On modern political antisemitism and the meaning of being political

It may be supposed that many Jews, especially the more secular among them, tend to take citizenship and politics seriously and concern themselves with public affairs more than others do.  Like their famous “moral seriousness,” this can be a cause of their being disliked.

As with fascist hatreds of them for being either capitalists, Communists, or both, they could be disliked as ‘oppressors’ or for some form of difference that amounts to disobedience of the supposedly true authority.

Christian (and Muslim) societies have tendencies towards political paranoia based on strong Oedipal figurations of ethical and political thought that are actually less pronounced (or less anxiously oppositional and exclusionary) in Judaism and Jewish thought.  Christianity is a religion of ‘the Father’ in a way that Judaism is not.

Totalitarianism was anti-political in particular ways. Communist totalitarianism was hyper-political.  Communism was pseudo-politicizing in a way that always already decided the objects and stakes of political contestation.  That is why it could not be a participatory democracy, even if it formulated that idea as a goal.

Nazism was anti-political in reducing politics to war and abnormal psychology, attributing difference to an inferiority residing in persons, who ultimately, as they cannot be changed, can only be eliminated.  Nazism figured politics as a war of ethical cleansing, driven largely by figures of health and sickness (or growth and decay), which were essentially psychologized in their manifestations but biological (genetic) in their cause and essence, and the targeted populations were ultimately to be removed or eliminated, and these were above all conceived in racial (as a social biology) terms.   Fascist nationalism generally invents figures of the social and political as naturalized.

In both left and right wing totalitarianism, the figuration of the political tends to be Manichaean, and this is partly due to Oedipal configurations of authority.  Christianity, like Islam, is a religion of empire and conquest and thus faith.  As a result, it has strong authoritarian tendencies that drive much of its moralism, and are rooted partly in an ambivalent attitude towards state authority and the relationship of the divine power to it, which can and often does involve both identity with and difference from the state authority, which can authorize both ultra-conservative and radical tendencies, while the animus against an internal adversary can target it as disobedient from below, oppressive from above, or both.  

This ultimately Manichaen, Gnostic, and Oedipal figuration is deficiently political.  It invokes political engagement but in pre-defined terms. 

It would be an inapt public policy towards Jews that assumes that what they mostly want is to express their own group identity, including through the practice of their religion, as well as identification with Israel as the Jewish state, and by combatting antisemitism, or emphasizing Holocaust memorialization.  The reasons minority group politics in American society tends to focus on the full inclusion of groups that remain distinct based on religion or ethnicity as markers of identity lay, of course, in particularities of American history. One thing many Jews might want is a freedom for “moral (and political) seriousness” and whatever this may be thought to imply.

It is an irony that Israel today is in some ways a very vibrant participatory democracy, but it gets treated in American political discourse, including by American Jews, and perhaps inevitably, as an object of a Manichaean project: a good that has already been achieved that is threatened by an inimical intolerant force.  Manichaean thinking is able through its own logic to correctly identity its targets, but not to escape the same pattern of thinking that might thereby be criticized.  

The best polity is a participatory democratic one in which there is a popularly shared freedom and power to politicize what is only latently political, and to inquire inventively and with free and open debates that are commonly enjoyed, and free of most rancor, about both the identification of problems to be solved and the manner of solving those that seem to have been established.

Political thought in America needs to get beyond problems of identities and their inclusion and pose the question of liberal democracy as a way of being political, and this as partly a relationship between the latent and the manifest is what is said, and a rethinking of what contestation is and how it must be structurally permitted, safeguarded, and encouraged.