Carville Reeks
I think I’ve mentioned that James Carville is wrong. Wrong about everything. Wrong all the time. His predictions are terrible, and his advice is worse. When Kamala Harris lost the election, he told the Democratic Party to sit in the dark while MAGA Republicans destroyed themselves. Anything we did would just draw attention to our weakness and give the triumphant Trumpists more to crow about.
By the time he said it, Musk was already rummaging in the databases. Stephen Miller was booking the flights to El Salvador, and Hegseth was preaching fundamentalist Christianity at the Pentagon. Not to mention Johnson planning for the cuts that will gut rural hospitals and strip Americans of their health care. Doesn’t sound like Republican self-destruction to me.
It now turns out that Carville is wrong about the Jews. His most recent podcast touches on all his hobbyhorses, but includes some reeking material about Jewish Democrats. Little folks like moi don’t seem to irk him. We’re not rich enough to draw his baleful attention.
The ones he doesn’t like are big contributors who apparently confide that they don’t like Columbia. That would be the university, not the country. Why you’d say anything to James Carville is frankly beyond me, but he quotes nameless rich guys who say they won’t contribute because the university supports/abets anti-Semitism.
That is not, by the way, a baseless judgment. Columbia has frequently been hospitable to Palestinian nationalism, and that has sometimes fostered anti-Semitic surges. The encampments this year were a case in point. Emotion rose to the level of a fever and many students felt that their Jewishness was under fire. I don’t believe in the suppression of free speech, and I certainly don’t support the deportation of the speechmakers, but Columbia drew back from fostering strategies of civility. Donors are entitled to do what they want, including deciding to withold funds because of their deep displeasure.
But Carville’s beef wasn’t really about anti-Semitism. His deeper allegation is that donors didn’t care, that they weren’t motivated by anti-Semitism at all. At the beginning of June, he notoriously asserted that big time donors had one thing in mind: defund Columbia, curry favor with Donald Trump, and position themselves to collect on Republican tax cuts. What he said, exactly, was alligator crude. The Jews, he argued, had abandoned Columbia. They had also abandoned the Democratic Party because “they just want their effing tax cut.”
It would be hard to say how much I hate this. I’m sure that there are wealthy Jews in the world who would like to be a little more wealthy. People are complicated, some are greedy, and I’m long past the point where I’m scandalized by bad behavior. I’d like to think that the political scientists get it right: Jewish Americans are the only white people who regularly and reliably vote against their pocketbooks. They tend to vote like a poor minority who are mindful of the structural inequality of this country. Does that mean that there aren’t exceptions? I’d be a fool if I denied the truth.
But Carville seems to imagine the worst, that we are grubby usurers motivated solely by avarice, who have embraced Donald Trump because he’ll deliver filthy lucre; that the Jews operate in a calculus of greed driven by our grotesque materialism; that our truest instincts are rapacity and acquisitiveness; that if you pull back the curtain you will see our venality.
What’s next, James Carville, that we crave the blood of Christian children? Is it not enough that we are under fire from the Right that our “friends” on the Left now shiv us in the belly?
Damn you, James Carville, with your insidious allegations and global judgments against my community. It’s rare that someone can get so many things wrong at the end of a career marked by his own failing powers. If this is what it takes to stay in the conversation, I’m ready to make the argument about forced retirement.
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