There is a particular tic in American public discourse in which openly made articulations of mainstream sentiments are breathlessly reported as “gotchas.” To take a very old but exemplary instance, Kevin Williamson was fired from the Atlantic for an old tweet in which he suggested that women who procure abortions should receive the same punishment given to murderers. Well, like millions of Americans, Williamson believes abortion is murder; QED. You might disagree with his premise or his conclusions, but the sentiment itself is not exactly fringe stuff, or particularly surprising coming from a socially conservative commentator.
This kind of framing isn’t an exclusive technique of the left. Right-wing outlets are prone to it, too—hysteria when liberals propose normal liberal things like raising taxes or increasing welfare spending, which do in fact have support in broad swaths of the American public. The silliest iterations are reserved for bouts of internecine skull-bashing, though. Back in January, the staunchly neoconservative Jewish Insider went after Michael DiMino, then a nominee to be deputy assistant secretary of defense. DiMino’s great sins were suggesting American exposure in the Middle East, including that engendered by its commitments to Israel, is disproportionate to its interests. The framing was not “why DiMino is wrong”; it was, “Can you believe DiMino said this stuff?”
This is not in fact persuasion. Presenting the things someone says in a public forum and saying, Can you believe this person thinks this? does not win arguments. It will rile up the people who already agree with you and are hostile to the object of the attack, but this is itself risky business if the positions are not so outre as advertised. In that case, DiMino was in the end confirmed.
But Jewish Insider is back at it, this time going after Jeremy Carl, a nominee for assistant secretary of State and occasional contributor to these pages. The Saturday article’s headline: “State Dept. nominee espoused antisemitic views, downplayed the Holocaust.” My God, Montresor! That sounds pretty bad.
Things start to soften as soon as you get to the lede, though: “Jeremy Carl, a Trump administration nominee for a senior position at the State Department, has expressed a range of derogatory views of the Jewish community, characterizing in writings and public interviews the community as holding a victim mentality, downplaying the significance of the Holocaust to the Jewish story and experience, musing about the need to address the what he called the ‘Jewish Question’ and characterizing Jews as religiously incorrect and in need of conversion.”
Well, all right. What does this boil down to? In some podcast appearances, Carl noted that Jews tend to lean to the left in America, said that invocations of the Holocaust are sometimes deployed cynically to shut down disagreements, and articulated the standard Christian orthodoxy that all must be converted to be saved. He also says Israel is a locus of disproportionate attention in American politics, and that the presence of antisemites in the right is in fact convenient for those attempting to shut down criticism. From the article:
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“Nobody can just take a small sip of the drink in front of them, which is the ‘Jewish Question,’ and imbibe carefully and have a mature discussion on it,” Carl said. “[They] need to overdose massively on it, to the point that they just begin saying completely ridiculous and absurd things.”
Carl said that such activity makes him shy away from “critique” of the Jewish community “because you don’t want to be lumped in with these clowns.” He declared that Jewish activists “love the Groypers because they’re just so discrediting of anyone who would ask questions about any of this,” referring to Jewish political activism.
None of these assertions, even if you believe them to be incorrect, is something outside the pale of normality; that’s presumably why Carl felt comfortable making them on a public podcast. Carl himself made this point in his comments to Jewish Insider. (Of course, all this stuff is down below the paywall, so most people will see little more than the scary headline.) And the very exercise of the article illustrates what Carl was describing—the conflation of antisemitism and good-faith disagreements to score some points. For whatever it’s worth, I would humbly submit that a grandee of the Claremont Institute, an eccentric West Coast hero-cult devoted to Leo Strauss and Harry Jaffa and currently chaired by Thomas Klingenstein, is probably not in fact a dyed-in-the-wool antisemite. Much less so when, as noted in the article itself, the said grandee grew up in a secular Jewish household. I would humbly submit that such an assertion is absurd and discrediting.
It doesn’t have to be this way. For example, while there are things that I can disagree with in the latest for Compact from Carl’s fellow Claremont man, David Azerrad, he presents arguments. He doesn’t present the other team’s statements and say, “Look! Can you believe this?” But the hit on Carl is of a type that is basically unproductive. When America First conservatives complain about their intraright opponents shutting down debate rather than engaging, this is what they’re talking about. And, when the same conservatives observe that these attacks also seem disproportionately oriented toward gumming up the Trump administration’s staffing and hampering its signature policies, it’s hard to argue.
