#56: American Jews: Lookin’ For Love in all The Wrong Places

Hatikvah is Israel’s national anthem, but since the ethos of the Israelis and American Jews is so different, it might be appropriate to find a separate one for the latter. My own candidate for a new Jewish-American anthem is Lookin’ For Love in All the Wrong Places (sung by Johnny Lee in Urban Cowboy).

A lot of people, most of them reflective Jews, have been puzzled by the twentieth century Jewish infatuation with the Left. The excellent periodical Commentary, for example, ran an entire symposium on the theme Why Are Jews Liberal? and there were as many answers, all of them plausible, as there were contributors. We don’t want to get trapped into the “single-cause” assumption, so I suspect that the truth is that all of those proffered explanations are involved in the phenomenon to varying degrees and among different sub-populations. There is, though, one pervasive factor that seemed to have been missed in that symposium, which is what leads me to dip my own oar in the water on this question.

The Jews have lived with the consciousness of being hated and despised wherever they have gone for more than two thousand years. And this hatred crystallized into very specific libels and stereotypes of evil. In particular, Jews were hated for being greedy and money grubbing, for being insular and clannish, and, in general, for being just plain bad. You’ve got to admit, tough or not, this is bound to get you down eventually. Sooner or later, you’re bound to develop neurotic reactions to this treatment. Some of them seem pretty obvious.

The most obvious one, it seems to me, is that Jews would become neurotically preoccupied with persuading people that they were not at all bad, that they were, in fact, good.

As it turned out, since their behaviour was neurotically determined, not determined by a rational assessment of the situation, their efforts at persuasion have always been doomed. Since they were not hated because of the characteristics they were alleged to have, getting rid of those characteristics did not serve to reverse the situation. People hadn’t hated Jews because they were bad; they hated them, and, because of that, believed them to be bad. More specifically, the fact that the hate came first, the rationale second, was given a theoretical foundation during the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. While previously the Church and others allowed for a Jewish “redemption” through conversion, this ended with the doctrine of racial, as opposed to religious, anti-Semitism. This was a crucial moment in history, since it set the stage narrative-wise for Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The Jews had to be exterminated because, according to the new doctrine, their evil was not remediable. Since one can change one’s religion, a person who is bad because of their religion can become good by simply changing it. But, as the Nazis maintained, if a person is bad because of what they are (metaphysically), they can never be made good. And the only remaining remedy is to exterminate them.

And since people continued hating them (or they believed that people were still hating them), they continued to work even harder at being publicly and conspicuously GOOD. My point is that Jewish liberalism must be, among other things, a psychological reaction to the situation of Jews in history.

Here are a few elaborations on this theme.

First, this strategy was not going to work with the dominant Protestant population. As Max Weber famously argued, the Protestants developed the acquisition of wealth as a theologically based God-given holy task necessary for the doing of good works. There was no way that these money-grubbing Protestants would not see the Jewish acquisitiveness and efforts at philanthropy as anything other than an attempt to ingratiate themselves (which, on my hypothesis, they largely were).

But not all Jews had philanthropy or good works available to them for proving that their hatred was undeserved. Certainly the Jews of pre-revolution tsarist Russia did not. Therefore, these Jews sought the only other option available, they sought to make common cause with the other sub-groups being mistreated, thinking to persuade at least them that Jews are not evil, but actually good.

But they were looking for love in all the wrong places.

The Russian upper classes despised them; but so did the Russian peasantry; and so, to their shock and horror, did the Russian revolutionary class. They tried the same thing later in Germany, with much the same result. The German socialists used the Jews when they were useful, and murdered them when they were not.

As in the case of all compulsions, the American Jews have never learned from their own history. They have continued to seek the love and approbation of their non-Jewish environment through philanthropy and good works. It hasn’t worked.

They desperately tried to make common cause with American blacks during the civil rights movement. They contributed their money, they contributed their brains, they contributed their influence, and sometimes they even contributed their lives. And, of course, predictably, anti-Semitism is nowhere more entrenched than among American blacks. The blacks used (and use) the Jews when they are useful, and reject them when they are not. Think Jesse Jackson and the Rev'rnd Wright.

But, in addition, a habit born of psychological compulsion does not cease to work when either the causes of the compulsion or even the compulsion itself ceases to exist. What was once a mere compulsion can acquire all the trappings of a moral-philosophical mantra, it can become an auto-biographical narrative, and this has certainly happened in the case of the American Jews.

Just as native Americans have become the environment-loving, spiritual, noble victims of European aggression and vice, and American blacks the poor victims of white racism, so the American Jews have become the modern warriors for right and good. Where self-identification is involved, the game du jour is Let's Pretend.

A further point that is consistent with this thesis is that American Jews have seen fit to reject the affection of possibly the ONLY population in history for whom the Jews have been flavour of the month: the American Evangelicals. This should be no surprise, from a psychological point of view.

The mechanism that underlies the Jewish search for love necessarily involves the conversion of hate into love. Freely offered love is worthless; only a love that has been dearly earned through suffering is satisfying. And so the American Jews keep snuffling around the American black population, and keep being harassed and assaulted, and, at the same time, turn up their noses at friendly overtures from the Evangelicals.

Groucho Marx captures the American Jewish neurosis perfectly in his clever quip:

Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.

I end this discussion with this.

The American Jews voted by a vast majority for Obama despite everything that was known about him that should have warned them, including what he explicitly stated. To them I say: How’s that been working for ya?

I doubt that Johnny Lee is Jewish, but any American Jew could sing:

I was lookin' for love

In all the wrong places

Lookin' for love in too many faces

Searchin' their eyes, lookin' for traces

Of what I'm dreamin' of

Hopin' to find a friend and a lover

I'll bless the day I discover

Another heart lookin' for love.

Voting for what is clearly and transparently against your own interests is only explainable in terms of mental pathology.

#55: Obama: Copernicus or Sitchin?

Way back when I was still teaching, I used to tell students that all enduring philosophical questions have the same form: a really powerful intuition that things are ONE way meets an equally powerful theoretical reason why it CAN’T be that way. For example, most people feel totally free in their decision-making, but, yet, the conclusion of an excellent argument (the causal determinist argument) holds that they are not. Most enduring paradoxes belong precisely to this pattern.

Now, in this collision between our strongest convictions and equally powerful contrary arguments we see a conflict that is rarely resolvable by reason. What actually happens is that the positions taken by people on these puzzles is almost always decided by their psychological dispositions. Thus, some people are more disposed to trust their instincts, others to trust arguments, while yet others are most comfortable suspending judgment altogether.

For example, Malebranche took the Cartesian doctrine of the beast-machine so seriously that, according to anecdote, he drop-kicked a little pregnant dog (of whom he was very fond) across the courtyard in the firm theory-determined belief that animals felt no pain (no more than did clocks). Even as there is no way of theoretically determining whether animals, like humans, feel pain or not, most people’s spontaneous inclinations are to believe that they do. But Malebranche was so much the philosopher that reason trumped inclination in his case.

On the other hand, while Hume was convinced that Berkeley’s skeptical arguments concerning the existence of an independently existing material world were irrefutable, he also thought that they couldn’t possibly overrule our dispositions to believe the contrary. He writes:

But that all his arguments, though otherwise intended, are, in reality, merely sceptical, appears from this, that they admit of no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause that momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism.

Moore took the same line in his famous The Refutation of Idealism, in which he made the point, albeit indirectly, that at the end of an argument with an undesirable conclusion, we always have a choice: we can accept the conclusion, or we can reject it on the grounds that its negation is incontestably true. If the proponent of the argument objects that we have not shown how the argument fails, we can respond since we know the conclusion to be false, we also know the argument to be flawed. Precisely how it is flawed is not our problem.

Lest it be thought that this is only an issue in abstruse philosophical controversies, please note that exactly the same issue arises in science. Carl Hempel pointed out (in a book whose title I no longer remember) that when a researcher encounters an unacceptable result (he just doesn’t like it), he can always (in theory) choose to reject the theory underlying some key part of his experimental apparatus. Of course, this can be extremely expensive in that it inevitably also brings into question everything else in science that relied on that theory. Yet, some times people are fully prepared to do just that. And that’s often when we get scientific revolutions.

When the researcher’s bet pans out, we’re clearly happy with him. When it does not, we think he was an idiot for challenging so much of the existing system of beliefs. We still get all giddy about Copernicus, but about Zecharia Sitchin, not so much. Sitchin has been arguing for some time now that we are the engineered products of highly advanced extraterrestrials who came to earth roughly 450,000 years ago. This theory has not done terribly well within the astro-physics community.

What all this indicates is that there is no simple, easy answer as to when or why to opt either for intuition (or the mass of evidence or the mass of acquired belief), on one hand, or for theory-derived conclusions.

The reason I bring up this theme is that I had not noticed before that this paradigm extends even beyond the pale of philosophy and science; it extends to politics as well.

In particular, I noticed this extension when reflecting on the apparent immunity of leftist ideologues to the lessons of 20^th c history.

If there is one thing that seems apparent beyond argument, it is that socialism simply does not improve the lives of the people who live under it. We know this most dramatically from the failure of the Soviet Union, from the fact that Cuba has been a welfare client since its revolution, and we also notice that China is leaving classical communism behind. At the same time we notice that India is booming as a free enterprise economy. All around the world, we see the socialist states creating horrible living environments for their people and capitalist states doing significantly better. And this is as true of Europe, with its social democracies, as well as out and out commie states.

Yet, the true believers, those who live under the aegis of a “great theory”, they proceed as if none of this had ever happened.

As in the cases I discussed earlier, these true believers must do something in order to hold on to their privileged theories. In effect, they must reject 20^th c history or its apparent lessons in some way.

One way, of course, is to deny that those things ever happened. This is a tough one, since the U.S.S.R. is visibly absent, if something can be visibly absent (Sartre thinks it can!).

Another thing is to admit that they happened, but it’s not because the system sucks, but because a) the system was never fairly applied, or b) it was applied, but it was undermined by the evil capitalists.

The true believers are making a BIG bet, just as Copernicus made a BIG bet and Zecharia Sitchin made a BIG bet.

Copernicus’ bet paid off. Sitchin’s has not.

Time will tell whether Obama’s goes the way of Copernicus’ or the way of Sitchin’s.

My money is on the Sitchin way.

#54: So What’s Gonna Happen Next, Eh?

The “remarkable” Barack Hussein Obama appears to be lumbering unsteadily from blunder to debacle. In particular, he seems to have no plan for dealing with either of the cosmic issues facing the U.S. and the world today: a steadily sinking economy and a deranged, intransigent Iran. Could it be that there are actually NO plans?

From what I’ve seen of the Bamster and his doughty cronies, I suspect that really is the case.

But there does exist a far more terrifying and sinister possibility, a possibility that might actually be probable.

We do know that the U.S. economy is sinking ever further into unemployment and debt beyond measure.

We have heard intimations recently that Europe is on the brink of economic disaster.

If Europe really does fall, I think that will break the camel’s back and we will see an unprecedented cascade of nations into insolvency and world-wide depression.

And here’s what will happen then, I suggest: Obama and the West will formally declare war on Iran.

I know, I know, it sounds crazy. Would anyone be so calculating as to use a war in order to repair a depression? Would they? You have got to be kidding! It's not as if no one has done it before. It's completely consistent with the way in which the Dr. Strangelove types advising this president think. This is exactly up Rahm Emanuel's alley: Iran's nuclear posturing is too good a crisis to waste.

And the beauty of it from incompetent Obama's point of view is that the idiot Mullahs continue to provide him and Europe with provocations and political cover.

The talking heads keep pointing out that the Mullahs have severe internal problems. Arguably, therefore, they increasingly need an external enemy or even a (containable) war (say with Israel).

What is forgotten is that the West could equally make good use of a war, particularly a winnable war and a war that was externally provoked (remember Pearl Harbor? Tojo's Big Mistake?).

A successful war has been a very effective way of inducing prosperity for the winners in the past and of finding a place in history for the president who fights it. At the present moment, the Bamster is set to replace Jimmy Carter as history's worst U.S. president. A war with Iran could save his arse and give him a second term. Can the Bammy resist this?

Can a West versus Iran war solve both of our problems in a single nuclear catastrophe?

The next war will be a doozy, I hope we’re around afterwards to enjoy the prosperity without glowing green in the night.

#53: Why Did The American Revolution Not Lead to a Dictatorship?

With only one exception, every revolution since 1776 has led either directly or indirectly to a dictatorship. The sole exception, of course, is the first one, the American Revolution. And it is not as if there have not been a fair number of revolutions since then. This prompts (NOT “begs”!!!) two questions: 1) why is it that revolutions lead to dictatorships?, and 2) why was the American Revolution an exception to this rule? I’ll take these two questions in order.

That revolutions should regularly lead to dictatorships is prima facie counter-intuitive. After all, revolutions are by definition “mass” actions and one might reasonably expect that masses who are reacting against oppression would not easily submit to further oppression. It seems odd, therefore, on the face of it, that revolutions should ever, much less regularly, lead to dictatorships. So, why have they led to dictatorships? I look for an answer to this puzzle in the notion of “anomie,” whose concept and whose term was first introduced into the intellectual lexicon by Emile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917).

We find societal anomie whenever existing norms are suddenly and violently rejected. Durkheim introduced the idea when dealing with the phenomenon of individual suicide, but I want here to extend it so as to apply also to whole populations who suddenly reject their entire cultures. For that is what revolution leading to dictatorship has always involved; not merely the rejection of a system of power relations, but a rejection of the entire culture that was host to those power relations.

The French 18^th C, for example, began its rejection of its own Christian theological past in the 17^th C, in the work of Rene Descartes, but also arguably earlier in the work of Galileo Galilei. But the real fruit of these rejectionist impulses was not to be fully ripe until the 18^{th c}, the “high” Enlightenment. And it is only in the late 18^th C in France, of course, that we find the bloody, deranged societal paroxysm called the French Revolution (1787), whose character was totally determined by the new faith of “reason,” whose role it was to quite literally replace Christianity in France. Christopher Hitchens mentions that there was a move afoot to make an actual divinity of Reason and that it was to be worshipped as such under the new regime (though he doesn’t give a reference). The revolutionary French hoped to found a “brave new world” on the foundation of a new state religion of “reason.”

What the post revolutionary French actually found was anomie, a kind of norm vacuum into which flooded every previously repressed murderous, sadistic, atavistic, savage human impulse. Marx told the workers of the world that they had nothing to lose but their chains – he didn’t mention that those chains also kept their most anti-social cravings under control. The ancien culture being rejected in the French Revolution was actually the internalized superego of which Freud was to write over a hundred years later. When cultural norms (the superego) are rejected, the individual is left only with two resources: a mass of unfiltered impulses, on the one hand, and reason, on the other. Unfortunately, reason is hardly competent against the power of impulse, since reason as such contains no values with which to keep the excesses of impulse at bay. What is required is an internalized system of civilizing intuitions that are carried forward from generation to generation. In other words, a civilizing culture. Contrary to Kant (and later to Rawls), Reason alone is always conditional, never categorical, and cannot yield any guidance whatsoever. Relying only on Reason, without the guidance of civilizing social norms, the French revolution led to bloody chaos, which, in turn, led to Napoleon’s dictatorship.

The same thing happened after the Russian revolution of 1917, which led to the replacement of Tsarist Russia with the new workers’ paradise. It happened after the German revolution of 1918, which led in the short term to the democratic Weimar Republic, but ultimately to Hitler. And it happened after Mao’s takeover of China, which led to the Cultural Revolution in the late sixties. Examples can be multiplied from smaller states, most notably from North Korea and Iran, among others. All of these are or were or became dictatorships.

It’s no accident that all of these revolutions led to dictatorships. Populations relying only on “reason” are easy prey for opportunistic “rational” theories. The reason is that people robbed of their social norms have no intuitions that raise alarms against charismatic leaders spinning “large” and wonderful theories. Sometimes, the revolutions lead directly to dictatorship, sometimes indirectly. Weimar probably had the longest interval of democracy, lasting 15 years (1918–1933), but one could argue that the Russian revolution also had an interlude of democracy, albeit a very short one. There was the “first” revolution of Feb 1917, which was a democratic workers’ revolution, but ultimately also a third one on the following October. The October revolution was emphatically not a “workers’” revolution, it was a classic putsch in which the Bolsheviks assumed absolute power. And with the Bolsheviks came the Cheka and its reign of terror under Felix Dzerzhinsky, the viciously insane Pole of Lubyanka Prison.

And so why did not America follow this same pattern? Why did not America lapse into dictatorship? I believe it is because the American revolutionaries were unique in not rejecting the culture of their oppressors. The American revolutionaries had an issue with taxation, not initially with the British monarchy per se, nor with British traditions. A very large number of the American revolutionaries went only very reluctantly into revolution, forced there by very ham-handed, arrogant, and stupid foreign policy coming from the reign of King George III. The intellectuals who were to be the creators of the new nation acquired their backgrounds and their theories from the accumulated wisdom of Britain and the continent, they were not rejecting all the values and traditions holus bolus of the old world: only monarchy. There was thus no anomie after the revolution, no value vacuum into which a dictatorship could flow. I think it’s as simple as that.

Some very impressive people have been fans of the Enlightenment, the so-called “Age of Reason”. One notable example is Peter Gay, a polymath of a writer with a major biography of Freud to his credit as well as numerous books on the Enlightenment as well as on the Weimar Republic. Though his interests are broad, they are actually instructively linked. He is, whether he knows it or not, an enthusiast of anomie, the state of “normlessness.”

While Durkheim thought of anomie as a kind of social-psychological “illness,” there are those who actually admire the condition without recognizing precisely what it is. I think that Gay and the multitude of Enlightenment admirers are exactly like this. They admire the Enlightenment for its many achievements, but fail to recognize the price that was paid for them and continues to be paid.

Writers like Gay appreciate the artistic and intellectual flourishing that sometimes occurs when anomie is (briefly) married to democracy. Normlessness is indeed a kind of freeing and thus does encourage creativity. My friend T.L. brought it to my attention that Thomas Kuhn's thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolution is precisely that scientific revolutions occur when there exists a norm vacuum of the kind I have been describing. It is, perhaps, anomie that torments Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov and what he means when he asserts that if there is no God, then virtue does not exist (attributed to him by Smerdyakov). I think there is some truth in this, though not a literal one.

It isn’t the death of God that is freeing, it is the death of a system of authoritative norms in which God was understood to have a place. But, as Sartre tiresomely insisted, this freedom comes at a price: it is a “dreadful” freedom. The reason is not really that if there is no God, then everything is permitted, it is rather that if the belief in God has died, then there is no limit to what people will allow themselves to do.

But, most important, what is also means is that a freedom acquired at the price of a civilizing culture is most of all a vulnerability to specious theoretical populist narratives that lead directly or indirectly into the murderous maw of dictatorship. Thus, the freedom acquired from revolution is indeed a dreadful, terrible freedom that carries an appalling cost.

#52: The Grand Inseminator

[this post is dedicated to my friend A.G.H., Scourge of the Left]

Imagine.

Imagine that an enterprising researcher cum engineer (no pun intended, but nonetheless accepted) invents a new, purely mechanical insemination machine; that the inventor calls this device: The Grand Inseminator; that this machine does exactly what a man does, in the same place, with a similar instrument, but without the involvement of an actual human man. (While such a device would obviously have a huge market among the lesbians and other assorted male-hating feminists, that’s not where this is going).

Imagine further that Obama manages to get a second term and that he makes Rahm Emmanuel’s deranged older brother Zeke, the Czar of absolutely all things medical.

And finally imagine (though this does not demand much of a creative effort) that crazy Zeke decides that reproduction has heretofore been far too haphazard in the U.S. Since the number and the quality of people produced “affects all of us”, he argues, reproduction should properly fall under government regulation. Consequently, he forbids the continuation of the random multiplication resulting from ungoverned frenzied out-of-control man-woman boinking. In place of the unregulated boinker, the roaming horny male, he puts the new government-certified and regulated Grand Inseminator, and establishes (of course) a new federal department: the Federal Insemination Administration (F.I.A.).

There would be many benefits to switching to the Inseminator.

First, there would be the jobs. The huge plants emptied by the fall of the auto giants could be re-tooled (sorry, no double meaning intended…) and vast armies of the currently unemployed returned to meaningful work.

Of course, there would also be the huge boost in employment due to the bureaucratic hiring necessitated on both the federal and local levels. Technicians, psychologists, specially trained gynecologists, and, most significantly, Insemination Inspectors and Insemination Panel members. All of this would be a “big boost to the economy.” Of course, there would a large spin off to supplementary industries; the plantations and factories that once produced rubber for tires, might now be producing rubber for the manufacture of thousands of Grand Inseminators. Just a thought.

I suppose the government could offer a “cash for clunkers” program in which wives received government credit for rides at the Inseminator offices if they divorced their husbands.

Second, and perhaps more important, the switch to the Inseminator would itself be a step towards the reduction of green-house gases! Consider …

a) each coupling would involve at least a 50% decrease in heavy breathing (the male portion being absent), but

b) it could involve as much as a 100% decrease, since the Inseminator is designed to automatically spray a topical anesthetic on the female pelvic region so as to ensure the total absence of any pleasure whatsoever (a further precaution against sexual pleasure is a portrait of Al Gore, whose PR release claims credit for the machine’s invention, on the ceiling of the official Insemination Room over the head of the inseminatee). The Zeke idea is to eliminate anything at all emotional from the reproductive process so as ensure that the results be scientifically and rationally defensible. I should add that this feature of the Inseminator can be turned off and is actually wired out of the system on models made specially for lady apparatchiks of the Democrat party.

c) The reduction of the number of children produced would automatically reduce the energy consumption of the U.S.

d) Crimes of passion would be eliminated (along with passion).

e) And the children produced would all have talents specifically needed by the society: there would be the jumpers, the singers, the writers of bullshit, the scientists, and smarmy bastards who infest our governments. Everything needed, but nothing more.

Hell, we don’t need to imagine – we just need to make a few verbal substitutions in the Democrat Health Plan and we have it, we have … The Grand Inseminator!

#51: "What's Happened to Poor Charity?" or "The Skinny Mussolini"

[This post is for Dr. Susan Rumble, in appreciation]

What’s happened to Charity, you ask, Sweet, Sweet Charity? We don’t see her around much any more.

Well, it’s a sad story, since you ask.

You remember Charity, don’t you? Sweet Charity? That free-love flower-child with the pretty face who always seemed to be around when you needed her? She didn’t ask a lot of questions, didn’t make you fill out forms, just gave freely of herself, gave out of love. And the needy loved her back. It was a more innocent time. Charity was still young.

What happened to her? you wanna know.

It was sad, and happened sometime during the Great Depression – she got kidnapped, just like the Lindbergh baby, but kidnapped by the government; they took her away and she’s never been the same since! While she’s not dead, she’s still changed beyond all recognition.

Charity’s not young anymore now, not innocent, and she’s no more a beauty. She weighs 1000 pounds, she smells real bad, she’s hard, she wears government-issue make-up, and she has a new name, as well as a number. Like I said, you wouldn’t recognize her anymore. Now she has bosses who make her give her favors to anyone who comes to the door, and that includes illegals; she doesn’t give freely anymore, she’s forgotten how to love. And the needy, they don’t love her anymore either; it’s just wham bam, but not even a whispered thank you ma’am ever to be heard. They think they have it coming, they think she owes it to them. And they never stop wanting more. I don’t think she remembers how it once was.

Charity’s gone, one more round, Charity’s gone

Charity’s gone, one more round, Charity’s gone

Well they took my Charity

Dressed her all in Brown

Took her to the inner city

And then they laid her down

The government took Sweet Charity from the people, and made her a slave. Poor Charity, they’ve given you a number and taken away your soul. Charity’s going by the name Welfare now; you can find her on any corner in Big City, U.S.A..

Who feeds her, you wanna know?

Well, we do – whether we want to, or not.

Who will the government kidnap next? I wonder …

Welfare is charity writ large upon the state.

The story of charity and welfare is just an instructive example.

Socialist government is always on the lookout for any successfully working privately operated social process. If it’s large and has either financial or political governmental advantages, it takes it over. Today, the Democrat administration in office has already taken banking and the auto-industry. They’re on their way to insurance. They want to take the media. They want to control energy, that’s what “cap and trade” is about. Healthcare is next.

Socialism does not necessarily entail formal government ownership, it can simply work out a quid-pro-quo with large industry which screws the ordinary people – that’s what Hitler did with outfits like Krupp as well as all the other large German industries of the time. He did not nationalize, he made it worth their while to be government puppets. We see the Obama administration doing that with the pharmaceuticals, the bankers, and the insurance companies, it’s not new. They have a lovely dance: he pisses on them in his speeches, but they get all kinds of inducements and special deals on the quiet. He pays them to be his official public enemies so that he can strut for his crowds like a skinny Mussolini.