Dershowitz may WalkAway…
[CORRECTION: OOPS! I apologize for not checking the date of the article. I was assuming it was new because I just heard about it, but it’s actually quite old (February, 2017). So the original body of this post is old news.
However, interestingly, it turns out that Ellison was made Deputy Chair rather than Chair in the results of that election. I guess that was okay with Dershowitz, although it seems like it was a compromise that avoided the real issue—which is that he ascended that high in the Democratic Party at all, considering his history. In fact, it turns out that the “Deputy” position was newly-revived in 2017, just for him:
The Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee is a position within the United States Democratic Party that was re-established by Tom Perez in February 2017 after the 2017 DNC Chair race, won by Perez.
After a close victory over Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, Perez appointed Ellison as Deputy Chair in an attempt to lessen the divide in the Democratic Party after the contentious 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, which saw conflicts between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.[1] Perez was seen as being more in line with the Clinton wing, while Ellison was more in line with the Sanders wing.
So back then (and I obviously missed the news at the time, although I knew that Ellison had not been elected Chair) it was an attempt to welcome the leftist wing of the party into the fold at the highest levels and appease it. Fascinating. We know how much “progress” has been made since then.
Dershowitz may not have officially WalkedAway after that, but he’s certainly alienated a great many of his fellow Democrats since then.]
…if Keith Ellison is elected the Democrats’ chairman:
My loyalty to my country and my principles and my heritage exceeds any loyalty to my party. I will urge other like-minded people — centrist liberals — to follow my lead and quit the Democratic Party if Ellison is elected chairman. We will not be leaving the Democratic Party we have long supported. The Democratic Party will be leaving us!
The reasons Dershowitz gives are Ellison’s alliance with the anti-Semitic Farrakhan and Ellison’s own expressed anti-Semitism and anti-Israel votes. Dershowitz adds:
The DNC has a momentous choice this weekend. It can move the party in the direction of Jeremy Corbyn’s labor party in England, in the hope of attracting Jill Stein Green Party voters and millennials who stayed home. In doing so they would be giving up on any attempt to recapture the working class and rust-belt voters in the mid-western states that turned the Electoral College over to Donald Trump.
Jeremy Corbyn today could not get elected dog catcher in Great Britain. I do not want to see the Democratic Party relegated to permanent minority status as a hard-left fringe.
I certainly agree with the danger of the Democrats’ hard-left turn. Then again, I think Dershowitz is fooling himself to think that this turn didn’t happen long ago, and was merely somewhat hidden with dissembling rhetoric.
Dershowitz has been expressing views outside the Democratic party line for quite some time now, and I think it’s cost him a lot (I’m written many times on this blog about him). But he is not yet ready to really leave. He adds something that takes away from his declaration:
If [Ellison] is elected, I will quit the [Democratic] party after 60 years of loyal association and voting. I will become an independent, continuing to vote for the best candidates, most of whom, I assume, will still be Democrats. But I will not contribute to the DNC or support it as an institution.
He assumes they will still be Democrats? Why on earth would he assume that? It’s an example of what I have previously called “the birthmark” of political identity:
…[T]he groups to which we belong–social, ethnic, religious, racial, class, professional, recreational, familial, political–all are pieces in the puzzle that creates our sense of identity. The majority of people are probably most comfortable when they perceive the elements within them as cohesive, and are uncomfortable when they see them as clashing with each other. But all sides–Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, “progressives” and anarchists and libertarians–take on an affiliation which becomes a basic part of personal identity and is consequently often very difficult to give up.
An excellent illustration of this phenomenon is Democrat Zell Miller, who gave a speech nominating G.W. Bush at last year’s Republican convention. This earned him the enmity of most of his fellow Democrats, who considered him a traitor to the party.
Many people wondered aloud why Zell Miller had not switched parties in light of his strong alignment with the Republicans and his staunch opposition to the Democrats. A “conservative Democrat” seemed to be a sort of oxymoron.
Miller’s answer? That he was born into the Democratic Party and considers his party label to be “like a birthmark”–innate, and difficult to eradicate.
I am virtually certain something similar is part of Dershowitz’s makeup. He is profoundly torn between his own identity as a Democrat—which to him is identified with “the good”—and what he cannot help but see with his own eyes. I don’t make light of the conflict. It is why a mind can be a difficult thing to change, and a party affiliation as well.
I also don’t think the Democratic Party cares what happens to Alan Dershowitz. Whether he supports them or not won’t change a thing for them, and his threats will have no effect on them. I don’t know whether they’ll elect Ellison or not—he has other baggage at the moment—but I do feel very strongly that if they don’t it won’t be because of any threats by Dershowitz.
[Hat tip: commenter “Julie near Chicago.”]
In the Polish town of Eishyshok at the time of the German invasion in 1941, many of the local Jews viewed the coming of the German troops with equanimity. The town had been occupied during the earlier war, and the German officers and troops of that time had been very well-behaved and even helpful, and those residents who had been POWs in Germany during WWI spoke highly of their good treatment. Too many of the town’s Jews failed to realize that “German soldier” meant something different in 1941 than it had in 1914.
Analogously, “Democratic politician” means something very different in 2018 than it did in 1960.
It is strange that an obviously intelligent man like Dershowitz still doesn’t fully understand this.
“He assumes they will still be Democrats? Why on earth would he assume that? ” I repeat, Dershowitz is a very smart lawyer but otherwise stupid because he allows his ideology to blind his vision of what the Democrats are and what they have done. The destruction of the poor blacks in the ghettos via all the welfare programs designed to keep them voting Democrat should have been enough to reveal how destructive they are. Low life scum like Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton as leaders of the party when 99.9..9% of the men in the US would have gone to prison for what they did. “But it’s for the good of the Party.” Dershowitz is stupid, as is anyone and everyone who values words above deeds.
Dershowitz was born in 1938 and was at the midpoint of his tertiary schooling around 1961. For someone of his vintage, mainline Democrats still understood themselves as competitors in public debate and for political office. They also took an interest in the welfare of various fraction of the working class – qua – working class. If they were intellectuals in the broad sense – Dershowitz certainly is, Camille Paglia is, Jerilyn Meritt is, Nat Hentoff was, Eugene McCarthy was, and George McGovern was – they had fixed principles which influenced their public preferences. That isn’t true anymore. Nowadays, discourse within and around the Democratic Party is a series of improvisations which justify power grabs and status games. Wage earners are deplorables unless they have ascribed traits which make them mascots and potential clientele (see “Julia”). The only legitimate participation is among peers or people working for peers. Everyone else is just disrupting the class or in contempt of court.
Dershowitz problem is that he’s a social democrat (in an abstract way), a civil libertarian, a Jew, an intellectual. The concatenation of interests for which the Republican Party is a vehicle are not his. The Republican Party’s defaults consist of imagery incongruent with what inspires social democracy (though not a hostility to programmatic social democracy per se), a critique of and resistance to what civil liberties types like Dershowitz were on about, Protestant in its common allusions, provincial in its tastes and sensibility. Alan Dershowitz ain’t ever going to own a Western Auto franchise in Oshkosh, nor will he ever know anyone who does. The thing is, the political vehicle of the Oshkosh Rotary is the only party that believes in public order, free public discussion and deliberation, and democratic choice. And there the only part that believes in the country as a country and not as a venue for professional-managerial types to play their games.
I think Mr. Foster is correct. I do not believe that the Democrat/Progressive party today would allow someone like JFK or Joe Lieberman to gain power in their organization. Men like them and Mr. Dershowitz are no longer welcome. The republican party has also undergone changes, although it isn’t clear to me if the Never-Trumpers/conservative democrats will remain/take back the party or start their own new party. It will be interesting to see how Trump shapes the Republican party in the future.
Note in re Dershowitz. He’s never been a man with much of an inclination toward ‘leapfrogging loyalties’. His loyalties are concentric, like an ordinary person. He’s a husband, a father, a Harvard employee, a Bostonian, an American, a Jew. In his class in society, that’s now unusual. It didn’t used to be.
The Democratic Party has also left behind Schumer, Pelosi and others like them. They just don’t realize it yet. At least Dershowitz does to some extent. S & P are riding a tiger but don’t know it.
Its not as if Dershowitz leaving would be a threat to democrats who, no doubt wished he had gone long ago.
Oh and Lynn, Im pretty sure Schumer and Pelosi will catch up. Its called staying relevant.
AD will continue to vote straight D even if he changes his voter registration to independent. It is his nature, as it is my nature to never vote for a democrat.
In 1960, I cast my first vote for Nixon. I had seen Kennedy in a campus visit and watched girls I knew, who had been sensible, become”Jumpers” as the Kennedy entourage called the girls who spent his appearances jumping up so they could catch a glimpse. My family, all life long Roosevelt Democrats, were outraged. A few years later, my mother claimed that she had been a Republican all along. I didn’t; say anything. I had taken an economics class in college and it made me a Republican at 21. I’m not sure such a class would have the same effect on students as Marxism has pretty well taken over colleges.
I remember my mom (a Latvian-born, true immigrant who believed in the American Dream, and lived it!) wondering why her best friend was always a Democrat.
Mom always saw the Ds as being pro-abortion and anti-Catholic. Mom was Russian Orthodox and lost a few children to miscarriages, so life was very important to her. I thank her for trying …. I am here because of her determination.
Her best friend was very union/democratic/very Catholic, but still a Democratic voter and could not see the issue about abortion. It drove Mom nuts!
I still love Mrs C. but we do not talk politics. She’s 98 and I just say yes ma’am.
There are many people who are born to a political theory and cannot change for many reasons. I think one reason is the feeling of going against their relatives.
Dersh vowed at least once before — 2016? — that he’d leave the party if they even looked like doing X. (So what was the issue? I doona recall.) In the end, they didn’t, quite.
I think Neo and the folks above are right. It’s interesting, because he’s only a year ± some months younger than David Horowitz.
But David did leave, twice — first, left his family’s Party, the Communists, and later, the New Left; and then he left the {Left,Dems,Libruls} altogether.
To me he was, and remains, a hero for that. Obviously there was something in him that required him to notice reality, and not to settle for less than the truth.
(There’s more to David than that, but beside the present point.)
I agree; Dersh seems to see things still through the lens of his “clan,” so to speak. Or if not quite that, he seems to be held by clan loyalty at least. Also, I imagine his mind holds the equation “Democrat = Civil Rights Movement” in quite a fixed way. I wonder if it also holds “Republican = Party of the Rich, who tread on the faces of the poor.”
David H. reminds us of Eric Hobsbawm, who, he says, did come to see that Communism/Leftism couldn’t work … but who said that even though he knew he’d been wrong all those years, he could not leave the Left because he could not give up the dream.
Of course, that might be rather unfair to Dershowitz. I do not, after all, know whether he already had to break some basic parts of his worldview to come to where he is today.
Whatever else, both Dersh and David are loyal to their Jewishness, “secular Jews” though they may be. (David says he’s agnostic; Dersh, I haven’t dated recently. *g*) Strong anti-Anti-Semites, and good for them!
I want to call everyone’s attention to a CORRECTION I posted at the top of the post. I’m reproducing it here:
CORRECTION: OOPS! I apologize for not checking the date of the article. I was assuming it was new because I just heard about it, but it’s actually quite old (February, 2017). So the original body of the post is old news.
However, interestingly, it turns out that Ellison was made Deputy Chair rather than Chair in the results of that election. I guess that was okay with Dershowitz, although it seems like it was a compromise that avoided the real issue—which is that he ascended that high in the Democratic Party at all, considering his history. In fact, it turns out that the “Deputy” position was newly-revived in 2017, just for him:
So back then (and I obviously missed the news at the time, although I knew that Ellison had not been elected Chair) it was an attempt to welcome the leftist wing of the party into the fold at the highest levels and appease it. Fascinating. We know how much “progress” has been made since then.
Dershowitz may not have officially WalkedAway after that, but he’s certainly alienated a great many of his fellow Democrats since then.]
Julie near Chicago:
See the correction at the head of the post.
Really, the fault is mine first. I didn’t notice the date on the Hill piece when I sent the link to Neo.
:>(
Julie
Julie:
Don’t worry about it. Not a big deal.
teaching time for conservatives again! 6 million 2012 obama voters did not vote in 2016. over a million voted for jill stein that cost clinton pennsylvaia, michigan. wisconsin and the election. trumps margin was less then jill stein vote in all three states. the 6 million democrats who didn’t vote have been polled (3 million were black voters) asked why they didn’t vote most (especially black voters) said clinton wasn’t militant enough! as sun tzu said know your enemy and yourself. left is more upset then right that soros didn’t get blown up. now they don’t have an excuse to blow up the koch brothers. and bill ayres still knows how to build them too!
I’m not sure such a class would have the same effect on students as Marxism has pretty well taken over colleges.
1. No it hasn’t. Faculty are astonishingly conformist and subscribe to a great many inane notions which are the mode in their social circle, but Marxism is unknown outside the sociology department.
2. Economists of all stripes tend to respect markets. Joseph Stiglitz is a major exception.
The leftists who gained control of the Democratic party are counting on their control of the universities and the schools to create a Democratic Socialist party. Obviously, they felt that the old Democratic party of liberals and union workers wasn’t getting them nearer their goal of turning the US into a European-style social welfare state.
Bye-bye Alan Dershowitz, Joe Lieberman, Sam Nunn, John F. Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, Bill Bradley, Richard J. Dailey, even Jefferson and Jackson! Hello Keith Ellison, Andrew Gillum, Gavin Newsom, Stacey Abrams, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris.
You could see that coming in Hillary’s campaign when she threw under the bus the coal miners, the Fraternal Order of Police (and all the cops in the country!), the Border Patrol, and the entire Rust Belt.
As a veteran of the Goldwater campaign of 1964, I can testify that it’s fairly easy for ideologues to seize control of a political party, but it isn’t so easy to convince the American people that those ideologues should be governing.
Whether that still holds true remains to be seen — we’ll know in a couple of weeks.
MikeK on October 23, 2018 at 7:03 pm at 7:03 pm said:
I had taken an economics class in college and it made me a Republican at 21. I’m not sure such a class would have the same effect on students as Marxism has pretty well taken over colleges.
* * *
Today the colleges, tomorrow the kindergartens.
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/democratic-socialists-of-americas-plan-to-infiltrate-americas-public-schools/