The Secret Knowledge

Roosevelt’s New Deal seemed to them the benignant socialism which might be the answer to the perennial Jewish quest for Justice.

Contemporary economic thought⁶⁷ makes a strong case that the New Deal prolonged the Depression by a decade, and would have extended its unfortunate sway but that it was stopped by the war.

The National Recovery Act of 1933 set prices and wages, created the inevitable shortages, and drove the small businessman out of business. It was stopped, ironically, by a couple of Jewish poultry merchants, who pleaded with the Republican Supreme Court for common sense (Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States). And the Republican Supreme Court struck down the National Recovery Act.

Jews of my day were Democrats, were Liberals. Everyone in the acquaintance of my parents’ generation supported the NAACP and the ACLU, knew the Rosenbergs were innocent and Whittaker Chambers guilty; no one would cross a picket line; and for a Jew, to vote Republican would have been as for him to endorse child sacrifice.

The question not asked then—for we knew no Conservatives—but asked now by the Liberal of the Conservative Jew is: “Don’t you care?”

But we, the Jews, even given our historical dedication to Justice, had, in our assimilation, forgotten that justice could only be achieved through law, and that the application of law meant the necessity of, at the very least, disappointment to at least one and more probably both of the parties involved in dispute. That, thus, the utmost expression of care was not the ability to express sympathy, but the ability to control sympathy and execute justice. Sympathy to the wicked, we were taught, is wickedness to the just. (Meiri, on the Talmud); that the legal codes and procedures were the property of the entire population, which based its actions upon their predictability, and that laws and judges who chopped and changed according to their sympathetic nature, which is to say, according to their “feelings,” were, thus, immoral.

This expression of “sympathy,” as in the action of most of contemporary Big Government, is the usurpation by the elected (or appointed) of the rights of others. The judge who forgot the admonition in Proverbs, “Do not favor the rich, neither favor the poor, but do Justice,” who set aside the laws, or who “interpreted” them in a way he considered “more fair,” was, for all his good intentions, robbing the populace of an actual possession (the predictability of the legal codes). He was graciously giving away something which was not his.

“Don’t you care?” is the admonition implicit in the very visage of the Liberals of my acquaintance on their understanding that I have embraced Conservatism. But the Talmud understood of old that good intentions can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immediately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and State statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would, in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others.

The literate Jew (or, for that matter, non-Jew) could refer to the very Torah and there find the story of Nadab and Abihu, sons of Aaron, and thus priests. They, overcome by zeal, stole into the sanctuary and burned incense in contravention of the Divine Law, and were consumed by the fire.

They erred, some say, on the side of Devotion, but they erred nonetheless, for they contravened the law, which is both written and derived from an understanding of the Divine, which, though it may be gainsaid by the atheist, is probably understood by him under a different name, that name being “conscience.”

Rabbinical thought holds that all sins are the Sin of the Golden Calf: Moses told the Jews to wait, as he was ascending the mountain to talk with God; the Jews did not wait, but, instead, built a golden image, and worshipped it.

But note that, though we understand their sin, and may accept, indeed, that it is the type of all sin, it was committed while Moses was yet undescended from the mountain, that is, before the Jews even received the Law. That is to say, they held in their heart some conscience,⁶⁸ some knowledge of the Divine which caused them, on discovery of their act, shame at what they, even uninstructed, understood as a transgression.

All healthy people have a conscience; those born without it are known as psychopaths, and treated, for all our philosophic sophistication, as monsters.

“Don’t you care?”

Well. I am a Jew, and I am an American, and I am a new-minted Conservative. I care about Justice and suffering, and wonder, as has every sentient being in history, about the disparity in society of wealth and happiness, and about the seemingly inevitable corruption of our representatives, and about the imperfection and apparent injustice of many of our laws.

The revelation, of my latter years, is that all good people care, but that they may be, legitimately, divided as to the means to address and the potential to understand and to correct disparity, sorrow, and injustice.

I have come to see that disparity is inevitable—that there will always be rich and poor—but that disparity need be neither permanent nor systemic, and that programs designed to impose equality of result, though perhaps beautiful in prospect, have weakened every society in which they have been practiced, and lead, eventually, to dictatorship and tyranny. The record shows that those same corrupt or corruptible, which it so say, human, individuals we call “the government,” will, as their power to tax and spend increases, become or pave the way for the accession of monsters.

Government programs of confiscation and redistribution are called the War on Poverty, or the New Deal, or Hope and Change, but that these programs are given lofty names ensures neither that their intentions are lofty, nor that even, if so, they will or could lead to lofty results.⁶⁹ A clearheaded review of these caring governmental subsidies, whether called welfare, or aid to Africa, or farm subsidies, reveals waste, subvention, and corruption, and tends to the enervation and the ultimate destruction both of the recipients and eventually of those taxed to provide the officeholders with the mantle of “sympathy.”⁷⁰

What is “social justice”? It is not merely an oxymoron. It is, inherently, the notion that there is a supergovernmental, superlegal responsibility upon the right-thinking to implement their visions.

But “society” cannot implement visions. It will develop along its own lines, the inherent ethos of the time bringing about, unpredictably, change, according to unfathomable laws, which, when adjudicated according to precedent, become the written laws of the land.⁷¹

The great advances in Justice which have made our country not only great but good are essentially the broadening of its definitions of those worthy of protection. This is the attempt to find justice through equality of opportunity. This is antithetical to that equality of result beloved of the Left; one might have one or the other, but they each are the other’s negation, and one must choose.

I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of