For the broader society, however, the success of this philosophy was less beneficial. Many people continued to value their traditional culture, their religion, and group solidarity, all of which were rapidly eroding. There were also practical consequences. While breaking down majority cohesion and siding with outsiders might have benefited productive internal minorities, it also weakened a nation’s ability to recognize and confront real external threats. A major military defeat might provoke a vigorous reaction against liberalism and against the traditionally despised and defenseless minority – Jews – who were rightly viewed as its original source.
This is precisely what happened in Germany after World War I. The Germans turned against liberalism, socialism and, above all, Jews in the name of rebuilding their national culture, their group solidarity and the ability of their state to confront outside threats.
It is a matter of fact that by this point most liberals were no longer Jews and most Jews were neither intellectuals nor liberals. Many had continued to be traditionally religious people who carried no “cultural virus” of any threat to anyone. Moreover, despite Nazi fantasies, the spread of a philosophy did not require a “plot” and there had been none. But facts no longer mattered; a ruthless oppositional ideology had been created that saw argumentation as a trick and physical annihilation as the ideal way both to assert the right of the majority to power and achieve a “final solution” to this cultural dispute.
The Nazis were ultimately defeated by countervailing force, of course – not by argumentation – primarily delivered by newly energized “liberal” regimes that were able to reunite themselves and confront the Germans physically when they overreached and posed a threat to all the states of the world, not just the internal Jewish minority.
Europe responded to the horrors of Nazism by concluding that its alternative, liberalism, must have been right and resolutely refusing to tolerate any deviation from its prescriptions. One would have imagined that assimilated Jews and their intellectual progeny would have derived a more considered lesson from this debacle but they manifestly did not. In the universities, Hollywood, the ACLU, and other redoubts they have continued to wage a guerilla war against the cultural identity and national loyalties of the majority.
In the most accepting and tolerant country in the history of humanity, the United States of America, they have continued to feel threatened by the persistence of any aspect of traditional culture and loyalties. The consequence ought to have been that they would again make deadly enemies. But America is indeed a different place and Jewish liberals, and liberals in general, were instead dumbfounded by a totally unexpected massive display of unsolicited love ? from precisely those forces they have continued to view as their foes.
The reason for this was that in the meantime, another 19th century Jewish philosophy – Zionism – had changed the world in ways they failed to appreciate. Most Jews lived in Eastern Europe 150 years ago and Eastern European Jews ultimately became most of the victims of the Western European madness. However, the realities of modernity in the 19th century were very different for Eastern European Jews. Jews were socially rejected, physically insecure and highly restricted in their access to education and much of the economy. Acceptance was not on offer at any price. Cultural influence was impossible. Of those who stayed in Eastern Europe rather than emigrate to the U.S. or Western Europe, assimilation was pursued by only a minority of Jews, with very limited benefits. It was manifestly not going to be the solution to the successful modernization and advancement of Jewry.