Democratic politics has grown steadily more performative over the past few decades. We can all see it. And, to some degree, whenever democracy begins its passage toward oligarchy, we arrive at the moment when the men in power descend among the people.
In Israel, the phenomenon is strange and sickly. It comes wrapped in a cloying, saccharine traditionalism of ethnic belonging, staged for the cameras and accompanied, of course, by a wink at the lowest impulses. Spicy ethnic food before Shabbat. Pots of food. Mainly to fill the belly and empty the head.
One might fear for these politicians health if they plan to eat the amounts of food they show on Facebook every friday afternoon.
Somehow, this earns likes from Jews on Facebook and makes the politician in the kitchen appear genuine. In Israel, most of those liking this content are Likud voters. One must ask: when populism is performed so awkwardly, can anyone wonder why young people are drawn or seduced toward more extreme and supposedly “authentic” forms of political action?
Last Thursday, Netanyahu turned up at a concert by Eden Ben Zaken, a Mizrahi pop star, at Menora Mivtachim Arena. It was presented as a surprise. Yet camera positions had already been arranged, and the prime minister was handed a microphone and allowed to address the crowd.
Miri Regev went down to Shuk HaTikva, a market surrounded by the Third World infiltrators she never removed but spoke with hate against (Why hate on them anyways? and let's assume you have a reason to hate this entire group - why not act to deport them to the land they came from? because Miri Regev is Miri Regev). Smotrich went to the market in Netanya. Ben-Gvir? He is still with the crocodiles who are supposed to eat terrorists.
The descent to the shuk to meet elderly, religious Mizrahi shoppers, most of whom do not know that groceries can be ordered from Rami Levy through an app, is not truly an encounter with the people, because the people are not in the markets. The people are at home, in the air conditioning, in front of their screens. The exercise is primarily an attempt to use a staged encounter with the aging remnant still found in the markets to stir something in someone watching through a screen.
The primitive right always shouts that it is illegitimate to criticize the populism of men who had never gone down to the people before, yet suddenly began doing so two months before an election and only when the cameras were present. The problem is that the story returns, once again, to the question of human quality confronting Israel. That human quality is deteriorating, to a great extent for demographic reasons.
I have written about this before. The reasons lie in the Jewish people’s relatively limited resources and in the social fabric that exists today. Granted, Israel still possesses a qualitative advantage, but the fact that the ruling party actively encourages multigenerational ignorance and intellectual degradation hardly helps. The attempt to construct a sense of collective belonging around the worship of politicians who brought upon us the greatest massacre since the Holocaust tells us everything we need to know about large segments of the Israeli right, which prefers hot fish dishes to critical thinking or its very own life.
The right elsewhere in the world is not necessarily a source of hope. There are reasonable ideas on the left; there are humanists on the left; there is rationality on the left - yet still it cannot show itself fully due to a tribalistic-mindset among the elites of the left and their constant need to create more preformative spectacles to feed into a social meatgrinder or to prove a theory that cannot be proven.
The problem is that in Israel, especially since the 1990s, the left has entered into a death pact with the antisemitic Palestinian movement of annihilation. The left is therefore not an option. Yet the Israeli right is not truly right-wing either, because the man who controls it, Netanyahu, is not a man of the right but a deeply conflicted Machiavellian. Nor is the right sufficiently intelligent to ensure that its sound ideas, assuming it possesses any, and assuming its supporters vote on ideological rather than merely sociological grounds, are actually implemented.
The Israeli right can therefore be understood as a kind of political-sociodemographic laboratory, demonstrating the failure of a conservatism that is not anchored in the intellectual capacity necessary to prevent the collapse of the Western island called Israel.
The same pattern can be found in the economization of everything. Together with the loss of God, which helps explain why liberalism as a centric model split after the early 1960s, failing to halt the erosion of Western character and subsequently unable to restrain the mass immigration of unskilled foreigners.
Beyond that, the fact that Jews themselves possess neither especially strong political skills nor especially high political intelligence when governing other Jews does not help.
Jews generally need to be outsiders: people who stand at a distance, observe how power operates as a whole, and jot down notes in a notebook, not those who wield power over other Jews, if their powers of observation and intellect are to find their fullest expression within a political system.
The Jewish man is apparently condemned to live under Jung’s verdict: incapable of exercising self-sovereignty, or, at the very least, capable of exercising it only at a low level. But even then, thank God, he still gives us something to think about.
