No one who thinks of themselves as an active citizen should dare to also believe that they’re consistently operating from the application of some sort of reasoned, root-level principles to all public policy and all social issues. I don’t care how worked-out your think your ideology is or how disciplined you are in your theories and praxis. There’s always something just beyond your view that is a massive violation of what you think is right, just and sensible that you either have been deliberately looking away from or that you’ve allowed others to obscure on your behalf.
Case in point: the recent New York Times investigation of the massive, deliberate misuse of public money by private Hasidic schools in New York where those schools are setting out to deliberately compel the children they educate to remain dependent upon and captive to the religious community that is educating them by refusing to teach them anything that might make it possible for them to choose otherwise when they become adults.
Educated liberals in my general world are quick to express (quite appropriately) their contempt for the deliberate underfunding of public education in states like Alabama, and for the brutally ideological and instrumental assault on public education now underway in Florida and elsewhere. The former may have some of the same instrumental intent as what is going on in the Hasidic schools mentioned by the NYT; the latter certainly does, in that it is completely comfortable with the idea of using education as an ideological bludgeon to compel students to think inside the cramped spaces that MAGA America wants to promote. As usual, it’s a case of far-right activists actually doing what they falsely complain others do: most of their complaint against the rest of America is less a complaint and more a statement of futureward aspiration for themselves.
But you know, the Hasidic schools in the NYT coverage are there in absolutely plain sight. And in some of my social media feeds, there was a quivering as the story settled in: won’t this feed into anti-Semitism? Maybe there was a quiet way to bring this up. Maybe it’s unfair or exaggerated. Maybe we shouldn’t really talk about this.
The fact is that the money that went into those schools wasn’t looked at because it’s politically inconvenient in the context of New York politics (city and state) to look. It is essentially a massive bribe paid to a set of powerful men who are absolutely able to deliver votes by command—or to withhold them. This is not a secret. It is a known thing. It is in that sense not that different than retail politics all over the country, retail politics in most liberal democracies. There’s always some group you don’t want to look at too closely in your neck of the woods even if they grossly violate some principle that you are otherwise very clear about, or so you believe.
I am not even sure that this is wrong per se. E.g., to get really outraged about it, you have to imagine yourself to be some supra-rational, supra-ethical crusader who is always willing to chase down any motherfucker who stole a loaf of bread, no matter how good he’s been since then. Not only is that a bad mindset, but it’s going to be untrue—you actually aren’t ready to do that at all. It’s the self-image that a lot of people who register as “independents” in US elections maintain, and it’s fundamentally false in comparison to what they actually do and think.
The real problem is not that everybody’s got something they’re not seeing, it’s what you do when you’re forced to look at it. That seems to me a place where we’re at an especially bad moment in American public culture (and maybe the public culture of other liberal democracies). What Lindsay Graham does when there’s a very human, very real story about the consequences of zealotry about reproductive rights right in front of him is telling: he plays in the trash. What Ken Starr’s friends say on his death, even with Starr himself having regretted the turn in his investigation of Clinton and having trashed any semblance of consistent ethics in his subsequent professional life is telling. And it will be telling what people who maybe didn’t want to look too closely at what one billion dollars was buying in New York City—the destruction of a generation—do next. There may be a lot of performative hubbub over the next few days, but the time to watch is weeks and months ahead.
Image credit: Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash