Dear Editor,
Most Jews have been shocked and puzzled by the demonstrations of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel antipathy on university campuses. But like the overwhelming majority of Americans, they know little about the ideological history of American college education and even less about the history of American political culture and philosophies. Those histories help to clarify what they see happening now in higher education and politics. To understand both, one has to begin with the American founding and the Revolutionary War.
The United States was founded on principles that are unique in recorded human history, which began in 3300 B.C. Since that time, virtually all societies (except for the Roman Republic) were autocracies. Before the mid-17th century, these were theocracies. Since then they have been a mixture of secular autocracies, theocracies, and democracies with high degrees of interference in their citizens’ liberties. The United States was different — it was founded as a natural rights republic.
The Founders believed that nature provided all members of the human species a right to self-ownership: a right to life, a right to liberty, and a right to the fruits of their labor, i.e. their property. Those rights, they explained, must not be violated by either their fellow citizens or governments. Indeed, individuals are entitled to defend their rights themselves or coalesce with others to establish a government to secure but not violate those pre-legal rights.
This view was taken by the Founders from the English philosopher, John Locke (whose political philosophy was published in 1690) and became known as “Liberalism” in England in the second third of the 19th century. Unfortunately, Liberalism was also used to describe another political philosophy, one which rejected the existence of natural rights but believed that governments should nevertheless protect liberty and property because society would thereby be benefited.
In America, the commitment to natural rights led inexorably to the Civil War, as slavery was a blatant violation of them. And then, amazingly, after some 600,000 lives were lost in the fight to recover those rights for the slaves, natural rights were rejected in the country’s most important colleges and universities.
This strange turn of events arose in the final quarter of the 19th century. The presidents of America’s most prestigious colleges decided they no longer wished their institutions to be purely teaching institutions. Instead, they desired to upgrade their colleges in emulation of the German universities which had been research institutions and had awarded doctoral degrees for two centuries (neither of which American colleges did). And so they decided to hire Americans who had either studied at or received doctorates in Germany.
By doing so they upgraded their institutions in mathematics, the natural sciences, and medicine dramatically. However, in philosophy, political science, history, sociology, economics, and law, hiring men with German doctorates or graduate training was a disaster. Unwittingly, they imported views that were the exact opposite of the Founders’ views about natural rights. The German perspective disseminated by the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (whom the Nazis would praise as the author of their convictions) and his successors was that nations are organisms of which human beings are merely cellular components. As such they had no rights, only privileges granted to them by the government and duties to preserve the organism, i.e., the nation. Those duties were to be assigned by the organism’s brain, which was constituted by university faculty and their students. Moreover, once American college presidents transferred the power of training and hiring new faculty to their teachers with German doctorates, this view was disseminated to subsequent generations of American college and university faculty.
German faculty with decidedly illiberal views called themselves state socialists. The Americans they had trained, not wishing to identify themselves as such, invented the name “Progressives,” adopted from the German Progress Party to disguise their views from the American public. And so John Merriam, the founder and chairman of the University of Chicago’s political science department, observed in 1903 that the Founders’ and abolitionists’ view — that all human beings have natural rights — had been repudiated by leading academics in American universities.
With an effective monopoly over doctoral training, American progressives guaranteed that undergraduate and graduate students in humanities, social science, and law would be exposed only to an anti-liberal point of view as that word had long been understood in 19th-century England and America. However, when the word “progressivism” became odious because of its association with Germany after World War I, socialists like the Columbia University political philosopher John Dewey substituted the word “Liberal” to replace it. That word’s original meaning excluded socialism as a universal violation of the right to one’s property.
“Liberal” was then appropriated by the Roosevelt administration to describe its New Deal policies like the National Industrial Recovery Act, a reorganization of the American economy that bore a striking resemblance to the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s syndicalist economic policies, horrifying even left-wing journalists like Walter Lippmann. That law was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935. Two years later, unhappy with its decisions, Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court.
Prior to the onset of World War II, the Roosevelt administration did not fill our country’s quotas for German Jewish émigrés, leaving many to die in Nazi Germany. It forced all of those of Japanese ancestry to live in internment camps until the end of World War II. In that conflict it continued the segregation of America’s military by race. When Vice President John Nance Garner requested FDR’s support for an anti-lynching law, the president kept publicly silent on the issue, allowing it to die in Congress.
Since the 1950s, survey after survey demonstrated that university faculties were overwhelmingly comprised of “Liberal” Democrats, rendering their institutions one-party, secular churches. What, exactly were the doctrines that they supported? They were the first Americans to advocate an unconstitutional fourth branch of government which we now call the Administrative State, comprised of unelected bureaucracies with the independent power to craft rules that are justified as the means of identifying violations of federal law. Many have their own judiciaries.
The abusive power exercised by these bureaucracies was and is fearsome. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, has used its powers to silence those who may criticize Democratic Party policies. The then-head of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the IRS, Lois Lerner, delayed or denied the applications from Tea Party groups for tax exemption under IRS category 501(c)4. But that only echoed the IRS investigation of libertarian or conservative public policy institutes and private foundations in the 1990s. Decades earlier, FDR used the IRS to investigate his fellow Democrat and left-wing adversary Huey Long. John F. Kennedy used it to defund conservative radio programs as suggested to him by the then-head of the U.A.W.
These were among the long-term political consequences of the philosophy inculcated into American institutions by Germany-trained faculty in the late 19th century. Their convictions have been absorbed by college graduates throughout the 20th century in greater and greater numbers, with their influence growing particularly in journalism, constitutional law, and politics.
To justify the use of government to violate what were viewed as natural rights by the Founders, “Liberals” used the various pretexts employed by a variety of secular autocratic elites. They “represented” the working class, the race, the environment, the nation, the poor, the climate — the list is probably endless. But ask yourself, did Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or the Kims represent the workers or were workers a convenient excuse for their political predations? Did Hitler represent the German race or his own autocratic and criminal appetites?
Exactly whom did Hillary Clinton represent when she used Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to invent a lie about her political opponent to have him investigated by the FBI? Whom did FBI employees Lisa Page and Peter Struck “represent” when they conspired to block a Trump presidency? And finally, whom did Joe Biden and his Justice Department represent when they invented pretexts for four separate indictments of a political opponent who represented about half of the American electorate?
It is no accident that the “Progressive” and “Liberal” movements that the foregoing persons represent did not descend from the views of America’s Founders but rather from 19th-century German autocratic anti-Semitic academics such as Hans Treitschke, Adolph Wagner, and Gustav von Schmoller, men who educated the first American doctoral faculty as well as the Nazi professoriate in Germany.
And now you can see how anti-Semitism after October 7 began to openly express itself on American campuses. Palestinians have for years been considered an exploited class by many of the majority left-wing faculty. Their exploiters, they claimed, were the Jewish “colonists” who had “stolen” the Palestinians’ ancestral land and who deserved what they got. The historical precedent for this was set by Adolph Hitler and Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941, at the Reich Chancellery.
From the German notes on this meeting seized by the British after World War II, we know that the Mufti told Hitler that they were natural friends because they had the same enemies — Jews, the English, and the Communists. He then offered an Arab Legion to fight for Germany in defeating their enemies. The Mufti said he had received a letter from Germany saying it supported the elimination of the Jewish national home. Hitler replied by saying that Germany stood with the Arabs for an uncompromising war against the Jews. And so, Germany would provide material aid to the Arab world. Eventually, it would militarily enter the Middle East and when it did it would guarantee that the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world.
Jews, in the view of Hitler, the Mufti, and many American progressives in our universities today are the exploiters of the Palestinian people and must be expelled from Zion or decimated there. Jews as enemies are added to a long list of pretexts for the autocratic powers sought by the contemporary secular aspirants of monarchical, elite status. For those of us who have spent our professional lives in universities, we have seen this outcome as an inevitability and, therefore, no surprise.
Nor should it surprise us that the eventual Democratic presidential nominee would, along with 35 of her colleagues, boycott Netanyahu’s speech to both houses of Congress. Do not be surprised by her policies toward Israel if she is elected president of the United States. And you can expect her to allow Israel’s and America’s chief enemy in the Middle East, Iran, to continue to fund itself, its nuclear weapons program, and its anti-Semitic proxies by unrestricted sales of its oil to China, just as Obama and Biden permitted them to do before her.
In the early 1930s, the eminent Jewish physicist Albert Einstein began to warn German Jews about what awaited them if the Nazis came to power. In response, he received basketsful of hate mail from his co-religionists. Let us hope that American Jews will have greater foresight today.
Jeffrey Paul
Cincinnati, Ohio
