Bret Stephens, Welcome To The Resistance

More than I would've expected.

So this is a column that I really need to write because it really rankles — I’m a U-Chicago person. I have a fundamental commitment to concepts of academic freedom, which include the right of students and professors to espouse views, which I find mistaken, wrong and even loathsome.

And so what Trump has now done is turned a legitimate grievance — and specifically Jewish grievance — into a tool to undermine and potentially destroy a value, which I think is a core Jewish value, which is the value of debate, dissent, reason, inquiry, criticism and so on. The one mistake we cannot make is we cannot get on the side of illiberalism. We cannot get on the side of people who pretend to be our friends but seek to undermine a political order centered on the notion of the freedom of conscience and thought, the freedom of and the dignity of the individual.

I don’t mean liberalism in the kind of progressive sense. I mean liberalism in the classic Jeffersonian and John Stuart Mill sense of the word. I think it’s dangerous because it puts the Jewish population sort of as a protected class of the ruler, and that’s happened historically for Jews over the centuries.

We keep hoping the next king won’t expel us or put us to the torch. But the whole purpose of liberalism is that Jews enjoy the same kind of rights and privileges and freedoms as everyone else, as equal citizens. That’s the promise of Washington’s letter to the Newport congregation. He says: We no longer speak of mere tolerance because Jews are every bit as American as everyone else.

And so there is a side of the Jewish population that’s sort of cheering Trump because he seems to have the same enemies, or many of the same enemies, that we do. But the methods he’s using to oppose those enemies, we ought to fear.