In an earlier column I suggested that the likely Republican presidential candidate has begun obliterating the boundaries of discourse and behavior that are indispensable for a functioning civil society not to mention for the moral atmosphere to which we Torah Jews are passionately committed. Through his shameless serial lying threats of violence and retaliation vulgar insults and obscenities egomaniacal boasting and utter lack of conscience and self-critique — all abetted by incessant media coverage of his every hiccup — his candidacy is sorely testing and dangerously tearing at the tenuous moral fabric of a country already well in the throes of spiritual and ethical decline.
But there’s a further havoc wrought when someone seeking to become a nation’s leader breaches time-honored standards not just of formal propriety and etiquette but the very bounds of basic decency without facing severe censure if not complete banishment from public life. That havoc is the threat it poses to certain particularly vulnerable societal groups — chief among them the Jews.
Historically persecution of Jews has begun with sustained verbal violence culminating in the demonization and dehumanization that legitimizes actual violence. Jews need a society in which there are taboos red lines not to be crossed with regard to every type of violence. The reality is that the chatter in darkened pubs and truck stops always has been and will be filled with toxic Jew-hatred. But those demons remain bottled up and largely harmless unless they are released by someone with stature and an enraptured following whom he plays like a fiddle someone who is au contraire lauded for “telling it like it is.”
Our people’s long tumultuous history has given us good reason to fear certain societal phenomena which in combination have time and again spelled grave danger for us. One is “mobocracies ” mass movements in which raw primal emotions like anger fear hatred and revenge prevail over reason and humanity. This candidate’s blood-and-soil populist nationalism fits the bill precisely attracting the adulation of masses because it is not their brains but the suppressed rage filling their guts that he excites.
