Those who recognize Aaron Wildavsky's name may wonder how the famed political scientist could possibly comment on Whoopie, since he died in 1993.
But I want to suggest he was highly prescient about what is going on today in America.
In a classic 1990 essay on “The Search for the Oppressed” (not available online, unfortunately), Wildavsky noted how the left was trying to redefine Jews in American consciousness:
"During the 1920s and 1930s, Jews—not entirely without reason—were recognized as one of the nation’s oppressed minorities. Quotas aimed to keep them out of college, discrimination out of work, and voter prejudice out of public life.
But radical whites, without the fanfare of a public announcement of the solemn cadence of a decent burial, decided Jews no longer were spoken of as a minority, deprived, despised, downtrodden, or whatever. Just like that.
Really, it was a case of mistaken identity: Jews were all of a sudden taken for imperialists. Actually, it was more like guilt by association. Jews, you see, were identified with Israel, which was defeating Arabs, who resorted to guerrilla warfare, however inefficacious, which somehow gave them membership in the Third World, so that Israel, ipso facto, became an imperialist oppressor, and domestic Jews ceased being a minority. Acta est fabula."
Wildavsky not only anticipated the BDS movement 20 years before it coalesced, but prefigures today’s intersectional world where a Whoopie Goldberg can highlight the hypocrisy of the left’s definition of racism.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/02/whoopi-goldbergs-suspension.php
But I want to suggest he was highly prescient about what is going on today in America.
In a classic 1990 essay on “The Search for the Oppressed” (not available online, unfortunately), Wildavsky noted how the left was trying to redefine Jews in American consciousness:
"During the 1920s and 1930s, Jews—not entirely without reason—were recognized as one of the nation’s oppressed minorities. Quotas aimed to keep them out of college, discrimination out of work, and voter prejudice out of public life.
But radical whites, without the fanfare of a public announcement of the solemn cadence of a decent burial, decided Jews no longer were spoken of as a minority, deprived, despised, downtrodden, or whatever. Just like that.
Really, it was a case of mistaken identity: Jews were all of a sudden taken for imperialists. Actually, it was more like guilt by association. Jews, you see, were identified with Israel, which was defeating Arabs, who resorted to guerrilla warfare, however inefficacious, which somehow gave them membership in the Third World, so that Israel, ipso facto, became an imperialist oppressor, and domestic Jews ceased being a minority. Acta est fabula."
Wildavsky not only anticipated the BDS movement 20 years before it coalesced, but prefigures today’s intersectional world where a Whoopie Goldberg can highlight the hypocrisy of the left’s definition of racism.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/02/whoopi-goldbergs-suspension.php
