JERUSALEM — In a sign of a growing rift, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized American Jewish leaders on Wednesday as a struggle over a stalled plan for equal prayer rights for both sexes at a Jerusalem holy site erupted with mutual recriminations and a tumultuous protest led by liberal rabbis wielding Torah scrolls.
.. The Western Wall, the holiest place where Jews can pray, has become the crucible of a fight over rituals and a sense of belonging. Together with their Israeli counterparts, North American Jews, who overwhelmingly identify with the liberal, non-Orthodox Reform and Conservative streams of Judaism, have challenged the strictly Orthodox authorities who enforce the traditional practice at the site, in which scores of Torah scrolls are restricted for male use.
.. Liberal Jews hailed the decision as historic at the time, but the government has failed to advance the plan because of opposition from the ultra-Orthodox parties that Mr. Netanyahu relies on for his governing coalition.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, and with a petition pending before Israel’s Supreme Court, non-Orthodox rabbis and lay leaders defied traditional convention by marching to the Western Wall holding 14 Torah scrolls. Despite some violent pushing and shoving by orderlies and ultra-Orthodox counterdemonstrators, they broke through the security barriers.
Clinton’s Samantha Bee Problem
Fallon’s apolitical shtick increasingly makes him an outlier among his peers, many of whom are less comics than propagandists — liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines.
.. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.
.. institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.
.. For the left, these are clear signs of cultural gains, cultural victory. But the scale and swiftness of those victories have created two distinctive political problems for the Democratic Party.
.. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank
.. he feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion
.. But it remains an advantage for the G.O.P., and a liability for the Democratic Party, that the new cultural orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many Americans looking to the voting booth as a way to register dissent.
The Fallout (Non-Nuclear) from a Donald Trump Victory
Political correctness really has become petty bullying, an attempt to enforce economic consequences for what is a social faux pas. Yes, we’re all supposed to be respectful to others, courteous, and to avoid giving unneeded offense. (The Left would be wise to start practicing what it preaches, to “do unto others as you would have them do.”) There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone declaring, “Hey, that really offends me.” But the Left wants to go further; they want a person who offends their sensibilities to be punished for it. Oftentimes the enforcers of political correctness want the person to lose their job. They want that person to become a pariah and feel constant social ostracization. They want to enforce the most serious of consequences for hurting someone’s feelings.
.. The Left would have to recognize that most of their our political and cultural elites demonstrate epic hypocrisy on a regular basis.
.. Obama declares, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say ‘okay.’” And then, in the words of David Axelrod, Obama keeps the Oval Office so warm in winter that “you could grow orchids in there.”
.. Hillary Clinton denounces greed and selfishness while collecting six-figure speaking fees. Bill Clinton gets a free pass from feminists as the sexual-harassment and womanizing allegations pile up. They talk about the importance of equal opportunity while Chelsea Clinton gets a $600,000 part-time gig at NBC News.
.. Ordinary Americans look at the elites and conclude they don’t actually believe anything they say, or at the very least, they don’t think they have to live under the rules they want to enforce for everyone else.
Why Clinton Lost So Many Democrats
The privileged student radicals of 1968 became the vanguard of the new class, which, despite its electoral marginality, defined American liberalism for the next five decades. Their children, inheriting their values, advanced their cause both in the prestige media and as the loudest, most aggressive voices on elite campuses. Today, that prosperous elite is ever-more isolated from the social and economic devastation that has gripped most of the country.
.. But it is no accident that leading corporate liberal publications, from The Atlantic to Slate toNew York, traffic in the most unrestrained identity politics, belligerence, and transgender extremism while their mostly young writers have also been the most supportive of Clinton and critical of Sanders.
.. But it is precisely because the liberal culture-war catechism is so totally losing resonance with them—not to mention the slaying of the Reagan policy paradigm by Trump—that the liberal pundit class is invoking that catechism with increasing hysteria. This election will do much to determine how the millennial majority ultimately takes shape.
.. If Trump wins, the combination of his likely one-term disaster and the shock of a Clinton loss will likely open the way for a lasting generational transformation of the Democratic Party. Unless Trump loses in a landslide, which looks increasingly unlikely, there is no going back to the old order for the Republicans
.. The legacy of the Bernie Sanders campaign will have been to reveal that for the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, the twin legacies of the 1960s—in both the party establishment and its ideological base—are at long last at death’s door.