Aug. 5, 2024: ‘Not Even Nuclear Weapons Are Taken Seriously’

Waiting for the Iranians; Stock market rout; Gender trouble at the Olympics

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The Big Story

Over the weekend, we watched an interview on the Modern Wisdom podcast with Dominic Cummings, one of the architects of Brexit and a chief adviser to former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. A list of Cummings’ past jobs, however, does not really do him justice. He is, unusually for someone involved in politics, a weird, mercurial, and brilliant autodidact, with obsessions ranging from Russian literature to John Boyd’s military theory and bleeding-edge technological development. As Johnson’s chief adviser, he put out the following hiring call for the British civil service—on his personal blog, no less:

We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand ‘diviner’ who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB.

He’s also a “brokenist”—in the words of Tablet’s Alana Newhouse—who has worked at the highest levels of government in the United Kingdom. His takeaway from that experience? Everything is worse than you can possibly imagine. The people in government are venal and incompetent, the institutions are pathological and must be transformed or replaced, trans-Atlantic elites (outside a few select domains in business) are delusional to the point of being dangerous to the societies they lead, and “the news is faker than WWE,” as he put it in an April 2024 Substack. 

With that intro aside, here are a few of Cummings’ observations from the interview that we think are helpful for understanding American politics as well as politics across the pond. 

Elite talent has left politics, and we now have a negative selection of political elites.

“Negative selection” isn’t Cummings’ phrase—it’s from the late American political theorist Angelo Codevilla’s 2019 interview with Tablet. But it fits what Cummings describes here:

There’s a vicious circle in British politics, and I think you see the same thing over in America. A lot of elite talent used to go into politics and public service of one form or another. If you go back 100 years, if you even go back 50 or 70 years, you see a lot of incredibly able people in Washington D.C. [and] in Whitehall building things and doing things. What’s happened is that that elite talent has massively shifted out of politics and public service and they’re in some combination of maths, money, venture capital, tech startups, scientific research, etc. But they don’t want to be part of the party clown show and they don’t want to be part of the political clown show. 

Elsewhere, he describes promotion and hiring within the British government, which tracks with our own sense of how things work in America:

At the moment you have these old civil service hierarchies that are run by the absolute worst elements of the HR department and they recruit almost entirely internally. And what this creates is an anti-talent ratchet. If you deal with the British civil service, what you see is a whole bunch of people between the age of 25 and 35 who are really, really able, a lot of energy, a lot of brains, a lot of can-do spirit. What happens is these people almost all leave between 35 and 45. And the reason is, they spend the first 10 years looking at it, they do a bunch of stuff, and then they look at their bosses, and they look at the HR system and how everyone gets promoted, and they recoil with horror and they leave. 

Nothing is taken seriously in government—not even at the top, not even on the most important issues. 

In the interview, Cummings shares his “Five Rules of How Government Really Works.” Rule No. 1 is, Not even nuclear weapons are taken seriously so never assume the problem leading the news is taken seriously. As he explains to interviewer Chris Williamson:

I spent a lot of 2019 and 2020 really, really digging into the situation with nuclear enterprise in Britain. Most of the things are illegal for me to talk about, but the core of it is legal to talk about, and it’s that over a 20-to-30-year period the country has neglected a whole bunch of the core infrastructure at every point of the chain for how these weapons are deployed. They’ve neglected building what needs to be built and they’ve classified the cock-ups so highly that I’m not allowed to explain to you in detail what they all are. It’s a pathological cycle where there’s a failure, and then rather than fix the failure it’s all covered up and the budgets just get bigger and bigger. 

Everyone sort of thinks, oh well they might get that wrong and they might cock that up, but the most important things the system must be really, really focusing on. And my point is, that’s the wrong way to think about it. Things have gotten so bad that it’s sort of the other way around. Ministers run around spending stupid amounts of time on trivia that’s on the front page of The Sun while just systematically neglecting the actual core things, like making sure the nuclear weapons are sorted out. 

In the U.S. context, we might think of the U.S. defense industrial base being allowed to wither for decades, such that the United States would “exhaust its munitions inventories in as few as three to four weeks” in the event of a war with China, in the words of last week’s report from the Commission on the National Defense Strategy. 

“Populist” and anti-system political figures are responses to a pathological system. 

Here’s Cummings again:

Trump partly is a phenomenon generated by tens of millions of people being completely disgusted and fed up with the old system. A lot of people might think Trump’s an asshole, they might not agree with him about everything, but they know one thing for sure about Trump: The old system really, really hates him. And because of that, well, he can’t be all bad, and maybe he’s our guy. 

And this is this self-feeding dynamic where the old establishment are saying the real danger is “populists” and “fascists” and the people who don’t trust the old institutions, and their argument about what’s happening is, well, it’s the idiot voters who are “fooled by disinformation.” Like, Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Biden is senile? Disinformation run by Putin. Biden is super sharp in private … 

They keep doubling down on, it’s the voters who are stupid not to trust us and the answer is for them to trust us more. But that is pushing more and more people into opposing them, and as the Democrat Party has gone more and more mad it’s pushed Elon, a whole bunch of people in Silicon Valley who voted for Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Obama twice, to now just come out and say sod it, we’re going to vote for Trump. 

Why do elites keep doubling down? Well, as Cummings wrote on his blog in 2017:

Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse educated far from power. Why? In the field of political opinion they are more driven by fashion, a gang mentality, and the desire to pose about moral and political questions all of which exacerbate cognitive biases, encourage groupthink, and reduce accuracy. … [They] live amid the emotional waves that ripple around powerful and tightly linked self-reinforcing networks. These waves rarely permeate the barrier around insiders and touch others.

Watch the full interview here:

 IN THE BACK PAGES: Mendel Uminer on the Jews of Brighton Beach

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The Rest

→Israel is on high alert in anticipation of Iran’s response to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week. Hebrew media reported after a Sunday night security meeting that Israel would consider a preemptive attack on Iran if it received “definitive intelligence” about an impending Iranian strike, and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told commanders of the Israeli Air Force on Monday to prepare for a “quick transition to offense” in the event of an attack by Iran and its proxies. Most interesting for observers of the new order in the Middle East, however, has been the spectacle of the Biden administration and Iran messaging in lockstep to set expectations for the coming Iranian attack. For instance, here’s an Axios report on Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s Sunday night conference call with his G7 counterparts:

The secretary of state told his counterparts the U.S. is making efforts to break the escalatory cycle by trying to limit the attacks by Iran and Hezbollah as much as possible and then restrain the Israeli response.

And here was The Wall Street Journal on Sunday on the U.S.-European efforts to keep the anticipated Iranian attack on Israel within “reasonable” bounds:

The U.S. asked European and other partner governments to convey a message to Iran not to escalate, warning that any significant strike would draw a response and signaling that efforts by Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian to improve engagement with the West would have a better chance if Iran shows restraint, according to people involved in the discussions. The U.S. said, as a part of its message, that it also was pressing Israel to de-escalate (emphasis ours).

And here was Iran on Monday conveying that it had gotten the message. Per the Times of Israel:

“Iran seeks to establish stability in the region, but this will only come with punishing the aggressor and creating deterrence against the adventurism of the Zionist regime,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said, adding that action from Tehran was inevitable.

In other words, what we’re seeing is the new paradigm established by the United States and Iran with the missile strikes in April: The United States will permit Iran to strike Israel directly in retaliation of Israel eliminating Iran’s terror assets (or “equities,” in Obama-Biden language)—as long as the attack falls short of some arbitrary Washington definition of significance. Washington will help Israel absorb the blow, but will also lean on Israel to absorb the strike and “take the win” without “escalating”—with the implicit threat of withdrawing its support should Israel attempt to break out of the current status quo, in which Iran and its proxies can depopulate the Israeli north and strike the Israeli homeland without fear of devastating retaliation. 

→Chart of the Day: 

That, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, is a visual of the stock-market rout prompted by Friday’s lackluster jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor. The Monday selloff started in Japan, where the Nikkei stock index lost 12% of its value—the largest single-day drop since the Black Monday crash of 1987. The drop in the United States was milder, but still substantial—all three major stock indexes dropped by at least 2% on Monday, with the tech-heavy NASDAQ leading the way at -2.84%. 

→The Paris Olympics are entering their final week, and while they’ve overall been a success, a budding controversy in women’s boxing offers some confirmation of Cummings’ argument that when it comes to powerful institutions, there’s often no there there at the top. On Thursday, after only 46 seconds in the ring, an Italian boxer quit her bout with Algerian Imane Khelif—who was disqualified from competition by the Russian-led International Boxing Association (IBA) last year after undergoing two genetic tests that found that she had male XY chromosomes. Despite these tests, the International Olympic Committee cleared her to compete, and IOC spokespeople have insisted that Khelif and another boxer disqualified by the IBA, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, meet “the clear definition of a woman”—i.e., they were “born as a woman, … raised as a woman, … [and] have a passport as a woman.” The IOC has dismissed the IBA tests as politically motivated but has not refuted their results, and indeed has dismissed the entire idea of genetic testing, with IOC spokesman Mark Adams telling reporters, “we managed to do away with sex testing in the last century.” 

But, as law professor Doriane Lambelet Coleman explains in Quillette, the IOC’s statements are lawyerly—which is a polite way of saying they’re bullshit. Khelif is not transgender, so the working theory is that she has a disorder of sexual development such as 5 alpha reductase deficiency or partial androgen insensitivity—i.e., she is chromosomally male and retains male competitive advantages in sports. In June, however, the IOC issued a language guideline requiring employees to refer to XY athletes who identify as women to be unequivocally identified as women in all public communications. As for the IOC’s dismissal of sex testing, Linda Blade explains at the Reality’s Last Stand Substack that the committee abandoned the practice in 1999—on the spurious grounds that it made female athletes “uncomfortable,” despite 82% of female Olympians supporting the practice—to avoid “emotional and social injury” to gender-diverse athletes. Four years later, the IOC changed its rules to allow male transsexuals to compete in the female category. 

→In more positive Olympic news, on Sunday, 37-year-old Novak Djokovic of Serbia defeated 21-year-old Carlos Alcaraz of Spain to claim the Olympic gold medal in men’s singles tennis. With the win, Djokovic became just the fifth player, and third man, in history to claim a “Golden Slam”—all four Grand Slam titles plus Olympic gold in singles. Djokovic accomplished this feat barely a month removed from knee surgery for a torn meniscus, against an opponent 16 years his junior who had just thrashed the Serb in three largely uncompetitive sets in the Wimbledon final in July. You could see what it meant to him when he collapsed on the clay after match point:

American gymnast Simone Biles, meanwhile, wrapped up her Olympic campaign on Monday by claiming the silver medal in women’s floor gymnastics—giving her three golds and one silver in what may be the 27-year-old’s final Olympics. If it is, she’ll finish with 11 career medals—the most by an American woman (and the third-most by any woman) in history. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Origins of Anti-Zionism, by Jonathan Marc Gribetz

American Jews, the PLO, and the CIA

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Brighton Beach Memoirs

Post-Soviet Jews—all too familiar with pseudo-progressive, anti-Jewish politics—speak their minds

by Mendel Uminer

New York is an “international” city.

Internationalism in Manhattan is not quite international. It's better understood as a sect of its own, whose mores are formed by the great ports of the Atlantic. But in the more provincial outer boroughs of the city, one finds New York’s genuinely worldly enclaves—the sprawling Chinese quarter in Flushing, where one can sometimes walk a mile without hearing a word of English, instead of Manhattan’s Chinatown, where suburban colonists are steadily replacing the autochthonous Chinese; Bay Ridge, with its Nabulsi sweet shops whose patrons clamor around television sets blaring Arabic, instead of the Edward Said Library in Morningside Heights, stocked full of his collection of secondary sources in English and peopled by kaffiyeh-clad Arafat fans; Gravesend, home of the National Premier Soccer League’s Brooklyn Italians, instead of Little Italy, none of whose residents are Italian.

Something similar can be said of the post-Soviet community of Brighton Beach. It is increasingly safer to notice, especially in the wake of the war in Ukraine, that this "Russian" neighborhood is populated less by Great Russians than by regional and ethnic minorities of the Muskovite realm, people whose Russian passports were marked with ethnonational designations: an "Uzbek,” a "Hebrew,” a "Ukrainian.” If you want to encounter a Jew whose citizenship in a major center of the diaspora was recently qualified as Jewish, you must head south, past the Belt Parkway and toward Riegelmann Boardwalk.

At the borscht joints of deepest Brooklyn, one finds people who have witnessed the decline of one of the great 20th-century empires from the inside, from which they made their way to what seemed to be the great victor of the 20th century, the capital of liberalism and free markets—a country whose leaders are beginning to resemble Leonid Brezhnev more than they resemble LBJ and Ronald Reagan.

Much ink has been spilled about the sociological currents at play in the strange American reception of Arab revanchism in the wake of the Oct. 7 pogrom. Some time after the war began, I came across a contemptuous epithet for Tel Aviv attributed to the Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Grinberg. He called it “Odessa on the Mediterranean,” because he believed, in the first half of the 1900s, that the city’s pacifist establishment was vainly pursuing moderation in the conflict with Arab nationalism. By refusing to claim explicitly political rights, they were acting like any other “Jewish community,” rather than representatives of a people headed toward sovereign territorialization.

Having grown up near a third Odessa, "Little Odessa" of Brooklyn, I found this disorienting. The Little Odessans I grew up with, including relatives of mine who grew up in the Soviet Union, seemed … well, not pacifist—and not inclined to refuse political rights. I decided to go pay a visit to the old neighborhood.

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The first person I visited was Svetlana Lifschutz, my great-uncle's ex-wife, who grew up in Sokhumi, Georgia, in the 1960s. (According to Moscow, Sokhumi is the capital of a Muslim dependency of theirs called Abkhazia, rather than a city in Georgia—no one else seems to agree.)

Minutes into our conversation, I asked her about “the war,” which she misunderstood to be the one in Ukraine. “Why would I have an opinion about that stupid war?” she sneered. When I clarified that I wasn’t referring to the dueling Hetmanates of Kyiv and Muskovy, but to the situation in the Holy Land, she calmed down. “Ah yes,” she said. “I follow that closely, I watch Russian-language Israeli TV all the time.”

From her point of view, as a Jew and a Georgian, the Soviet Union was a machine of indolent ethnic Russian bureaucracy, an engine geared toward the repression of resourceful minorities—such as Jews, Georgians and Armenians—all under the cover of communist cant. “Growing up in Georgia, I never felt any discrimination,” she told me. “I only had one antisemitic teacher in high school. But when I aced my medical school exams, I spent a few years trying to get into different medical schools in Russia proper, but none of them would take me because of the Jewish quotas.” She left the Soviet Union in 1979.

Leonard Petlakh, a Jew from Belarus who now runs a chain of JCCs and Ys in south Brooklyn, notes that while the American second generation is more liberal and assimilated than their conservative parents, those parents have recently begun boasting to him about the dissenting stands taken by their liberal children against the institutionally imposed culture of pro-Arab orthodoxy at their fancy-schmancy universities. Some might argue that this is simply a function of the status of the Hebrew nationality in the Soviet Union, but Petlakh believes it can be traced to something deeper. “We were there when the Soviets invented most of the PLO slogans, starting from ‘imperial aggression’ all the way to ‘Zionist apartheid,’” he told me. “If, when I first arrived here—or even more recently—you told me these stories would one day become popular in America, I never would have believed you.”

Petlakh and I talked about the Brat (Brother) movies, directed by Aleksei Balabanov. Action comedies set in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Chicago, they are classics of post-Soviet chauvinism and ressentiment—Vladimir Putin has even used Brat references in his electoral campaigns. A Russian friend of mine, who considers herself post-national, once confided to me that she can’t help feeling like a patriot when she watches it—it’s a guilty pleasure. Brat’s hero, Danila, is a veteran of the Chechen war and a gangster with a heart of gold. Laced with contempt for Chechens, Ukrainians, Jews, and all Americans aside for the genial truck driver who gives Danila a ride out of New York, the films are raucously funny cousins of the Dirty Harry series. Yet once the hero’s bumbling older brother, en route to his mission of saving Russian women from lesbianism and exploitation at the hands of Chicago pimps (the twin fates of the average American woman, according to Brat), succeeds at swindling border control with his fake passport, he signals his contempt for the Amerikansky dupes by announcing “Free Angela Davis!”

To Petlakh, the Yasser Arafat and Angela Davis tropes were both goofy bluffs which he never imagined could possibly be taken seriously in the West. The cynicism with which these mantras were devised and employed in schools and in the media was obvious. “It’s hard for a Jew from the Soviet Union or from Iran to fall for such things,” he told me.

Lifschutz agrees. She remembers listening to unsanctioned broadcasts of Voice of America and Kol Israel in Sokhumi during the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967. Moscow condemned it as “rotten imperialism” and “aggression.” I ask her if people believed this and she is shocked. “We were jubilant, we all started clamoring to immigrate to Israel,” she recalled. I explained that I meant to ask about her non-Jewish neighbors. “Oh, perhaps some of the simpler goyim,” she said. “Educated people always knew you could never believe anything printed in Izvestia, there was always an angle. It’s not like here where the lies are taught by true believers who make their students feel like they have access to secret knowledge.”

In the past, I got the impression that to Lifschutz, American liberty at home—and its expression in the national polities which, in its heroic era, it championed abroad—represented a stark contrast with the Soviet Union, which she saw as a land of lies populated by statistics and quotas, rather than citizens.

In this discussion, though, I found her decidedly less sanguine. “America is a very different place than it was when I got here,” she said. “it took some time, but the oil powers really converted the West to the Arab cause, almost like the conversion of the descendants of destitute Arab DPs through the UNRWA camp system. You must understand, the current electorates of America and Europe are not composed of the same elements as they were 30 years ago—and their prejudices are very different from the old ones.”

She is intensely proud of the Russian community in Israel. “Look at them, they didn’t even know Hebrew when they arrived, yet in just a few decades they have founded businesses and are in all the professions—their kids serve in the army and they are loyal to their country,” she beamed. The one thing she told me makes her sad is the anti-religious tenor of Russian Israeli television.

Russians in Israel may still be patriotic without religion, but here in the states, Jewish identity among ex-Soviets is becoming more tied to religious experience. At the F.R.E.E. (Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe) near Neptune Avenue, I bumped into Alex, an ex-boxer (and he looks it) who was hunched over someone’s yahrzeit candle, lighting his cigarette. (That’s the kosher way to do it, because you can’t light a new flame on the holiday.) After chatting a bit, he took me to the Young Israel synagogue a few blocks away, where his favorite rabbi holds court.

“Before I met Rabbi Zaltzman," Alex told me, “the only thing Jewish about me was the nationality entry on my Soviet passport.”

Ephraim Zaltzman grew up in the States, but his father was a famous figure in the underground Orthodox cell in Samarkand. He speaks English without an accent. The synagogue he runs is a fusion of Chabad and Young Israel; a large Israeli flag stands to the right of the Torah ark, while the prayer books all follow the Chabad arrangement of the liturgy—some with facing English translations, others with Russian translations. Alex made me don a kippah. Outside the sanctuary, men were playing chess and sipping tea.

Alex, who is in his 40s, was circumcised 15 years ago, after coming under the influence of Rabbi Zaltzman. “He told me the best time to do it is the week between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur—on Rosh Hashana I was uncircumcised and by Yom Kippur I was a different man,” Alex told me. Still, he has a dim view of Brighton Beach religiosity. He arrived in the States in 1992, as a teenager. “I remember when there were five Russian restaurants with kosher certification around here, now they are all treyf. This shul predates Rabbi Zaltzman, it’s very old. He saved it when the old-timers realized the youth were mostly leaving—they decided to allow Chabad to take over, otherwise it would probably become a mosque.”

Sitting next to us is a young Talmud student who grew up in Sumy, a Ukrainian city which has suffered heavy bombardment from Moscow’s troops. He runs a Released Time Jewish studies program for Chabad, catering to a public school not far from Young Israel. His appraisal of Brighton Beach religion is more optimistic. “We just started, so we only have about 20 kids from this school, but there are many more potential recruits, I can tell.” The two begin arguing in Russian and I take off to Oceanview Café for some vareniki.

According to Petlakh, they’re missing the point. “The post-Soviet Jewish community was never religious, nor were they ever highly affiliated with Jewish organizations.” Precisely because their Jewish identity had a national and political expression in the Soviet Union, most Jews did not resort to confessionalism. But he thinks the second generation, or at least those among them who will not assimilate completely, is more likely to engage with Judaism through religion than their parents. “I’m not religious, but one of my sons is now modern Orthodox. The other made aliyah.” And he sees a growing level of identification with Jewish causes among the youth, in ways peculiar to their Soviet heritage. “A friend of mine works for Hillel, and he runs Birthright Israel trips for the Hillel kids. All year he could never tell which kids are Russian and which aren’t, but once he got to Israel, he immediately began hearing sounds of recognition in Russian—they began seeing their grandmas everywhere.”