Because Jewish law and Jewish philosophy are both significantly more in line with conservatism than they are with leftism. Judaism has very strong social standards, Judaism has very strong expectations for behavior, Judaism has very strong beliefs about the values of hard work and playing by the rules, and liberalism doesn’t tend to believe in any of those things. It tends to believe that consequences must be alleviated for people who make bad or immoral decisions and it tends to justify such decisions by appealing to lack of free will.
The Rambam writes that free will is the basis of all human morality as well as the Torah. That’s a deeply conservative principle.
Why did you go to Harvard Law School? Was it just so that you could say, “I spent three years as a conservative in a liberal lion’s den”?
If you get into Harvard Law, you don’t pass it up. I finished school and I considered whether I wanted to go directly into politics or business, and my mom – who runs a television company and always regretted not getting a law degree – suggested it might be valuable to go to law school. So I took the LSATs, did well, applied to Harvard, got in, and once you get into Harvard Law, you don’t say no.
Has it been an asset in politics? Of course it has because the Left only has three attacks on people on the Right in politics: you’re stupid, you’re corrupt, or you’re evil. When you put Harvard Law on your resume, it makes it very difficult for them to use stupid, so they have to turn to corrupt and evil.
On that note, you have written that the “age of civility” in politics is over. Can you elaborate?
I’m not sure there ever was an age of civility. I think we have a tendency – politically, religiously, all over the place – to create these golden years in the past that probably didn’t exist.
But the reality is that civility is less important than clarity, and right now only very few people on the Left are interested in having a civil conversation about the merits of particular policy solutions. They’re interested in attacking you as a racist, sexist, bigot, or homophobe if you disagree with them. And you cannot deal with folks who are uncivil in a civil fashion. That’s a recipe for losing. That’s why Mitt Romney lost in 2012 and John McCain lost in 2008.
You’ve also said that liberals often harbor an “undeserved sense of moral superiority.” What did you mean by that?
Most people on the Left have never actually done anything to help folks they claim to have helped. The black community, for example, which the Left has claimed to have helped over the last 50 years, has not in fact been helped. The poverty rate of the black community is basically the same as it was before the War on Poverty, the illegitimacy rate is almost four times as high as it was before the War on Poverty, and the education levels are actually slightly elevated but lag dramatically behind those of other races over the past 50 years.
People on the Left will say if you oppose their education or welfare policies, you must be anti-black. Well, that’s creating a sense of unearned moral superiority, and you have to strip them of that, because the reality is that not only is the Left not morally superior to the Right, in most cases the Left is morally inferior because of the results of the philosophies they’ve touted for so long.
