Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — AEI Annual Dinner 2017
We’ve seen the emergence of what I call a politics of anger. We have seen the culture of competitive victimhood. We have seen the emergence of identity politics based on smaller and smaller identities of ethnicity and gender. We’ve seen the new politics of grievance. We’ve seen the silencing of free speech in our universities in the name of safe spaces.
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Instead of a culture of freedom and responsibility, we have a culture of grievances that are always someone else’s responsibility. Because we no longer share a moral code that allows us, in Isaiah’s words, to reason together, in its place has come something called emotivism, which says, I know I’m right because I feel it. And as for those who disagree, we will shout down or ban all those dissenting voices because we each have a right not to feel we’re wrong.
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And because half of America doesn’t have strong families and communities standing between the individual and the state, people begin to think that all political problems can be solved by the state. But they can’t. And when you think they can, politics begins to indulge in magical thinking. So you get the far right dreaming of a golden past that never was and the far left yearning for a utopian future that never will be. And then comes populism, the belief that a strong leader can solve all our problems for us. And that is the first step down the road to tyranny, whether of the right or of the left.
We need people willing to stand up and say, rich and poor alike, we all have collective responsibility for the common good. And we need a culture of responsibility, not one of victimhood, because if you define yourself as a victim, you can never be free. We have to have people to have the courage to get up and say that earned self-respect counts for more than unearned self-esteem. And we have to say the fundamental truth that is at the heart of the Hebrew Bible and of American politics that the state exists to serve the people. The people don’t exist to serve the state.
Money Quote: The market is about the creation and distribution of wealth. The state is about the creation and distribution of power.