Isegoria

The Confederate secretary of state, who appeared on its two-dollar bill, was perhaps the 19th Century’s most prominent American Jew, Judah P. Benjamin:

Benjamin was born a British subject on St. Croix in 1811 to a family of Sephardic Jews. In 1822, the Benjamin family immigrated to America, seeking their fortune in what was then the nation’s most Jewish city: Charleston, S.C.

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As a Charleston schoolboy, Judah was adored by his teachers for his quick mind. He was packed off to Yale at age 14 where he became the sole Jew in his class. In New Haven, Judah distinguished himself as a debater, engaging the questions that he would eventually argue on the Senate floor, including “Ought the government of the U. States to take immediate measures for the Manumission of the slaves of our country?” and, ominously, “Is it probable that our country will continue united under its present form of government for a century?”

But the little big man on campus—Benjamin stood just over five feet tall—never graduated. In 1827, he was expelled from the university for “ungentlemanly conduct” of an unspecified nature. Rumors that the tempest in New Haven involved gambling, carousing, or kleptomania dogged him the rest of his life, particularly during the Civil War when the Northern press rehashed the scandal to tar the man they called the South’s “evil genius.”

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By 1852, “the Little Jew from New Orleans” had made enough of a name for himself as a state legislator to be sent to the U.S. Senate, chosen, as was then customary, not by popular election but by statehouse pols. On the Senate floor, Benjamin flourished as an orator of the Southern cause, a master of the secessionist rhetoric that cast slaveholders as victims. After Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, with the war looming, Benjamin intoned in a speech to his Northern Senate colleagues, “You may carry desolation into our peaceful land, and with torch and fire you may set our cities in flames … but you never can subjugate us; you never can convert the free sons of the soil into vassals, paying tribute to your power; and you never, never can degrade them to the level of an inferior and servile race. Never! Never!” When an abolitionist senator, citing the Book of Exodus, called Benjamin out for the signal hypocrisy of a Jew shilling for slavery—he tarred him as “an Israelite with Egyptian principles”—Benjamin cried anti-Semitism and refused to answer the charge on the merits.

With Louisiana’s secession from the Union in 1861, Benjamin, having turned down the chance to be the first Jew nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, was tapped by Confederate President Jefferson Davis as his right-hand man. During the war, Benjamin rotated through a series of Cabinet positions, first attorney general, then secretary of war, and finally secretary of state. Because of Benjamin’s Jewishness, Davis presumably figured he could never challenge him for the presidency should the South succeed in its bid for independence. (Unlike the United States Constitution, the Confederate Constitution permitted immigrants to become president provided they were Confederate citizens at the time of its ratification.) Secretary of State Benjamin was given the daunting diplomatic task of trying to obtain international recognition for the South as an independent country—a hopeless endeavor he pursued with such zeal he was later dubbed the “Confederate Kissinger.”

When the war ended, Benjamin fled Richmond posing as a French farmer who spoke only broken English. The short, fat attorney eluded a U.S. Army manhunt through the swamps of Florida before setting sail for London, where he began his legal practice anew from scratch. Soon counted among Britain’s most successful barristers, he built his wife a trophy home on the Rue d’Iéna in Paris and threw a lavish wedding for his daughter. In 1884, Benjamin died a wealthy man. Against his wishes, his wife had him buried in a Catholic cemetery, the famed Père Lachaise, where he rests today in obscurity, ignored by tourists tramping from Marcel Proust’s grave to Jim Morrison’s.

Oh, and he might have been gay, too.

(Hat tip to Steve Sailer.)

Outsiders discredit themselves when they make accusations of conscious conspiracy:

Some government bureaucracies have the very nasty dynamic that when they screw up, they create bigger problems, and thus get more funding to solve the bigger problem. Often, no one gets fired. The leaders of the problem-creating department now have more employees and thus more status and authority. Thus the system actively rewards those who work against the stated goals of the institution (again, they are not intentionally subverting the institution, they are often deluded).

The word “intent” breaks down because we do not have a handy English word to describe subconscious, institutional, or evolutionary intent. Many low-status outsiders observe the institution acting like a vampire, but they do not understand the internal dynamic, so they assume that the selfishness is conscious, when it is not. Their mistaken analysis of the internal dynamic makes them look like cranks, even though the overall observation is correct.

Because intent is so complicated, it hardly makes sense to even analyze it. To judge an institution, watch what it does. Look at the pressure that shapes its decisions.

Consider the pro-immigration Silicon Valley capitalists. I doubt Paul Graham fantasizes about bringing in hordes of programmers to push down wages, so that he can make an extra buck. That is ridiculous. But, he spends most of his time with startup founders and other investors. His grand thesis is that what is good for startups, is good for the country where the startups live (I generally agree with this thesis). So naturally, out of pure empathy, he feels pain when the founders recount some trouble getting a visa for themselves or a key employee. The social circle of elites like Graham, Zuckerberg and Gates include few workers who have been squeezed out of their jobs by H1B’s. So their concerns are reduced to a footnote and omitted from the FWD.us plan-of-action.2

Consider the Yale president. President Salovey will want to champion some noble new initiatives. That is the role he was hired for. But how to pay for it? If he cuts funding for some diversity program he will have protesters at his door. If he cuts a department, professors will be outraged. If he cuts the new gymnasium renovations, they’ll lose out on matriculation from rich and prestigious elite students. Thus the pressure is always to get more money, to grow, to expand. The pressure is to raise tuition, seek more government grants, seek more tax benefits from running a giant real estate conglomerate. Does President Salovey ever lie in bed, trying to sleep, thinking to himself, “You know, the primary benefit of Yale is really having a monopoly on a social network. It is wrong to exploit that social network, to make parents take out second mortgages to get access to it. Maybe we should charge less. We could do without the new electronic media center.” Perhaps he does think that. But there is no pressure to make him act on such thoughts.

Consider the Federal Reserve. It is incorrect to claim that the Federal Reserve is run by the banking industry in a command and control manner. But the two are very cozy. The door revolves. And even if you eliminated the revolving door, the banking industry has real power because of the information asymmetry. The bankers know the mechanics of the financial system, and thus when the system breaks, the bankers get to make the plan to fix it.3 Thus policy plans that originate in the banking sector are often the policy plans that get passed. And look at the results. There were trillions in bailouts for Wall Street. Many financiers net gained from the entire boom-bust cycle, while the ordinary tax payer has net lost. Inflation has run higher than the interest on CD’s, thus taking away money from ordinary Americans each year. Favored institutions get loans at low rates to buy up coveted property. Local banks and shops struggle to compete. If you observe the results, the conspiracy theorists have a point.

Consider media companies. Do journalists get promoted for making good predictions and fired for making wrong predictions? Do clicks and advertising dollars correlate with truth value? Do foundation grants and donations from the wealthy correlate with truth value? If not, why should we expect these institutions to be giving us an accurate view of reality?

The bottom line is do not judge any person or institution by what they say. Watch what they do. Find where the pressure is. Trace their social network. Who gives them advice? Who do they want to impress? Examine where the incentives lie. Examine the selection process by which people or departments or ideas get promoted. In the long term, an institution is forged by pressure, not by lofty goals and intentions. Thus the conspiracy critique is often simplistic and naive, but effectively true.