Overcoming Bostonitis?
This writer wishes Jacoby would sound even less like other Boston Globe columnists.
I’ve nothing against Jeff Jacoby, who from all accounts is a fine family man and a journalist who occasionally produces informative columns. (My eldest daughter and he attend the same synagogue, and my daughter has praised his soft-spoken manner.) Jacoby was among the few columnists at The Boston Globe, who went after former President Obama and his smarmy, social engineering administration. After a stint as an editorialist at the Republican-leaning Boston Herald, Jacoby in 1998 was invited to become the “conservative” columnist at the Globe. There he took positions that are not found elsewhere in his paper, e.g. questioning the wisdom of legalizing gay marriage. Unlike other columnists with whom I’ve grouped Jacoby under the general heading, “neoconservative,” the Globe‘s showcase “conservative” sometimes steps out by taking socially conservative positions.
This may be the reason that I’ve been profoundly disappointed by some of Jacoby’s columns in recent years. His rant against Trump on April 4, 2016, was only the beginning of a series of invectives against The Donald, which lasted for months and which easily matched in vitriol anything printed about the Republican presidential candidate in Jacoby’s leftist newspaper: “But the authoritarian abuse of power in a Trump administration isn’t just a theoretical possibility. Should the New York businessman win the presidency, it’s a certainty. Trump’s campaign, with its torrent of insults, threats of revenge, and an undercurrent of political violence, is the first in American history to raise the prospect of a ruthless strongman in the White House, unencumbered by constitutional norms and democratic civilities.” Curiously this column contrasted Trump’s authoritarian tendencies to the responsible use of power by Abraham Lincoln. Whatever one may say in defense of Lincoln, desisting from the authoritarian exercise of emergency powers wouldn’t be one of them.
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These denunciations came after Jacoby provided another PC tear, this time against the honoring of Confederate symbols commemorating “one of the most poisonous ideologies of American history.” Amid the bullying by the media Left following the murder of a black Bible study group by a white psychopath, Dylann Ruf, in Charleston, Jacoby (July 9, 2015) posted something that could have come from the likes of Al Sharpton. The removal of the Battle Flag from the state capitol grounds in Charleston was apparently not enough for this columnist. We’re supposed to go around denouncing anything associated with this “symbol of racial oppression and victimization” in language that I’d reserve for the Swastika. One needn’t be a fan of slavery to recognize the remarkable hyperbole in this screed, which, unless I’m mistaken, may have also been aimed at critics of government centralization. Would the “treasonous” representatives of the “poisonous ideology” include those who like myself criticize unconstitutional bureaucratic centralization?
What does one do as a student of American history with a passage like this one? “There could not be more literally anti-American colors than the Confederate flag. Had racial hatred and subjugation played no part in its history, it should still be anathema to anyone who reveres the Constitution. Or the United States of America.” One might ask Jeff whether he thinks that everyone who ever believed that states had the right to secede was “anti-American” This would include many patriots of the founding generation, including those who signed the Constitution, with the proviso that their states should be able to leave the Union. Jacoby’s traitors might also include New Englanders, some of them former Federalists, who were ready to quit the Union in opposition to the War of 1812. It might also shock Jacoby to learn that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other early American patriots believed that states had the right to “nullify” federal legislation and federal statutes that displeased them.
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