Attorney Steven Menashi is President Trump’s nominee to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Menashi is a staunch conservative who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. He is also Jewish.
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In 2010, he authored an article for the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law titled, “Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy.” It is possible, the paper argues, for a society made up almost entirely of one ethnicity, as is the case in Israel, to partake successfully in democracy.
“[E]thnonationalism,” he writes, “remains a common and accepted feature of liberal democracy that is consistent with current state practice and international law.”
From this article, and with many intentional and grotesque misrepresentations, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow accuses Menashi of supporting “ethnonationalism.”
More specifically, MSNBC’s version of Sean Hannity said Thursday evening that the conservative attorney wrote in 2010 that “democratic countries work better when everyone in the same ethnicity.” She alleges Menashi made “a high-brow argument for racial purity.” Maddow also claims his 2010 paper stated that “democracy can’t work unless the country is defined by a unifying race.”
This is slander.
Menashi’s article sought specifically to refute the idea that “Israel’s particularistic identity—its desire to serve as a homeland for the Jewish people—contradicts principles of universalism and equality upon which liberal democracy supposedly rests,” as National Review’s Ed Whelan notes.
Menashi wrote that, “[p]articularistic nationalism and liberal democracy … emerged together at the same historical moment and persisted in symbiosis,” adding that the “idea that a sovereign democratic government represents a particular ethnonational community has its root in the principle of ‘self-determination of peoples’ espoused at the foundation of the League of Nations and the United Nations.”
Comparing European kin-repatriation policies to Israel’s Law of Return, Menashi adds further, “[f]ar from being unique, the experience of Israel exemplifies the character of liberal democracy by highlighting its dependence on particularistic nation-states.”
From this, Maddow accuses Menashi of making the case for “racial purity,” claiming his paper states that only single-ethnicity countries can be successful democracies. It says no such thing.
I like Whelan’s concluding summation of Menashi’s 2010 article:
What matters for national identity, Menashi emphasizes – quoting John Stuart Mill – is that a people are “united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others, which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people, [and] desire to be under the same government.” That—and not race – is clearly what Menashi means by his broader concept of ethnic, or “ethnocultural” or ethnonational, identification.
Israeli Jews and Palestinians clearly do not share an ethnonational identity. The United States is beyond the scope of, and barely mentioned in, Menashi’s article, but it’s plain from his analysis that all people, irrespective of race or of narrower concepts of ethnicity, who see themselves as part of the American national community do share an ethnonational identity.
There is a real problem today of good-faith thinkers being chased from the public square by attention-hungry idiots with what looks like a “gotcha” quote. Thoughtful individuals are being discouraged from exploring difficult topics for fear of being branded as “problematic.” And, honestly, it is becoming increasingly difficult these days to tell whether the same attention-hungry idiots who are making it impossible to have public discussions on complex issues are as stupid as they are dishonest.
