And because Hitlery knows how to make nice nice with the friendly Arafat family?
Posted on 10/17/2003 1:31:03 AM PDT by kattracks
Why are Jews still wedded to the Democratic party, years after it stopped making any economic or political sense for them to remain in the marriage? It`s a question one hears often from bewildered non-Jews and Republican Jews (Democratic Jews - i.e., the vast majority of American Jews - seem oblivious to the question, let alone any possible answer).The truth is, there is no single answer. The most commonly heard explanation, one routinely offered up in "analysis" pieces by lazy journalists and High Holiday sermons by liberal Reform rabbis, is that the liberalism espoused by the likes of a Teddy Kennedy or a Barbra Streisand comes straight from Jewish tradition - in other words, if Moses and King David and Maimonides were alive today, they`d all be dues-paying members of the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and the National Organization for Women.
Such nonsense is belied by the fact that the more Orthodox a particular Jewish neighborhood or community, the more likely it is to vote for Republican candidates. Conversely, areas with a heavy concentration of secular and assimilated Jews vote almost without exception for liberal Democrats. If the explanation cited above held any water, the opposite would be true.
Another line of reasoning one encounters is that Jews gravitated to the Democratic party because the party best served their interests. Since that answer is not nearly as off the wall as the first, let`s take a little swing down memory lane and see what we can find.
Bossism and Socialism
Surprising as it might seem from our vantage point, the Jews who came to the U.S. prior to the great waves of immigration from Eastern Europe tended to look askance at the Democratic party, which was identified in the popular mind with Tammany-style political bossism, support for slavery, and an agrarian populism that often seemed indistinguishable from the rawest anti-Semitism.
That attitude changed with the arrival of the Eastern European Jews who crowded into the big cities at the turn of the century and quickly learned that their very livelihoods were dependent on the good will of those Tammany-like political machines, which were invariably Democratic and invariably corrupt.
Jobs and basic amenities were used as barter to purchase party loyalty, and bribery was the order of the day - the late New York senator Jacob Javits told the story of how his father loved Election Day because the saloonkeepers would pay $2 (double a day`s wages at the time) to anyone who promised to vote Democratic.
Although the dominance of the big city bosses was an inescapable fact of life for the new Jewish immigrants, the pressure to vote the party line was felt most keenly in local elections. When it came to presidential politics, Jews were far less wary of voting their conscience.
In 1916, for example, Republican candidate Charles Evan Hughes received 45 percent of the Jewish vote, and four years later Republican Warren Harding actually won a plurality among Jews - 43 percent as opposed to 19 percent for Democrat James Cox and 38 percent for Socialist Eugene V. Debs.
That last figure - nearly 4 in 10 Jews voting for the Socialist candidate - tells a story in itself, a story not to be ignored when seeking to understand Jewish voting habits. Many of the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came to America with a passionate belief in one form or another of socialism, and those Jews tended to vote for third party left-wing candidates when offered the choice. Though their candidates were, with the exception of some local races in immigrant neighborhoods, roundly unsuccessful, Jewish socialists and communists left a seemingly indelible stamp on the collective political identity of American Jews.
Most Jews, however, whether out of political moderation or fear of wasting their vote on a long shot, cast their ballots for either Democrats or Republicans. And though the Republicans lost a significant number of votes in 1924 to the third party candidacy of Progressive Robert LaFollette, it was not until the election of 1928 that the relationship between Jews and the Democratic party became the inseparable bond that still exists nearly 75 years later.
The Affair Commences
It was in 1928 that Democratic presidential candidates first began polling landslide numbers among American Jews, as New York governor Al Smith, a Roman Catholic of immigrant stock (whose campaign manager happened to be Jewish) captured 72 percent of the Jewish vote. Despite his overwhelming Jewish support, and the equally strong backing of fellow Catholics, Smith carried only 8 states against Republican Herbert Hoover and failed to win his own home state of New York.
The nascent trend of lopsided Jewish support for Democratic presidential candidates solidified four years later when another New York governor, Franklin Roosevelt, won the votes of better than 8 in 10 American Jews. Roosevelt, whom Jews idolized more than any other politician before or since, went on to win 85 percent of the Jewish vote in 1936 and 90 percent in both 1940 and 1944.
Harry Truman was the next Democrat to benefit from Jewish party loyalty, though his share of the Jewish vote in 1948 slipped from the Rooseveltian 90 percent to a "mere" 75 percent, thanks to the third-party candidacy of Henry Wallace, whose left-wing campaign attracted those 15 percent of Jewish voters for whom Truman apparently was not liberal enough.
Whether Roosevelt or Truman was deserving of such Jewish support is a question most Jews were reluctant even to ask until relatively recently. As the journalist Sidney Zion wrote several years ago, Roosevelt "refused to lift a finger to save [Jews] from Auschwitz.... Then, in 1948, the Jews helped elect Harry Truman, who recognized Israel but immediately embargoed arms to the Jewish state while knowing that the British had fully armed the Arabs."
The Republican share of the Jewish vote - an embarrassing 10 percent in 1940, 1944 and 1948 - improved significantly in the 1950`s as Dwight Eisenhower won the support of 36 percent of Jews in 1952 and 40 percent in 1956. Eisenhower`s opponent in both elections was Adlai Stevenson, a one-term governor of Illinois whose persona of urbane intellectualism set a new standard for the type of candidate favored by Jewish liberals.
Actually, Stevenson was not at all what he seemed: biographer John Barlow Martin revealed that Adlai hardly ever cracked open a book, and the historian Michael Beschloss, in a New York Times op-ed piece ("How Well-Read Should a President Be?" June 11, 2000), noted that when Stevenson died, there was just one book found on his bedside table - The Social Register.
Fortunately for politicians, perception is at least as important as reality, and John Kennedy followed in Stevenson`s footsteps as a non-intellectual who, with the help of compliant reporters and academic acolytes like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., managed to come across as a Big Thinker - in marked contrast to his well-earned reputation as an intellectual lightweight that dogged him throughout his years in Congress.
Despite the fact that his books were ghost-written (the journalist Arthur Krock was in large measure responsible for "Why England Slept," while Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was the primary author of "Profiles in Courage") and his choice of reading material ran mainly to spy novels, Kennedy, like Stevenson, benefited from the perception that he was made of sterner intellectual stuff. This was particularly true when it came to Jewish voters, who gave Kennedy 82 percent of their votes in 1960 and continued to support him in similarly high numbers for the duration of his presidency.
There never was much doubt that Jews would vote in large numbers for Democrat Lyndon Johnson over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 - a year when even many moderate members of his own party were high-tailing it away from the GOP`s outspokenly conservative standard bearer.
Johnson, the incumbent who assumed office upon the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, adroitly positioned himself as a man of the sensible center while Goldwater, disturbingly ambivalent about his own presidential ambitions and qualifications ("I`m not even sure I`ve got the brains to be president of the United States," he told the Chicago Tribune), seemed to delight in saying whatever he felt would most disturb the liberal reporters covering his campaign.
Goldwater`s supporters thrilled to what they perceived to be their man`s unusually blunt and honest oratory, but the rest of the country was decidedly unimpressed. Johnson was returned to office with 61.1 percent of the popular vote. Among Jews the results were even more one-sided as Johnson equaled Franklin Roosevelt in his heyday, pulling 90 percent of the Jewish vote to Goldwater`s 10 percent.
Republicans did somewhat better with Jews in 1968 when former vice president Richard Nixon, never a popular figure in the Jewish community, garnered 17 percent of the Jewish vote (actually a point down from the 18 percent he received from Jews when he ran against Kennedy in 1960).
This, too, was an easy election to predict in terms of Jewish preference, not simply because Nixon was Nixon, but more so because the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey - a classic cold war liberal whose type would become nearly extinct by the mid-1970`s - enjoyed an unusually close relationship with most of the leading organizational figures in American Jewish life.
Once again, Jews hardly reflected the thinking of the country at large, as Nixon (43.4 percent) squeezed out a victory over Humphrey (42.7 percent). George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, won 13.5 percent of the vote as a third-party candidate. (Jews gave Wallace 2 percent of their votes.)
Nixon and Beyond
The 1972 presidential election proved to be one of the more interesting - and instructive - elections in terms of Jewish voting behavior. During his first four years in office, Nixon had compiled a generally solid record on Israel. U.S. policymakers began to take seriously Israel`s value as an American asset in the region, and military aid to Israel rose to unprecedented levels.
Israel`s prime minister at the time, Golda Meir, was an unabashed admirer of Nixon`s, and the Israeli ambassador in Washington, a former IDF chief of staff named Yitzhak Rabin, raised the hackles of liberal Jewish organizations when he all but endorsed Nixon for a second term.
None of that seemed to matter to the bulk of American Jewry. Certainly there were defections from Democratic ranks - an organization calling itself "Democrats for Nixon" was a predominantly Jewish affair, and several wealthy big-name Jewish contributors who normally gave to Democrats were this time around writing checks to the Nixon campaign - but most Jews still feared that pulling the Republican lever would cause their right hands to lose their cunning.
Running against Nixon in 1972 was the liberal South Dakota senator George McGovern, a leading "dove" on Vietnam and a man who had not exactly carved a name for himself as a defender of Israel. McGovern exemplified the type of guilt-driven, anti-defense liberalism that captured the Democratic Party that year and would lead it to electoral disaster in four of the next five presidential elections.
"Official" Jewry - that dizzying network of committees, councils, conferences and leagues staffed by liberal flunkies whose Holy Writ is the platform of the Democratic Party and whose daily spiritual sustenance comes from New York Times editorials - was represented in the McGovern campaign by Jewish liaison Richard Cohen, who after the election returned to his job as public relations director at the American Jewish Congress, and campaign director Frank Mankiewicz, a former employee of the Anti-Defamation League.
As was the case in prior elections, Jewish organizational flunkies such as Washington fixture Hyman Bookbinder made no secret of their Democratic sympathies. Jewish celebrities were highly visible McGovern supporters: Barbra Streisand, Peter Falk, Carol King, Simon and Garfunkel, and scores of other household names enthusiastically gave their time and money to the Democratic candidate.
Unless of course they're corrupt and need a favor from Hiterly to spring some of their fellow travelers from prison. Then they vote for the pro aborts.
And because Hitlery knows how to make nice nice with the friendly Arafat family?
My hope (admittedly not grounded in any empirical evidence) rests on two factors: First, the war on terror. I believe this changes the game board radically for a significant percentage of Jews, even those the author dubs secular or humanist Jews. Second, The emergence of intellectual Jews within the conservative block has made it respectable for Jews to abandon the faith and begin to vote their particular interests.
I instinctively understand why secular Jews historically have had such difficult trials in their unwillingness to reconcile to the Republican Party even when it proves a better friend of Israel and better represents their class interests. I don’t think it has much to do with the Jewish experience, per se as the author supposes, but all to do with their antagonism to the things of God. This has not to do with the familiar and often expressed anxiety that fundamentalist Christians are of a type of mentality which can too easily slip into pogrom, such as energizes the opposition to Gibson’s THE PASSION. It does have to do with the instinctive resistance of all godless men to submitting to the will of a Higher Power. To the degree they see the Republican Party as the author of restrictions on their freedom of action, they must oppose it despite all else.
This is an unconscious reaction and would be indignantly and honestly denied by those, whether Jew of Gentile, who become enraged at the social conservatism in the Republican platform.
You offere here a very deep insight. I think it is defintiely true and, as such is almost universal; that is, it drives as much those from formerly Christian families as those from formerly Jewish families (leftists are neither Christian nor Jewish, in my view, despite what they claim themselves).
In the case of Jews, there are two additional idiosyncrasies. At least the first waves of these immigrants did remember bad experiences in Europe, as the author points out. There is also the task of a Jew referred to as tikkun olam -- to repair the world and, in particular, to alleviate injustice, hinger, and suffering. A religious Jew is commanded to take care of "the widow and the orphan in your midst" daily. This is a very important part of the Jewish psyche.
Now, observe that that the above-given quote uses singular rather than plural. One is supposed to contribute to the betterment of the world personally and direct his or her efforst to individual persons. As is the rest of the religion and in Christianity, the relationship with G-d is personal, not corporate.
Unfortunately that is where confusion occurs for many: in similarity to non-Jewish liberals, many Jews think and feel that they repair the world if they advocate "humane" government measures and laws. Socialists speak of the betterment of the world also. They also offer equality that the Jews in Europe, and here until the second half of XX century, did not have. This explains in part the enthusiasm of many Jews for that utopia.
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