Posted on 01/30/2014 7:15:41 AM PST by Alex Murphy
Norman Podhortez just came out with a book, Why Are Jews Liberals?. It seems that this as intellectually interesting as writing a book, “Why are blacks Democrats?”, would be. You can tick off specific reasons, but in ethnic terms American liberalism and the Democratic party is a minoritarian coalition. To some extent it has been true since the recruitment of the Irish in the urban North in the early 19th century as allies with the outnumbered partisans of slave power. In fact The American Jewish Identity Survey tells us that once Jews become Christian, they aren’t so liberal. Here are the percentage of Republicans by Jewish subgroup:
Jews by ethnic origin & religion – 13%
Jews by ethnic origin, irreligious – 13%
Jewish by ethnic origin, “Other religion,” which is mostly Christian – 40%
Jews of other religion are also less intelligent than the other two groups, 36% college graduates vs. 57% for Jews who are religious and irreligious.
In any case, if Norman Podhoretz wants Jews to become Republican, he should encourage conversion to Christianity. Specifically, Protestant Christianity. Look what rock-ribbed Republicans Jim Talent and Marvin Olasky became. And don’t even talk about Howard Phillips, he wants to bring back to the inquisition for idolaters and pagans!
But I come not to talk of Jews, but of Catholics. As I said, the rise of the Democratic party as we know it was to a great extent concomitant with the first waves of Irish Catholic immigrants to Northern cities. The historical details of this are well known, so I won’t go into it, but to some extent the ties still are operative. According to the exit polls, last fall Barack Obama won 47% of white Catholics. He only won 34% of white Protestants! This is still a large difference.
Some of this might be accounted for my region and ethnicity (e.g., Italians and Northeasterners are more likely to be Catholic). So I looked in the GSS. There’s a variable “ETHNIC,” which asks where one’s ancestors came from. I wanted to look at a few groups, especially ones where the sample size wasn’t too small, and where there were likely to be Catholics and Protestants. So
1) French, who are those whose ancestors come from French Canada or France
2) German, whose ancestors come from German or Austria
3) British, whose ancestors are from England, Wales or Scotland
4) Mexican, whose ancestors come from Mexico
5) American Indian, whose ancestors come from Mother Earth’s union with Coyote
Some of these groups, such as Germans, had Protestant and Catholic cohorts from the beginning. By contrast, Mexican Americans have a large Protestant contingent through conversion (though some indigenous immigrants from Chiapas were converted in Mexico). American Indians were targeted by both Protestants and Catholics. Finally, though Huguenots have been prominent in the American aristocracy (Franklin Delano Roosvelt’s mother was a Huguenot, as were the ancestors of many Southern low country planters), I assume most Protestant French Americans arrived at their religion through conversion on these shores.
I also limited the sample to 1992 and later to have some contemporary relevance.
Then I compared these classes to two categories, political ideology and political party. I created an “index” of liberalism and Democratic orientation, so that I simply multiplied the frequency in each class by an integer. Ergo:
Index of liberalism = (% liberal) X 2 + (% moderate) X 1 + (% conservative) X 0
Index of Demo orientation = (% Democrat) X 2 + (% Independent) X 1 + (% Republican) X 0
So an index of liberalism of 1 means perfect balance, while below 1 means somewhat conservative, and above 1 means somewhat liberal (2 being all liberal). The same for Democrats. Then I took the ratio of Catholics to Protestants by their indices.
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French | German | Mexican | British | American Indian |
| Protestant | 0.88 | 0.73 | 0.85 | 0.68 | 0.83 |
| Catholic | 0.86 | 0.8 | 0.96 | 0.93 | 0.85 |
| Catholic/Protestant Ratio | 0.97 | 1.1 | 1.13 | 1.37 | 1.02 |
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| Democratic Index |
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French | German | Mexican | British | American Indian |
| Protestant | 0.9 | 0.77 | 1.06 | 0.77 | 1.08 |
| Catholic | 1.07 | 0.88 | 1.32 | 0.95 | 1.37 |
| Catholic/Protestant Ratio | 1.19 | 1.13 | 1.24 | 1.24 | 1.26 |
What you see here is clear: Catholics remain more Democratic than their Protestant brethren. Some of this might be regional, but the effect seems to still show up if I constrain by region (though in some cases it does dampen a fair amount). The sample sizes for American Indians was small, but the party identification difference is outside of 95% confidence intervals.
Specific hypotheses? For Mexican Americans there are many reasons that Catholics are more likely to be Democrats. They’re probably a higher proportion of immigrants, and less assimilated and integrated into American society than Protestants. Protestants are mostly converts, and conversion will presumably be more likely for those who engage and interface with the majority Protestant society more often. The other groups are a bit more confused. The people of British origin are ancestrally mostly Protestant. Those who are Catholic today, whether through intermarriage or conversion, are different politically from those who remain Protestant. I suspect it has to do with a bias in terms of the type of person who would convert to a minority religion, or marry into a minority religion (Orestes Brownson was a nut). In regards to the Germans, only a minority of Protestant Germans are Lutheran (though some German immigrants were likely of Reformed persuasion, these would be a minority), rather, they’re well distributed across Protestant denominations. This suggests to me a high degree of assimilation and integration. By contrast, the Roman Catholic German population was an organized redoubt of anti-assimilationist fervor down to World War I, a fact which drove Irish American Roman Catholic clerics such as John Ireland crazy. As for the French Americans, I suspect that a more thorough process occurred with them that is occurring with Mexican Americans. I have read that the minority of Japanese Americans who adhere to the Buddhist Church in America are somewhat more ostentatious in maintaining their Japanese cultural traditions (e.g., language) than their co-ethnics who have converted to Christianity. I see no reason why this wouldn’t be true of Catholics (the majority of people of Irish descent today in the United States are Protestant, but I suspect they’re less obviously “Irish” in their cultural markers in part because of their religious break from tradition). Despite modern America’s Protestantization of Catholicism, just a few generations ago being of a non-Protestant faith was profoundly alienating from the mainstream (see Catholicism and American Freedom: A History).
I’m not presenting this to suggest that Catholics are inherently liberal or Democratic. The differences are not that extreme, though they seem robust and significant. But it is somewhat ironic in light of the role of Roman Catholic intellectuals at the highest reaches of the conservative movement, particularly at publications such as National Review. No, as I said, I suspect that Catholic adherence to the Left party out of the expected range of their demographic otherwise is a function of their minority status. Similarly, the small number of French Protestants who remained after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes were suspiciously well represented among French radicals involved in the Revolution which overthrew the ancien regime which had oppressed and marginalized them so. Obviously there’s nothing necessarily revolutionary about French Protestantism, rather, Catholicism was the customary and traditional religion of the French nation, and so it bespoke a streak of nonconformity to remain true to the Calvinist faith in France after the cessation of toleration for said faith.
When you say “economic” are you really saying “union” and the revolving slush fund between Big Labor and the Dems? Surely, the people of Pittsburgh aren’t stupid enough to think that the Dems actually understand economics, are they?
I hate to say this...but I think most of them do.
The image of the 19th. century “robber baron” cast a looooong shadow in this town.
2. Old habits. A lot of 60+ Catholics think they are still voting for JFK and helping the little guy even tho that's not the same party.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I don’t see “union” in there.
If we don’t support life by voting against those who support abortion, euthanasia, contraception, etc. we will never have liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Catholics have always been married to the democrat left, before JFK they had either a permanent majority democrat vote, or they may have had a slight majority support Eisenhower in 1956 as an incumbent, it depends on which polling you use.
So at most, the Catholic vote had gone GOP once, before JFK.
Is that how the Catholic vote turned California permanently democrat, is that why the democrats pray for Catholic immigration to conquer Texas?
No one can account for black behavior or their politics, no one can explain them, and no one really tries to, but probably none of us belong to black denominations anyway.
Many here do belong to the Catholic denomination, and we are importing millions more of them, that is why the vote of the catholic denomination is all important, as we keep losing the nation to Catholic and atheist voters the democrats count on the catholic vote to give it to them forever, that isn’t an issue with whatever denominations most of the black voters belong to.
We do know that when Hispanics become Protestant, that they start voting more pro-life conservative.
Agreed. The Catholic voter’s love of Democrats goes back way beyond JFK. We started looking around for someone to punish the EEEEEEVIL Anglo-Saxon Protestant Robber Barons in the late 19th. Century.
When they make enough money to move out of the neighborhood and own in the suburbs, they will vote Republican. Everyone votes their pocketbook.
Nonsense, Catholic means baptized members of the Catholic denomination who consider themselves Catholics.
Protestant means all the other Christians, people who have never been baptized or may not have ever been in a church but consider themselves a Christian, blacks, Hispanics, gay Episcopalians, Lutherans, Evangelicals, and any and all, it is a vastly more diluted category than the baptized Catholic church members, yet the catch-all non-catholic Christian category is still far to the right of the catholic denomination.
What nonsense.
It’s the economy, stupid.
Actually the white Protestants voted 69% GOP, and the white Evangelical denominations, about 79% GOP.
The Catholic denomination isn't a race, it is a church denomination that the democrats have counted on for 150 years, and one which the democrats are importing by the millions.
Do you think the democrat party would be fighting to import many 100s of thousands of Evangelical Christians every year?
So Catholics and Jews and gays, the wealthy Asians and feminists support the democrats because they are good on the economy?
Majority is what wins elections. When the economy is good, [Reagan, and the Bushes] Catholics vote for GOP. But after the way Bush screwed them by exporting their jobs, the GOP brand is in the trash can.
The Catholic vote has only gone republican about 5 times in our entire history.
You reasons aren’t why.
And the GOP has nominated a Catholic for President exactly zero times in our entire history.
And then there are the Catholics who are not Democrats.
Ditto for Buffalo, NY.
That is why my in laws were Democrats for a long time.
My mother in law is no longer one, only because of abortion.
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