Why Do Jews Still Vote Democrat?

IMHO opinion, it really boils down to historical issues that one can trace back to the pogroms of europe. These mini-holocausts in which hundreds's to hundreds of thousands prompted the Jews to find a way to try to assimilate and still retain some sliver of Jewishness, in hope of not periodically being slaughtered for being Jews.

This is Reform Judaism. The Reform Judaism basically is a heavily watered down version of Juadism that is (imho)destroying the Jewish people.

They are assimilating themselves out of existance. So, in the USA where 90 % are Reformed, they are the de-judaized Jews (Shai Ben Tekoa) and therefore have a worldview that parallels the secular or Liberal Christians.

So, IMHO as the USA becomes more unChurched, a more liberal voting pattern will emerge, like the JewsInNameOnly, the ChristianInNameOnly will vote the same.

Interestingly, the Jewish orthodox are on the rise and they are conservative and vote conservative. Listen to www.israelnationalradio.com and www.israelnationalnews.com and www.deprogramprogram.com to get a feel for Jewish revival.

I am a Conservative Republican Jew and have been since I could vote. My brother is an Orthodox Jew and he and the members of his synagogue are Conservative Republicans. There are many Liberal Jews, but there are many Conservative Republican Jews as well and many on this website.

There is no love for the Marxist Messiah in Israel. That distrust and concern will be made known in America. It is up to Conservatives, since the leadership of the GOP are eunuchs, to expose the antisemitic Osama Obama and his racist wife. Exposure is what destroys Liberals. I would say the RAT Messiah, endorsed by Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, has more to expose than any candidate in the history of this country. Each of us has to get to work to expose all these traitors. We can do no less than our troops are doing in Iraq and Afganistan. We’re fighting the enemies of America here; enemies of your children and grandchildren’s futures.

It’s like a family name, it gets handed down and its hard to change. My grandmother and grandfather were fervent Democrats, but they grew up in the great depression and fell for the New Deal. My Grandfather was a career Air Force officer and my mom an Air Force BRAT. He went on leave with my grandma to a Florida hotel that had a sign “No Blacks, No Jews, No Dogs”. He was in uniform so they didn’t really question him and his name wasn’t particularly or obviously Jewish.

Anyway, those kinds of stories have been told around Jewish dinner tables for generations. So the idea of “social justice” comes from hearing those stories. I don’t think it truly means marxism I think it means one thing to the New Deal generation and quite another to the boomers and possibly something else to Gen X and Y. (if gen X and Y even stand for anything that’s real... open to debate).

Anyway, I grew up in a liberal democrat home, and I went to a liberal democrat school, but I knew it wasn’t right. But they did teach me that totalitarianism was the biggest evil of the 20th century (and on that they were right). So 1+1=2 I instantly became an anti-federalist, anti-statist. Big government = bad evil government. Civics class taught me that the GOP was the party of the small government and local control, so when I turned 18 as a senior in High School, there was no question in my mind I would join the GOP despite that my entire family were democrats.

Sadly, I have discovered that the GOP has not really been the party they told me it was in civics class.

Good posts, especially number 49! The “social justice” types (who are just parroting the vague “hip” marxist “social justice” (four legs good two legs better) tripe - not true Judeo-Christian social justice, are what I call margarine Jews or margarine Christians. There are those Catholics that will vote for a Dim no matter how pro-abortion they are, even though the Church teaches that supporting abortion is a grave sin.

Orthodox Catholics battle these types in the Catholic Church, the Episcopal “church” had tons of them, as do most of the ole mainline Protestant denominations. Red-diaper stale sixties leftovers that think we’re still in 1968 and if you put a Cross or Star of David over the hammer and sickle that makes it OK.

Will you please stop libeling the late Rabbi Kahana' (zt"l; Hy"d) in this fashion? This is the second time that you or someone else has identified Rabbi Kahana' with the leftist Jewish Establishment and accused him of having antipathy to the American Heartland.

The JDL existed in the large cities with populations of elderly Jews who were being terrorized by Black and Puerto Rican gangs. The JDL was primarily against these groups and was in fact disowned as "racist" by the Jewish Establishment.

Rabbi Kahana' was a rightwinger who supported the Vietnam War (yes, our side!). He was an ardent anti-Communist who was absolutely scathing in his denunciations of Jewish liberals. He also defended the Holy Torah from the "documentary hypothesis." He may have even cooperated with the John Birch Society at one point. His JDL bombed Soviet targets, not the American Heartland.

Cease and desist at once your hateful and false attacks on Rabbi Kahana' or I will report you to the mods!

Civics class taught me that the GOP was the party of the small government and local control.

I guess we were both fortunate that we were able to go to a real American civics class, unlike many kids in public schools today who seem to come out as illiterate in American government and politics. And the scary thing is that these kids are generally gung-ho for leftists and actually vote for them.

I myself am disappointed in the GOP, but McCain is far from the first "moderate" to become the GOP presidential candidate in the post WWII era though he is clearly preferable to the 'Rat alternative.

While most Jews in America are politically liberal, and some leftist to varying degrees, there is a reason beyond the stereotype of snobby WASP country clubs, Ivy League colleges, and Wall Street firms discriminating against Jews (and to a lesser degree, Catholics of Irish or Southern and Eastern European ancestry) and driving Jewish voters away from the Republican Party and conservatism. The fact is that there was a strong element of anti-Semitism among conservatives, especially those who were not classical or Jeffersonian liberals, but who were closer in spirit to the "throne and altar" rightist ideology of Europe. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories were popular in the military, especially in the upper ranks, as a book, The "Jewish Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army, documents. This bigotry was rationalized in terms of so-called scientific racism and the postulation of a world Jewish conspiracy that assisted America's national foe, first Imperial Germany and later the Soviet Union. Even those Jews who were not leftists had some reason to fear that American conservatism could be transformed into an openly anti-Semitic movement. In post-World War I Europe, the fascist movements, from Britain to Romania, sprung from prewar "throne and altar" traditionalists. These movements differed from German Naziism insofar as the latter was rooted in paganism and a racist version of utopianism rather than Catholic/Lutheran/Anglican/Orthodox beliefs and traditionalism. Nevertheless, both the fascist movements and Nazism shared a hatred of the Jews as both racial aliens and cultural destroyers. American Jews largely chose not to distinguish between the old school, classical liberals like Robert Taft and Howard Buffett, who held no grudge against the Jews, and the cultural conservatives like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, who were anti-Semitic.

In the long run, the tendency of non-observant Jews to intermarry with non-Jews will eliminate a distinctive secular Jewish culture in America, even in places like New York, Los Angeles, and southern Florida. The Orthodox will of course remain distinct, much as small Protestant groups such as the Mennonites and the Dutch Reformed have.

The fact is that there was a strong element of anti-Semitism among conservatives, especially those who were not classical or Jeffersonian liberals, but who were closer in spirit to the "throne and altar" rightist ideology of Europe.

I think the "Jeffersonian liberals" are the American "throne and altar" conservatives. After all, most anti-Semitic American "far-rightists" are strict constructionist Jeffersonian Republicans, not monarchists. The Jeffersonian tradition also contains a radical anti-banking element.

Most of today's "rightwing" anti-Semites are of the "Jeffersonian" type (the Birch Society, the Constitution Party, Ron Paul, Joe Sobran, Lew Rockwell, etc.). Pat Buchanan (who'd be a Hamiltonian Federalist were he not also an anti-banker) is an exception.

BTW, Italian Fascism, the only "true" Fascism, did not have an anti-Semitic element at all until 7/14/1938, under the influence of Nazi Germany. Until then the Fascist Party recruited great numbers of Jews. But then, Italian Fascism was not as clerical as the other so-called "fascisms." One reason for this was that Italian unification and nationhood was opposed by the Vatican and had a decidedly anti-clerical, Latin Masonic element. Italy (unlike France and Spain) thus never had a "holy nationalism" for the original Fascists to exploit.

Paleoconservatism represents something of a fusion of the small government, laissez faire economics, and anti-interventionist stances of libertarianism and the conspiracism, American and white particularism, and populism of older rightist movements. A major reason for this fusion ideology was due to the efforts of classical liberal economists like those associated with the Foundation for Economic Education (Leonard Reed) and later another group of libertarians who adhered to the Austrian School of Economics (Murray Rothbard) to popularize free market economics and limited government to the traditionalist American Right. It was the libertarian equivalent to the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party. The classical liberal economic views became a part of both the establishment conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s, such as those associated with National Review, and the more radical elements associated with the John Birch Society of that era. The Rothbard-Rockwell prostelyzation of traditionalists has divided the libertarian movement, with one faction centered around Reason magazine and the other around the Lew Rockwell Report. Additionally, the adoption of these positions has caused a split in the Catholic Right, with a "rad trad" faction accusing the Catholic libertarians of adhering more to the economic theories of von Mises and his cohorts than to the social pronouncements of pre-Vatican II Popes.

The older, pre-World War II, Right, which was often openly anti-Semitic, was not a limited government, free market movement. (There was a carryover of old school, Jefferson-Locke liberals such as Rose Wilder Lane, H.L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov, John Flynn, and others, who were not comfortable in either the rightist or the progressive camps.) The old school liberals excepted, most of the elements of the pre-World War II Right were "big government conservatives", to use a Bush era term. The Populist movement in rural, non-Yankee America advocated socialistic measures like nationalizing the railroads. Such Populist figures as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin split from the New Deal because its measures were not sufficiently redistributionist. The Ivy League WASPs of the Northeastern upper classes were supportive of such government powers as would benefit their financial interests, such as tariffs, central banking, and railroad monopolies, while opposing those that did not, such as minimum wage laws and protection to union organizing. Anti-Semitic attitudes were found in both groups, for reasons of religious bigotry and adherence to Nordicist and nativist beliefs, as well as the spread of canards blaming the Jews for any number of social problems.

Interesting. I had thought that the WASP decline in the Northeast was simply a matter of their having small families while the immigrants, usually Catholic Europeans, and their children had larger families. It is interesting to note that in the 1940s and 1950s, Irish and Italian Catholic state legislators in states like Connecticut were defending mid-19th Century laws against birth control and pornography passed by almost entirely Yankee Protestant legislatures. The descendants of those Yankee Protestants had switched sides on these issues by that time. Prescott Bush, grandfather of President Bush and a former Connecticut governor and senator, was a prominent and strong supporter of Planned Parenthood. Unfortunately for GOP political fortunes, it was the English descended population of the Northeast that heeded their family planning advice.

Thank you for that very interesting and detailed post.

I would disagree with you on two matters. First, I believe the defining characteristic of "palaeoconservatism" is a radical rejection of universals in favor of the values of the race/nation/civilization (thus the call for a "planet of peoples" vs. an alleged "one world government"). This means that Jeffersonian strict constructionism was part of the "radical right" from the beginning, since this is the American equivalent of "feudalism" in Europe. I used to wonder why the Birchers quoted Frederic Bastiat while supporting Francisco Franco. I came to believe that the radical relativism of the "palaeo" right meant that laissez faire was considered by them to be the American equivalent of the European right's "throne and altar."

The second thing I would disagree with you on is your characterization of the rural populists as rightwingers. Despite his religious fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan was very much a leftwinger on economic matters and was in fact the father of the modern, leftist Democrat party (even FDR admitted this). Also, the American Heartland was at one time a hotbed of actual socialism (even "rightwing" Arkansas governor Orval Faubus was the son of a socialist and was educated at a "labor" school). Appeal to Reason was published in Kansas. There were socialist colonies in places like Tennessee and Georgia. Bryan was from Nebraska and Eugene V. Debs from Indiana. And as a young politico (before he became famous) Huey P. Long had to work long and hard making speeches for the Democrats in order to counter the headway the Socialist party was making in Louisiana.

But all this brings up a very interesting phenomenon. Throughout American political history the Heartland and the Coasts have been political enemies. At one time the coasts were conservative and the Heartland radical. Today the opposite is the case. But by what standard does one declare the Heartland inherently "right wing" and declare socialist populism a right wing phenomenon?

Another interesting phenomenon is that the Birch Society's "bad guys" are the same wealthy capitalists the nineteenth century leftist populists hated so much (Rockefeller, Morgan, "international bankers," etc.). Yet the populists hated them for being capitalists and the Birchers hate them for being "secretly behind Communism." Interesting. Most interesting indeed.

Despite my disagreement on these two points, your post was excellent. Thank you again.

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