Kurt Schlichter’s column of today makes a couple of penetrating observations, some of them rather sad. Here’s the bit that’s uppermost in my thoughts:
Some groups vote as a bloc. Black Americans almost always vote Democrat – something like 90%, though this time Donald Trump seems to be earning a better percentage. Similarly, Jewish Americans are famously liberal voters, with the vast majority supporting Democrats in the past. But things have changed. The position of the Democratic Party is aligned with the far left, which pretty much wants to kill all the Jews. And Biden really, really wants to win the states with large number of Muslims like the despicable Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, whose daughter/niece was recently suspended from the University of College for her hate crimes.
Yes, Kurt needs a proofreader. But apart from that, he’s spot-on in the above. Furthermore:
A lot of Jewish Americans are very invested in being liberal. That’s who they are. That’s not just a political affiliation but an identity. Imagine you’ve spent 65 years of your life voting for Democrats, and suddenly this happens. Are you ready to make a 180° turn? That’s hard. That’s hard for anybody. It’s human nature. Voting Dem is a habit mixed up with personal identity. That is tough to change, even then the face of indisputable and undeniable evidence like these sociopaths chanting “From the river to the sea.” So, my guess is we’re going to see some Jewish voters swinging to the Republicans, but not most – at least not in 2024.
My outlook isn’t that optimistic. I doubt we’ll see even a 5% shift in party preference among American Jews. Jews who vote Republican will conceal the fact from their Jewish friends and associates. Family members who “go red” will be excoriated, and perhaps cast out, by their relatives. Rabbis will speak against voting Republican, though they’ll have a hard time articulating their “reasons.” Allegiance to the Democrat Party isn’t just a habit “mixed up with personal identity;” it’s a prescription written into Jewish tribal solidarity.
The Jewish people in our time are the most insular of all American demographic cohorts. They have their reasons, including history’s whisper that gentiles can’t be trusted. That insularity includes a mandatory “liberal” political stance. (Why yes, those are sneer quotes. After all, liberal means “favorable to freedom.” How many Democrats do you know to whom that description applies?) The Jewish identity is one founded on exclusion: the historical exclusion of Jews from mainstream society in virtually every nation of the West. Their reaction has been to embrace the practice of exclusion: i.e., to be quite unbending about who is and who is not a Jew.
Allow me to emphasize this:
It’s about membership in the tribe.
You can go badly wrong thinking that it must be about religious belief or practice. The Judaic faith in this country is as fragmented as Christianity. The political alignment is separate from that – even orthogonal to it.
Unfortunately, voting Democrat became integral to Jewish tribal identity some time ago. The parallel to the voting practices of American Negroes is exact, with the difference that American Jews are even more united that way. Today, if you’re a Jew who votes Republican, be careful to whom you admit it. A lot of American Jews would declare you “not of the tribe” for your “betrayal.”
I dislike to say such things. After all, the C.S.O. is Jewish (non-religious). While it’s unwise to generalize from personal and therefore sharply limited data, her family, that of my first wife, and that of many other Jews I’ve known over the decades, have been consistent in this regard. I’ve heard many among them, on many occasions, dismiss some group as “not Jews” for this reason among others.
For which reasons I don’t expect American Jewish votes to flood into the Republican column this November.
