It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  He railed against the bombing of Serbia, which was then still taking place. By attacking Russia’s historic ally, Medved argued, we were strengthening the hands of the anti-western faction in the Russian parliament. “Here we win this historic victory in the Cold War—thank you, President Reagan—here we win this historic victory over what was rightly called the ‘evil empire,’ and now we’re in danger of bringing the Communists back to power.” He aired a report on President Clinton’s visit to Seattle earlier that afternoon, playing a chant that protesters shouted when Clinton was delayed: “He’s late. He’s late. He must have had a date.” He attacked the Republicans in Congress, not from the left, but from the right, agreeing with a caller who thought the GOP was failing to stand up for itself. “You’re right,” Medved said. “The Republicans are behaving like a puppy that’s been hit on the head with a newspaper.” He reviewed two made-for-TV movies, Joan of Arc and Noah’s Ark, and the new Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, attacking his fellow movie critics, who were all panning the Star Wars film, as “elitist.” “There are so many wonderful characters in this thing,” he proclaimed. “The film is terrific.” Medved mocked the Canadian province of British Columbia, where the police had been handing out free cell phones to prostitutes, hoping for leads on a serial killer. “Those wacky Canadians. They’ve done it again.” The police should be rounding the girls up, Medved argued, not giving them phones they could use to book more business. And he railed against Jesse Ventura’s just-published autobiography, in which Ventura admitted that he didn’t wear underwear. “I mean, do we really need to know this?”

  As pugnacious a conservative as Rush Limbaugh, Medved nevertheless differs from Limbaugh in several regards. Whereas Limbaugh is grandiloquent, Medved prefers a light touch, engaging in conversations with his callers instead of lecturing them, and whereas Limbaugh sticks to politics, Medved comments regularly on popular culture, making book, television, and film reviews a staple of his show. But the most marked difference between the two probably lies in the way they deal with religion. Limbaugh ordinarily mentions religion only obliquely, seldom doing more than acknowledging his belief in traditional values. Medved talks about religion openly. When he reviewed Joan of Arc, for instance, Medved praised the respectful manner in which the movie portrayed Joan’s faith. Medved’s callers respond in kind, talking about religion just as openly as he does. Medved regularly receives calls from avowed Christians, the kind who know their Bible verses. The day I listened in, one of Medved’s callers worried about Democratic moral standards. “How would I say it?” the caller said. “Democrats promote an immoral lifestyle.” Another caller commented on the distribution of cell phones to prostitutes in British Columbia. “Scripture is real clear on this, Michael,” the caller said. “ ‘Woe to a nation that calls ‘evil’ ‘good’ and ‘good’ ‘evil.’’ ” Even some of Medved’s sponsors are Christian. Among ads for “Comfort Airbeds,” AMICA Insurance, and Amazon.com, Medved ran an ad for Crosswalk.com, “the ultimate site for Christians on the Web.”

  There is something odd about Medved’s being so conservative. There is something even odder about his eliciting so much of a response from evangelical Christians. Michael Medved is an Orthodox Jew. “Have a good weekend,” Medved said, wrapping up the Friday show on which I sat in. “And have a fulfilling Sabbath, whenever you celebrate the Sabbath.”

  * * *

  Jews are overwhelmingly Democratic. During the New Deal, they regularly cast about 85 percent of their votes for President Franklin Roosevelt. In more recent years, Jews cast roughly 80 percent of their votes for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and for Senator Hubert Humphrey when he ran for president against Richard Nixon in 1968. In both 1992 and 1996, Jews cast about 78 percent of their votes for President Clinton. Only African-Americans cast larger percentages of their votes for Democrats, and even then only by a few points.

  It is easy enough to understand why Jews first became Democrats. Although the Jewish presence in America dates from colonial times—one synagogue in Rhode Island has been in use since 1763—by far the largest influx of Jews arrived in America between roughly 1880 and 1924, during the great wave of immigration that brought millions to this country from Eastern and Southern Europe. Like the Italians, Slavs, and others with whom they arrived, Jews were slow to become politically active—it took a while for immigrants who landed on Ellis Island to get the idea that this country belonged to them just as much as to the descendants of immigrants who landed on Plymouth Rock—and it was not until the 1930s that they got into the habit of voting. Still poor, they naturally gave their allegiance to the Democratic Party, the party of the little man.

  The party of the little man. This requires a word of explanation. When the GOP was founded, it was the party of the little man itself. At least it thought so. As we have seen, it drew much of its support from one sort of little men, rural folk in the North, and it championed those who were, so to speak, the littlest men of all, the slaves. Yet after the Civil War the Republican Party began a long and close association with big business. It elicited the support of the men who were industrializing the nation—titans such as the railroad magnate Leland Stanford, benefactor of Stanford University, who served as the Republican governor of California and as a Republican member of the Senate. The Republican Party imposed tariffs on manufactured goods, helping to sustain the profits of these new industrialists while forcing ordinary Americans to pay more for products of all kinds. When Mrs. Astor held her famous ball for the New York 400, she might as well have billed it as a gathering for the Republican Party’s staunchest supporters.

  There was one Republican, President Theodore Roosevelt, who stood up to business, reviving the nearly forgotten Sherman Anti-Trust Act to bring suit against dozens of corporations. But when William Howard Taft succeeded Roosevelt as president, Taft reverted to laissez-faire, and the Republican association with big business resumed.

  During the 1920s the relationship between the GOP and business reached its apex. Business produced goods and services at a rate that raised the standard of living to levels theretofore unknown. Benefiting from the boom, the GOP held the White House and both houses of Congress for most of the decade. “The chief business of the American people,” announced Calvin Coolidge, the man who as president led the Republican Party from 1923 to 1929, “is business.” Then came the Great Depression.

  After succeeding Calvin Coolidge in the White House, Herbert Hoover had the misfortune to be president when the Depression struck. The irony is that by Republican standards Hoover was something of a progressive. He believed in activist government. He used the Federal Farm Board to supply relief to farmers and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to supply capital to the banking system. If he had been reelected in 1932, Hoover might have pursued some of the same policies as did the man to whom he lost, the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. Yet none of this mattered. When Hoover gave speeches to restore public confidence, he seemed merely to be telling people to buck up and bear it. Encampments of the homeless, huddling in tents and sheds, soon became known as Hoovervilles.

  By contrast, Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal, which, while lacking in specifics, at least sounded encouraging. Elected in 1932 in a landslide, Roosevelt spent the first years of his presidency enacting one piece of legislation after another intended to help labor, farmers, and the needy. The Depression never really ended until the Second World War, when the production of war matériel reopened the factories and created new jobs. But while economists now doubt that the New Deal played much of a role in the nation’s economic recovery, there is no doubt that it played a role in the lives of the voters, giving them new hope. Thus did the Democratic Party, and emphatically not the Republican Party, become the party of the little man.

  It is, as I say, easy enough to understand why Jews first became Democrats. It is a lot harder to understand why they are still Democrats. As immigrant groups become more affluent, they become more Republican. The Irish, Italians, Slav
s, and every other immigrant group you can name have all conformed to this pattern. The only exception are the Jews. In the words of Seymour Martin Lipset, Jews today “live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans.” Why?

  There seem to be two reasons. Marty Lipset himself emphasizes the Jewish fear of anti-Semitism. The descendants of people subjected to anti-Semitism for centuries, American Jews fear anti-Semitism even today. According to the 1999 Survey of American Jewish Opinion, American Jews name anti-Semitism as the greatest threat they face. “When you ask people which groups are more likely to be anti-Semitic,” Marty says, “Jews answer Republicans and groups that support the Republicans, such as conservatives, businesspeople, and evangelical Christians.” Jews remain loyal to the Democratic Party, therefore, because they see the GOP as their enemy.

  The second reason Jews are Democratic is that Jews are liberal—the most liberal ethnic group in the country. To cite one statistic, Jews are more than twice as likely to be pro-choice as members of any other ethnic group. To cite another, Jews are four times more likely than the members of other ethnic groups to come right out and identify themselves as “liberal.” Long after Democratic politicians have learned to avoid the l-word, Jews embrace it.

  Dedicated liberals who see Republicans as anti-Semites. These are not likely GOP voters. So why did Michael Medved convert?

  Slouching in a chair in a conference room after the show, Medved explained that there were three reasons why he left the Democratic Party to become a Republican. “First, I became more religious.”

  When in his late twenties he became an observant Jew, Medved said, his political outlook changed. He found himself drawn to the way the Republican Party stood up for traditional morality, which he now took seriously. At the same time, he found that he had stopped worrying about anti-Semitism among some of the GOP’s most ardent supporters, evangelical Christians. “Evangelical Christians worry secular Jews,” Medved said. “They don’t upset the devout nearly as much. People of faith understand people of faith.”

  The second reason for Medved’s conversion was that when he observed the liberal culture close at hand, he disliked what he saw. After graduating from Yale, Medved spent several years during the early 1970s living in Berkeley. The protest movement had already crested, but it had left behind a large residue of student radicals. “All those people who wore long hair, never bathed, spent their time protesting—I decided I didn’t want to have anything to do with them,” Medved said.

  His views of liberals, already trending downward, reached a nadir after his apartment was robbed. The police apprehended the burglar. “It was a black kid who was twenty-four,” Medved said. “It turned out that he had committed seven other burglaries.”

  Medved attended the trial. “I can still hear the public defender,” Medved said. “She was a Jewish woman from New York. ‘Travel with me now,’ she said to the jury. ‘Travel with me now to the impoverished backwoods of Louisiana. There is a baby crying, a black baby.’ Then she went on through the whole history of slavery and oppression, as if it excused repeated acts of theft.”

  The jury returned a verdict of guilty, but the judge, apparently as liberal as the public defender, sentenced the burglar to just four months in jail. Medved found himself looking at the GOP’s tough stance on crime with new eyes.

  The third reason was Israel. When that nation suddenly found itself at war in October 1973, Medved, who had cousins in Israel, followed events closely. The first week of the war went badly. Sustaining massive losses, Israel came close to defeat. Then, warning the Soviets not to intervene, President Nixon resupplied Israel, enabling the Israelis to transform the dynamics of the war so completely that they captured the Sinai and the Golan Heights. “Democrats like McGovern, whom I had supported, said we ought to wait awhile and not rush into it,” Medved said. “Not rushing into it could have cost Israel its existence.” Republicans, Medved felt forced to conclude, were better friends of Israel than were Medved’s fellow Democrats.

  Thus the conversion of Michael Medved. He came to believe that Jews have less to fear from evangelical Christians like those who support the GOP than from the anomie of secular culture, that liberal permissiveness is inferior to conservative firmness in confronting crime, and that Republicans are more serious than Democrats about defending Israel. Is Medved’s case unique? Or are there lessons the Republican Party can learn from his experience? I fear the former.

  True, there was a time in the 1970s and 1980s when it looked as though the GOP might indeed win the support of many Michael Medveds. The Democratic presidential candidates Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis got Republican hopes up. Running against them, the Republican presidential candidates Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush all polled more than 30 percent of the Jewish vote, considerably more than had been the Republican norm. During the same period, the neoconservatives emerged. An influential group of Republican intellectuals who used to be liberal, and in some cases radical, most of the neoconservatives were Jewish. Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, and Irving Kristol, publisher of The National Interest, attracted particular attention, in part because they were important in their own right, in part because they had sons who themselves rose to prominent positions in Republican politics. John Podhoretz became a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, William Kristol the chief of staff for Vice President Quayle. After leaving government, John Podhoretz and William Kristol founded the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard. Support among Jewish intellectuals, a new, higher share of the Jewish vote—at last, Republicans hoped, the GOP was gaining ground.

  They were mistaken. The GOP wasn’t gaining ground, the Democratic Party was putting up bad candidates. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis appeared weak, both in their support of Israel and in their resolution to maintain our own defense, the strength of which, in turn, lends American support for Israel its credibility. Then the Democrats nominated Bill Clinton. Clinton pledged himself to the staunch support of Israel. And he promised so persuasively to uphold our own defense that he won the endorsement of no less a figure than Admiral William Crowe, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To the extent that Jews had ever begun a migration toward the GOP, Bill Clinton reversed it. In 1992 Bill Clinton won 78 percent of the Jewish vote, holding George Bush to just 12 percent; in 1996 Bill Clinton again won 78 percent of the Jewish vote, holding Bob Dole to just 16 percent. * As for the neoconservative movement, it remained Republican. But it also remained tiny.

  Like any other institution, the Republican Party has limited resources. It therefore needs to pick and choose the groups to which it will make its strongest appeals. Since Jews cast almost the same overwhelming percentage of their votes for Bill Clinton four years ago that they cast for Franklin Roosevelt sixty-four years ago, it seems fair to conclude that they are unlikely to receive overtures from the GOP particularly warmly. What should the GOP do?

  The Republican Party should oppose anti-Semitism of any kind, and it should remain explicitly committed to the well-being of Israel. But it should take those steps for the sake of its own self-respect. As for appealing to Jews, I see only two approaches. One would be to recognize that Jews have made up their minds about the GOP and to let it go at that. “The GOP has a better chance with religious Jews than secular Jews,” Michael Medved said, “but do you know how few religious Jews there are? Less than 10 percent of Jews attend synagogue regularly. And even among religious Jews, most are Democrats. There’s just a lot of history we’re dealing with here.”

  Yet it is hardly in the nature of a political party to give up on an entire bloc of voters, no matter how insistently the bloc has spurned the party’s advances. The Jewish population of the United States is about 5.8 million, or just a scant 600,000 more than the combined population of Iowa, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Delaware, the first states to select delegates to the national party conventions. This suggests the second approach. Like a long shot presidential candidate campaigning
in those four states, the GOP would shrug off the odds, ignore the cold reception, adopt a cheerful, dogged insistence on the rightness of its cause—and go right on trying to persuade Jewish voters to support it, simply refusing to take no for an answer.

  BLACK AND REPUBLICAN

  The only group even more Democratic than Jews is African-Americans. This seems odd. They are the very group the Republican Party was founded to help. It was a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the Confederacy, and it was Republicans in Congress who enacted the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing African-Americans the full rights of citizenship throughout the nation.

  It isn’t as if African-Americans were ungrateful. For decades after the Civil War, they proved overwhelmingly Republican. In the South, where most black people remained after the war, literacy tests, poll taxes, and other Jim Crow laws limited the ability of black people to express their allegiance to either party. Yet when they did vote, they voted for the GOP. According to Seymour Martin Lipset, as late as 1932 black people gave a majority of their votes to the Republican presidential candidate, Herbert Hoover, even as Hoover was losing to the Democratic candidate, Franklin Roosevelt, in a landslide.

  African-Americans first became Democratic for the same reason as did Jews: the Great Depression. The poorest people in the nation, black people needed help even more badly than did anyone else, and the New Deal gave it to them. By 1936, black people had changed their allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party, giving Franklin Roosevelt nearly 90 percent of their vote. They have been giving Democrats huge margins ever since.