Why Jews Should Not Be Liberals Page 10

  Most importantly, he had created hundreds of new jobs without any help from government. Just like Ford, Edison, and Gates, he had created new wealth by pursuing his own selfish self-interest. It was enlightened self-interest though, because he furnished all of his employees with an unlimited supply of "Mahi-Mox" plus all the soap and deodorants they needed. And all lived happily ever after.

  Stories like this are repeated over and over in this country. Individuals pursuing their own selfish, frequently enlightened, selfinterest create jobs. Jobs are not created by government taking money from some to give to others, and in the process wasting half of it. If that were the answer, the Roman Empire would still be with us, all of us would still be running around in bed sheets, and living off of the State.

  Jobs are created by producing goods and services that fill a need in the marketplace. To create more jobs we need to strip away the regulations and restrictive rules that make it so difficult to start or to expand a business, permit people to retain more of the fruits of their own labor, and confine government to its proper role of enforcing fair laws without favoring one side over another. If we can stir these simple ingredients together, ease in starting and expanding businesses, increased incentives for keeping and reinvesting the money we earn, and a sharply reduced role for government, then this wonderful American free market system can retain its place as the world's freest and most productive economy.

  If there is any one group of immigrants who has flourished the most under our system, it has certainly been the Jews. Wandering from nation to nation throughout our 4,000-year history, only in America has it been possible to achieve what we have within the space of a few generations. For us not to recognize the value of the system that has permitted this progress is simply pure ignorance. Let us now make sure that others have the same opportunities that our ancestors and we have had. We can do this only by strengthening our free market system and not by strangling it with the deadening hand of government regulations.

  Who knows how many more "heroes-to-be" are out there waiting for their "Mahi-Mox" to be discovered? And now with even McDonalds serving them, if only someone could invent a cheaper bagel!

  JEWISH VOTING PATTERNS

  Since the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, right up to the present conflicts between Orthodox vs. non-Orthodox, Jews have always been a fractious people. Never being able to present a truly united front on many of the major issues confronting our people throughout the ages, we still have managed to survive numerous persecutions and dislocations. Israel currently is a politically divided nation. Why is it then that in these United States, Jews continue to show such uniformity in their voting habits? Why is it that for the past seventy years, from 60-90% of American Jews routinely vote the Democrat ticket, no matter who the presidential nominee is? This was not always the case here. In the presidential election of 2004, it is estimated that the Jewish vote for the Republican incumbent, George W. Bush, "soared" to 25%, still an improvement over the 19% recorded in 20(x). A most interesting footnote to Jewish voting in 2004 was just released. It seems that Jews who attend religious services on a regular basis split their votes 50/50 between Bush and Kerry. Is this another argument for Jews to abandon their secular liberal philosophy'?

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the first great waves of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Western Europe established themselves eventually as merchants, financiers, and generally became part of the capitalistic fabric of America. They tended to vote their pocketbooks and were politically conservative. The memories of their European origin were not excessively burdened with pogroms and brutal persecution. Nathaniel Weyl writes in The Jew In American Politics, "(T)o the extent that they were politically committed, the majority of American Jewry remained faithful to the party of Lincoln between the Civil War and the Rooseveltian New Deal." The main reason for this was that American Jews, mostly of German heritage at the turn of the twentieth century, had succeeded in their new homeland and were now firmly established in the middle and upper classes of American business and social life.

  They backed the Republican Party, Weyl writes, because that party was the one of business and espoused the virtues of individualism. The Republican Party, he writes, "was more Protestant than Catholic, more mid-Western than Eastern, more North European than representative of the newer immigrant stocks, more middle class than proletarian." When they were followers of the Democratic Party, such as Morgenthau and the Strauss brothers, they were moderates, and probably in today's political definitions would be classified as moderate Republicans.

  In Stephen Birmingham's book, Our Crowd, a history of the one hundred German Jewish families who attained great wealth after coming to this country in the 1800s, he relates that almost without exception, these Jews became Republicans. Joseph Seligman, Jacob Schiff, and Otto Kahn, among others, were the outstanding figures who went from peddlers to becoming giants of finance. When one of their descendants or associates became a Democrat, this was regarded with horror. Sadly, future generations of these great achievers did not retain much of the political conservatism of their ancestors.

  In 1881, the mass immigration of Russian and East European Jews to America began. These Jews, escaping from the persecution and the pogroms, were poorer than the German Jews who had preceded them, and had little in common with the established 250,000 mainly German and Sephardic Jews already in the United States. They were escaping from the tyranny of the czar and tended to support those attempting to overthrow the czar, including the communists. Many Eastern European Jews had become socialists to defend themselves from the tyranny of the czar. Paul Johnson writes that some Jews became Bolsheviks and revolutionaries to escape their Jewishness. Jews, who were in reality "non-Jews" when it came to observing their religion, were prominent in revolutionary parties in many countries in Europe. One example was Leon Trotsky, a Jew, who helped bring Lenin into power in 1917.

  Once arriving in this country, many gravitated into the needle trades and light industries with which they were familiar. Jews became leaders of some of the more prominent labor unions: Samuel Gompers, first with the cigar makers, and then as president of the AFL, and Sidney Hillman with the garment workers. Weyl writes that the first generation of Russian Jews concentrated on giving their children an education and moving themselves out of the sweatshop labor into that of skilled labor, contractors, and independent businessmen. The number of firms in the garment industry in New York increased from 234 in 1882, to 16,552 in 1918, employing over 3(X),(X)0 people. The second generation moved into other small businesses and those professions that did not require more education than they could afford, such as lawyers, accountants, and pharmacists. Not until the third generation did they begin to reach the medical professions that required extensive education and training.

  Although these Russian and East European Jews settled in major American cities, which were mainly controlled by the Democratic Party, as they gradually moved up the economic and social scale, by no means did they uniformly move into the Democratic Party. Apparently enough of them remembered the tyranny of the czar and were determined to deny the American government those supreme powers that had forced them to leave their mother countries. To many Russian Jews, the concept of liberalism meant that this would liberate them from the control of government or the czar. When they found that American liberalism tended to increase the powers of government over their individual activities, a goodly number of them rejected the Democratic Party.

  Thus from Lincoln to the beginning of World War I, the majority of American Jews were Republicans. A succession of American presidents had been friendly toward Jews and had vigorously protested anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe. Also, the Irish controlled most Democratic political machines in the North, and there existed hostility between the Irish and the Jews at that time. Theodore Roosevelt, in particular, was a strong favorite of Jewish voters. Roosevelt even predicted that a Jew would someday be president of the United States, and appointed th
e first Jew to a Cabinet post: Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Oscar Straus. The leading Jews in America, Jacob Schiff, et al, supported Theodore Roosevelt. Even though the bulk of American Jews, now numbering almost three million, were of Slavic origin, and were more of the working class than the original German immigrants, they tended to continue to accept the leadership of the German Jews, who were still heavily Republican. Also the German Jews in America, even though they disagreed with the politics of many of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants, still contributed heavily to help the new immigrants become established here.

  In 1920, eleven Jews were elected to Congress: ten Republicans and one Socialist. Then things began to change. One of the factors bringing about the change was, strangely enough, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The rebirth of this organization in 1915 stressed the supremacy of the Caucasian race, and was against Negroes, Catholics, and Jews. By 1924, the Klan claimed a membership of six million and was strong in Southwestern cities. At that time the South was solidly Democrat. Thus the Klan became an important element of the Democratic Party, and in the 1924 Democratic Convention was the cause of a debate that almost split the party into two pieces. Alfred Smith, a Catholic, former governor of New York, demanded that the Party repudiate the Klan. His motion lost by one vote, but Smith went on to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1928, when the Republican Herbert Hoover defeated him.

  The effect of all this, strange as it may seem today, was that America's Jewish voters, one half of whom were concentrated in New York, became impressed with Smith's denunciation of the Klan, and began to switch to voting Democrat. This was ironic because the issue of the Klan was never a divisive issue in the Republican Party. Perhaps the Republican Leadership did not speak out loudly enough against the Klan. For whatever reason, history records that the Democratic Party took the credit for defeating the Klan, and thereby earned the gratitude of many Jewish voters. This was almost akin to setting up a straw man, knocking him down, and claiming credit for a real knockout. In heavily Jewish precincts in New York and Chicago, Smith won 66% to 75% of the vote. Two years later, in 1930, six of the eight Jews elected to Congress were Democrats. (In 2001, 25 of the 27 Jews in the House of Representatives and 10 of the 11 Jews in the Senate are Democrats. The trend has continued.)

  Then came the election of 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt against the Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover. This was the third year of the Great Depression. Hoover was trying unsuccessfully to cope with the Depression. Jews as a group had been hit by the Depression, but no more and perhaps less than other groups. There were no particular Jewish differences between the two candidates. Nazism had not yet become an issue; domestic anti-Semitism was not a big problem; Hoover was considered to be an honest, capable president. Yet Jewish support for Roosevelt in 1932 was overwhelming. Illinois recorded Jewish votes of 85% to 95%. New York was up in the 90 percentile. Roosevelt won fortysix of the forty-eight states.

  Why this massive swing in the Jewish vote'? FDR was a charismatic leader. Endowed with a deep, resonant voice-remember there was no television-FDR talked about helping your fellow citizen, about charity for all, about helping the average man to achieve his goals. In other words, he preached charity, brotherly love, repair the world, all themes dear to Jewish hearts.

  Weyl writes, "Jews, even those of a secular bent, saw in Roosevelt's programs the embodiment of ideals of brotherhood and charity which were deeply embedded in the ethical teachings of Judaism. The intensity of Jewish religious and ethical education made these concepts a vital part of the everyday lives and aspirations of ordinary Jews." Paul Johnson wrote that Jews voted Democrat because of sympathy for the poor and the underdog, a position that many had escaped from in Europe. FDR sold himself and his party to America's Jews as the group that was best equipped to achieve the goals that Jews sought here.

  So there we may have it. Having become fairly well established in their new American environment, Jews still longed to implement their inborn desire to do good and be charitable. In their infinite wisdom, American Jews saw FDR as a modern Messiah. FDR with his undeniable charisma, magnificent speaking ability, and brave disregard for his own physical handicaps, seemed bigger than life. Elected to an historic four terms, climaxed by his leadership in helping to defeat Hitler, FDR became a giant figure in Jewish eyes, and remains so to this day. This appears to continue to be one of the primary reasons that the great majority of American Jews have remained Democrats to this very day.

  As Thomas Sowell writes in Visions Of The Anointed, liberals create or seize upon a crisis, develop a solution for it that involves government programs, and then walk away from it to await their next crisis opportunity. The fact that their programs fail, and frequently bring about the opposite result from that intended, has no meaning to the liberals. And so it is with the FDR myth and his programs. Jews thought they would bring about universal brotherhood and prosperity for all. At this they failed miserably. After seven years of the New Deal and all the make work programs inherent in that doctrine, as late as 1939, there still existed a national unemployment rate of 20%! As for universal brotherhood, it was during the late 1930s that anti-Semitism in this country reached its heights.

  It has only been the marvelous workings of our free market system that has brought unparalleled prosperity to America. All of the government welfare programs, with the possible exception of the GI Bill to educate returning veterans from World War II, have had on balance probably a net negative effect on the growth of our economy. Yet American Jews still cling to the outmoded and obsolete reasons that first influenced their swing to liberalism.

  Studies have shown that the way one's parents vote has a great influence on the political leanings of their children. I did not realize it at the time, but my parents were Republicans, at a time in Chicago when almost all Jews were Democrats. We read the Chicago Tribune, which then was a staunchly Republican newspaper. When FDR died in April 1945, 1 remarked to Ellie, then my girlfriend and later my wife, that this was possibly a good day for America. She was somewhat horrified at my statement, and frankly, I don't remember from where it came. It was probably from some deep feeling that came from overhearing conversations of my parents. Fortunately it did not spoil a beautiful romance and today we think alike on all things political.

  Perhaps now with a third generation coming of age since the 1930s, Jewish votes will begin to shift. There are hopeful signs that the young American Jews of today are questioning more and more the political leanings of their elders. In the new age of computers, the Internet, and the wide dispersal and availability of information, it appears that many of the old myths are slowly disintegrating as more light is cast on the lack of results of the liberal programs. Also it appears that many young Jews do not have the emotional attachment to the old liberal dogma that prevents many of their elders from rationally thinking through just what it is that is so great about liberalism.

  One recent example of changes that are taking place was reported in 1999 in the Orange County Register. Several young Orange County readers were interviewed about their reasons for their recent conversions to different religions. A recent convert to Judaism was quoted as follows: "I'm a libertarian, so liberty, self-responsibility and acting on your own volition are important to me...the heart of Judaism's history is its struggle for freedom amid mass persecution. It is a story of the tragic price paid when people cannot exercise free thinking." As more young Jews enter the business world and come face to face with the multitude of government rules, regulations, and taxes, the Jewish tradition of the importance of freedom of the individual to act in accordance with his own enlightened self-interest may well contribute to a meaningful change in their inherited voting patterns.

  One never knows how attitudes are influenced. Change is coming, although it is sometimes difficult to see. Old habits are hard to break, but break them we must if American Jews are to finally become convinced that liberalism is a philosophy that is truly not in harmony with Jewish law
and tradition.

  LIBERALS' BELIEF IN THE MAGIC

  POWERS OF GOVERNMENT

  Of all of the ties between Jews and liberalism, the one that is perhaps the strongest and the strangest is the devotion and dedication that Jews in America have had to the "wondrous" powers of a strong, centralized federal government. Ever since 1933, when FDR converted the federal government from a fairly insignificant entity into the powerhouse it has become, American Jews have hailed and championed the federal government as the answer to all of our social ills. If only more of them had read and believed what the great French economist Frederick Bastiat wrote in the 1800s-"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else"-we would not have created the monstrous governmental structure we have today.

  Somehow in the minds of the Jewish leaders and the organizations they head, the best and in most cases the only solution to our social, economic, environmental, and assorted difficulties, was to grant the federal government those powers that they believed could bring about the desired ends. As to the results that accrued from granting those powers, that was left to the historians. So long as the "sound good" and "feel good" laws were passed, with their invariably rosy predictions, then we Jews believed we had done the right thing. As Dennis Prager has said, liberals believe that it is not results that count; it is only good intentions.

  The fact that in 1939, after seven years of the New Deal, the unemployment rate in the United States was still close to 20% is unknown by most Jewish voters. It was only the onset of World War 11, with the massive war effort financed only partly by taxation and mostly by the issuance of government bonds, that eventually created a wartime boom period. Our national debt skyrocketed during that period with the issuance of massive amounts of government bonds, along with deficit spending. In hindsight, most economists agree that most of the New Deal programs passed in the 1930s served mainly to prolong the length of the Depression, rather than bringing it to an end. In a free economy, if left reasonably alone, the natural forces of the market will tend toward balance, not imbalance.