The Future: Two Parties (Part II)
A country has a two-party system: Party A and Party B. Three fourths of Group X belong to Party A. Group X is not a large group of people. It numbers less than 20 million worldwide. A plurality of Group X lives in another country, of which it forms the majority.
Now, which Party – A or B – is more likely to favor a strong and abiding relationship between the first country and the second country?
Correct: Party B.
What?!
This overt fact should puzzle us. Let’s puzzle this out.
When we look at the history of Europe – take Germany and Poland specifically – we see how their development and achievements were in no insignificant part an outcome of the presence of the Jews. Whether Jews formed .3% or 10% of the country, our presence was an essential “ingredient” of the body politic. The growth of cities like Berlin, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Cracow is unthinkable without the presence of our people.
What we have witnessed in Party A, the Democratic Party, is comparable to what occurred in Germany and Poland – and throughout Europe – during the 1930s where we were purged, consequently robbed, pushed out, and the twist of the 1939-1945 period: murdered. Of course, only the first of these four unfortunate steps has occurred because this “pattern” has re-appeared only in the Democratic Party, not the entire United States. That said, caution and a sense of danger are appropriate.
A word about the modern Democratic Party: Milton Himmelfarb’s stated in 1973 that Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. Fifty years later, Himmelfarb’s statement is instructive about how the modern Democratic Party succeeded.
Until LBJ drove the Civil Rights Act through Congress in 1964, the Democratic Party was a coalition, one of whose components were Southern segregationist states. The Southern states “seceded” from the Democratic Party with the candidacy of George Wallace in 1968.
Post-1968, the Democratic urban machines could still churn out votes, but without financial muscle – not to mention public relations and media savvy – the Democrats were overmatched.
Only because Jews defied the trend of other Americans, who rose in socioeconomic class and switched political affiliation, was the Democratic Party able to hold its own after 1968.
All this, however, creates more confusion about why Party A, the Democratic Party, has gone off the cliff with anti-Israelism. But that’s because we tend to think rationally and overlook the emotional undercurrents that form the substructure of the surface reality we inhabit.
The Jews as a successful people – the Jews, as the recipients of revelation at Sinai – excite jealousy. That jealousy isn’t from the have-nots and the underclass as we usually imagine. The jealousy arises from our peers! – those with whom we share socioeconomic and educational attainment. Many of our fellow liberals – and certainly left-liberals – hate us because we have a teaching, a Torah, and an ethic that allows us to become affluent but vote with the interests of the poor.
Sure, an upper-middle class Catholic can eschew her upbringing and become pro-choice, and William J. Clinton can grow up in the dirty, deep South and betray “his country” (the Confederacy), but these are individuals. As a group, no one does what we do.
What we did. Many of us are pained that as the people who declares “not by might but by spirit alone” – as the prophet Zechariah taught – we must affirm the rightness of might. Indeed, sometimes, the mighty are right.
If you are a Democrat, stay a Democrat and, with Fetterman, Haley Stevens, and the Democratic Majority for Israel, fight for your candidates. Republican Jews are a new norm within the Jewish community.
Let us all walk humbly with our God, and among each other.