Election '80: Jewish Unease And The Democratic Party
Raab, Earl
ELECTION 80 JEWISH UNEASE AND THE DEMOCRATK PARTY EARL RAAB After a full half-century of politics anchored by their relationship to the Democratic Party, the Jews of America are coming to feel...
...In that year, while some 41 percent of the general population voted for the Democrat Smith, he won about 72 percent of the Jewish vote—a walloping differential of 31 percentage points...
...it is, specifically, the illiberal tendencies which, in the name of a more pure democracy, are now pressed upon us...
...The Democrats stood against ethnic bigotry, for liberal social reform, against fascism, for Israel...
...Once a group "discovers" a party, it passes that discovery on to its children as a part of its natural legacy...
...No man-on-horse...
...The notion that political freedom is precious because it permits us most fully to exercise our differences is enervated...
...Asked whether more government intervention should take the form of "nationalization," only one percent of the Protestants and seven percent of the Catholics say "yes...
...The need may be to calculate the risks rather than to try to avoid them altogether by a ritualistic nay-saying at every turn...
...If the Democratic Party has its share of "appeasers" by way of world political views, the Republican Party does not lack its share, by way of oil-and-trade views...
...Jews have had experience with that kind of neutering...
...What is happening to the Democratic Party and to the party system is, of course, a part of what is happening in general to the American political system...
...The Jews have changed, and the Democratic Party has changed, and the issues have changed, and the political—and social—future is suddenly ominous...
...All that vast network of groups that, in the plural society, stand between the citizen and the government, that insulate and protect the citizen and that enrich the society, is weakened...
...The major restrictive laws of the 1920s were not lacking in Demo, cratic support, but their leader was Albert Johnson, Republican Chairman of the House Committee on Immigration, and it was a Republican Congress that passed the new law, and a Republican President— Harding—who signed it in 1921— where Wilson had vetoed it...
...In short: serious Jewish access to the national political process in America has been exercised through the apparatus of the Democratic Party...
...Because its effect is actually to limit participation, not to extend it...
...The Democratic Party is, manifestly, the party of intervention...
...For example, some Jews reacted with genuine dismay when it was announced, in 1971, that McGovern had come out in favor of a proportional representation quota for delegations to the upcoming Democratic convention...
...In order to reverse it, it must first be defined, and the concerns which lie at its base must then be precisely addressed...
...indeed, the self-classification shift from strong party partisan to independent has been more dramatic among Jews than among Protestants or Catholics...
...And it linked quite naturally to Jewish concern for the disadvantaged, who are more likely to require government intervention on behalf of their liberties...
...it covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd...
...That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild...
...now they are anti-party...
...And the likely consequence of all this is not that parties will disappear, but that they will be transformed from the company stores of the past to a kind of open department store where the newly independent electorate will do its selective shopping...
...But far more important, as a source of political clout, has been the Jewish role within the Democratic Party...
...And there has been little effort to connect these developments within the political process itself to substantive acts of illiberal government intervention which have troubled Jews...
...It is those priorities and those interests which have now begun to change...
...In its early years, Israel was still perceived as a response to the Nazi experience, and Harry Truman's instant recognition of Jewish independence once again reinforced the Jewish-Democratic connection...
...Nothing ought more alert them to danger than the heralding of a new order in which the individual is celebrated while his associations, affiliations, organizations are attacked as narrow, anachronistic, selfish...
...And anti-communism has been the "specialty" of the Republican Party...
...Once, they were without-party...
...18 percent of the Jews do...
...Indeed, sociologists are regularly perplexed by the disproportionate support which Jews, no longer poor, provide for intervention on behalf of the poor...
...In continental Europe, as later in Leninist Russia, they were formally emancipated as individuals—but never as Jews...
...Such a society is emerging in America today, in the name of a more participatory democracy...
...Jews have remained social interventionists...
...Will the Jews realign themselves with the Republicans...
...we are reduced by that "network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform," adopted in order (it is said) to extend liberty, but wholly leveling in effect...
...But the primary reason that Jews, so long accustomed to turning to the Democrats for political muscle on Israel's behalf, now see the Democratic Party as a fading ally has to do with the change in the domestic Jewish-Democratic connection...
...And for the Jews, to whom the Democratic Party has been a powerful political resource, and in which they comprised an influential elite, the decline of the party will have a more direct effect...
...Instead, the quota issue points to a fundamental choice before American society...
...Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate...
...today, the vast majority do so...
...It was, of course, deTocqueville who prophesied it...
...The "New Politics" encourages it, and the Democratic Party embraces it...
...We are slotted into the appropriate numeric categories, as many of us as the proportions require and permit, and mass society is advanced...
...the result, inevitably, is a flattening of individual aspiration and achievement...
...In 1952, about half the electorate indicated that "party" was one of the reasons they liked or disliked a candidate...
...In 1920 about two-fifths voted for the Socialist Debs, and about one-fifth voted for the Progressive LaFollette in 1924...
...It is not Jimmy Carter who has caused the growing sense of political rootless-ness, nor even the intense Jewish concern for Israel's security...
...The Democratic Party became the repository of Jewish hopes for a free social democracy that would fit with dominant Jewish social and political values...
...It can be conservatively estimated that the proportion of Jews among Democratic campaign activists and party activists is at least five times greater than their proportion in the voting population...
...The party itself will deal less with power—it will have less—than with technique...
...Patronage has long since been swept away by civil service reform...
...Their concern is not that government is turning big, but that government is turning bad...
...Now, independents are better informed, bettter educated, and more sharply issue-oriented than the party regulars...
...The discovery, of course, is issue-related—and so is the generational transmission...
...The Jewish concern is for nothing less than the present erosion of individual liberty...
...The interventionist NLRB was necessary to the security and the mission of the nation...
...Why lament it...
...The process may yet be reversible...
...children tend to vote the way their parents did...
...That loss will not happen overnight, but it is already under way...
...But that fear is not to be taken seriously...
...I do not speak of the standard complaints about too many government employees, bureaus, regulations and taxes, or about a government that saps individual initiative...
...The Democrats have also been the party that has stood for individual liberty, no small concern of the Jews...
...Strong partisans are twice as likely to work in campaigns and three times more likely to make campaign contributions than independents...
...The order of the day is dealignment, not realignment...
...Negative attitudes towards the Soviet Union cannot automatically be equated with Middle East strategies from which Jews might take comfort...
...it is a threat, a danger to the Jews...
...It is not a zero-sum economic confrontation which the adoption of quotas presages, in which Jews will lose while, and because, Blacks win...
...so were the interventionist social security laws...
...The plural society is built of groups, of chaotically overlapping groups...
...As a voluntary political association, an amalgam of job-seekers, idealists, specialists in power, as a coalition of groups sweating through difficult compromises in order to insure their own place in the plural spectrum, the parties will decline, and that decline will be a significant mark of the emergent mass political society...
...But now Israel's safety appears to depend on America's readiness to resist Soviet imperialism in the Middle East, and on America's perception that the PLO is an arm of that Soviet imperialist design...
...Still, the tendency to resolve genuinely messy social problems by the neatness of quotas is worthy of the uneasiness it engenders...
...That Jimmy Carter is not Franklin D. Roosevelt has been obvious for some time...
...And he accepts that helplessness because it has been justified by seductive slogans...
...The Jews have been part of this movement away from party...
...The mass society is built of atoms, of individuals who are not permitted their hyphens...
...I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the idea . .. the old words 'despotism' and 'tyranny' are inappropriate...
...It is not big government, or high taxes, or bumbling inter-ventionism that is at the heart of the matter...
...But neither is the case for the Republicans unclouded...
...One study reports that about two-thirds of the Protestants, over half the Catholics, but only a little more than a third of the Jews think that "government intervention in economic life" is enough or too much...
...Before 1968, direct primary elections were the exception rather than the rule...
...today, less than a quarter of the electorate so indicate...
...A section of the organized Jewish community opposed changes in the electoral college, but has only belatedly come to have second thoughts about other aspects of electoral reform...
...For that is where the adoption of quotas points...
...And some risky flexibility is owed to those highly charged racial/political situations which made Jefferson, in early vision, "tremble" for his country...
...economic penalties alone may not have the desired result...
...Jews have generally supposed that race-conscious programs will seriously stunt their economic status...
...principal factor in determining party affiliation and loyalty is generational inertia...
...On the Jewish political horizon, there is a cloud, and the1 Democratic Party is a part of that cloud...
...Second, the fact that it is the Democratic Party which has become, for whatever the reasons, the practical harbinger of the mass society means that the Jews are losing their single most effective instrument for political participation...
...If the party system is rendered meaningless, so is that access...
...T^e first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives...
...now it is proposed to strip the parties of their right to choose candidates...
...many more citizens than before are effectively disenfranchised, left with no candidate who is acceptable or accessible on a coali-tional or compromise basis...
...The real and long-range significance of the shift, however, lies in the matter of party participation...
...At the beginning of this last half-century, the lack of government intervention on behalf of the poor, the helpless, the victims of bigotry, was a scandal and a threat to the Republic...
...There is more to it than these...
...The Republicans objectively served the nation as an instrument to blunt the more dangerous edges of racist extremist movements by swallowing them—but in the act of swallowing, the Republicans took on some of their contours...
...it has place, therefore, for the Jews...
...And Jews, whether because they remember their own economic history, or because they remember their religious history and its ethical imperatives, or because they remember that benign government ? intervention has often saved them in otherwise hostile societies, support intervention...
...The Republican Party was traditionally the non-ethnic party, and the party in the non-South that drew the most explicit bigots to its ranks...
...There is no great mystery in the Jewish addiction to the Democratic Party...
...With a higher per capita income than Catholics or than any Protestant group other than the Episcopalians, Jews remain staunch defenders of government programs to aid the less fortunate...
...The number of people who describe themselves as "independents" has quintupled since 1960...
...So, for the past half century, a commitment to active government intervention on behalf of both individual liberty and social progress has been the principal connecting tissue between the Democratic Party and the Jews...
...But the steady movement of America towards a full and free social democracy has begun to show signs of sluggishness, perhaps even reversal...
...Jews have responded to the danger signs with some historic instinct, although the response has been uneven, never systematic...
...it is difficult for them to deal with a situation in which the villain is not an evil ruler or an insensitive government, but a condition—the condition, at last, of mass society triumphant...
...In our time, the society of atomic individualism is encouraged by appeals to "direct democracy" and "participatory democracy...
...In about a half dozen cities, the Jews constitute an influential 1S percent of the electorate...
...Jewish agencies may well have overreacted to the danger, large though it be...
...In the name of political reform, and in the name of political liberty, the pluralist society—always the most welcoming home for Jews, always the most congenial ground for freedom—is threatened with destruction, with replacement by a mass society in which meaningful group associations are not tolerated...
...The quota issue, for all the attention it has received, has been and still is widely misconstrued...
...Government not by coalition and by compromise, but by plebiscite...
...Instinctively, Jews recognized that such a system would weaken their position in the Party...
...so, in the 1950s, were the civil rights laws, which intervened in private as well as public enterprise in order to break the mold of racial discrimination...
...No one does any pre-screening of our candidates for us, there is no negotiating process, no hard bargaining—there are only the candidates, who offer themselves to us as we sit, each in his own parlor...
...they did not, however, realize that still more was at stake, that, indeed, the foundation of pluralism was being attacked, the foundation of mass society being laid...
...Yet there is a connection, and it must be attended...
...One cannot "blame" the Democratic Party for this...
...At best, Jews constitute less than five percent of the national voting population and have been a critical factor, now and again, in certain presidential elections...
...The painful process of coalition building is entirely by-passed...
...But it was in 1928, voting for Smith, that the growing alienation of the Jews from the Republican Party finally showed up in the Democratic tally...
...That is a very influential proportion in those circles which are most instrumental in shaping the directions of the Democratic Party, and while there are no formal ties between the organized Jewish community and these Jewish activists, the effect has been to maintain a two-way link between the Democratic Party and prevailing Jewish values, domestic and foreign...
...In the case of the Jews, once the discovery was made, the fact of their dramatic concentration in the Democratic fold helped keep the Party on a course which was compatible with Jewish priorities and interests...
...The mass society is built of atoms, of individuals who are not permitted their hyphens...
...The effect is not to separate us, but to homogenize us...
...Jews are understandably still fixated on the Holocaust experience, ever alert to the danger of a pure fascist dictatorship, of raw totalitarian centrism...
...Men are seldom forced by it to act but they are constantly restrained from acting...
...Indeed, Jews have known for a while that even Franklin D. Roosevelt was not Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...it is a threat, a danger to the Jews...
...Years later, it was in the Democratic Party that the civil rights movement made its political home, and was made at home—and the civil liberties movement as well...
...The eventual consequence of such developments is the "ban laid upon human personality with which Burkhardt describes Western Europe before the 14th century...
...If the party system withers away, so does that access...
...There has been no room for and no need for negotiation...
...In the name of benevolent justice, the government proposes to minimize the importance of personal attributes, genetic and circumstantial...
...During the civil rights era of the 1950s, the direct relationship was made explicit: poverty would diminish as discrimination was erased...
...If there developed within society a doctrine of direct democracy, it was natural that the doctrine be tested first with the Democrats...
...The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided...
...If the Democrats were, historically, the party of anti-fascism, Jews have recently come to recognize that it is not German fascism but Soviet communism which threatens Jews abroad—including the Jews of Israel...
...It is more difficult for them to know how to respond when freedom is diminished not by a man on a white horse, but by a leadership vacuum, not by autocracy but by an apparent extension of popular democracy...
...In the present circumstances, the Democratic Party has no special advantage over the Republicans...
...There are situations in which court-ordered, time-constrained quota hiring may be the only remedy for a bad faith lack of effort...
...The debate between these two models goes forward, and there is a case to be made for both...
...But the result places the Jews in a kind of double jeopardy: First, in the weakening of the parties and the party process, there is movement towards the kind of mass political society which threatens disaster for the Jews...
...That is the double jeopardy: The emergence of a mass society which threatens pluralistic society, for the Jews, for everyone, and the mass society's demolition of the party system which threatens Jewish political access in particular...
...It was possible, back then, for a candidate to win in the direct primaries, as Estes Kefauver did in 1952, and still be rejected by the party process...
...But Jewish experience— not just in this century, not just in this place—dictates a critical preference for the pluralist approach, and suggests as well that what the Jews have learned has universal implications for everyone interested in political freedom...
...The movement to restrict immigration, for example, was long led by the more nativist Republican Party...
...It is a sticky problem, indeed...
...the thing itself is new and since I cannot name it I must attempt to describe it...
...The exact size of that differential has varied from election to election since '28, but it has always been substantial, averaging some 30 points— 22 points in the first two Roosevelt elections, 35 points in the next two, and somewhere between those two in the McGovern-Nixon election...
...By 1972, a majority of convention delegates had been chosen by direct primary—in the name of reform, in the name of participation, in the name of democracy, names so hallowed that even though more and more observers are coming to lament the development, it may well be irreversible...
...Obviously, the Jewish commitment to the Democratic Party as the guardian of individual liberty was a matter of self-interest, perhaps more significant than the traditional self-interest of the pocket-book...
...And not just on the issues...
...Only about 20 percent of the electorate split tickets before World War II...
...The Earl Raab is Director of Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco...
...Labor unions, political parties, religious associations—all these are devalued, sometimes overtly attacked...
...Hidden within the notion of "reverse discrimination" is a kind of "reverse individualism": in the name of elevating all individuals, of freeing the individual of the penalties of his particular situation, the practical idea of the individual is diminished...
...ELECTION 80 JEWISH UNEASE AND THE DEMOCRATK PARTY EARL RAAB After a full half-century of politics anchored by their relationship to the Democratic Party, the Jews of America are coming to feel themselves politically adrift...
...Their concern is not that government has intervened too much but that it has begun to intervene in illiberal ways, in ways that are antithetical to Jewish interests, values and commitments...
...And Jews have, from Al Smith's time forward, been among the vanguard of those supporting heavy government intervention to accomplish these humane purposes...
...That is not very likely, for more than one reason...
...Initially themselves among the poor and the helpless and the victims of bigotry, Jewish commitment to government intervention outlived the identification of the Jews as principal beneficiaries of that intervention...
...It is now becoming apparent that 1980 is not 1932—nor even 1928, the year in which the lopsided Jewish attachment to the Democrats began...
...The practical strength of political parties has derived from their control over patronage and over candidate selection...
...Those who today suggest that labor unions are not really necessary because the natural workings of the market are adequate to protect the worker suffer from acute absence of hindsight...
...Richard Rubin describes it this way: "Proponents of the new politics argued that Pluralist notions of building a party coalition on the basis of different political interests bargaining for shares of power were to be abandoned because the method of organizing was against the common interest of all Americans—against a clear 'public interest' that would not only be grounded in the ideal but would also replace the old fragmented coali-tional politics at the organizational level as well...
...those cities choose some seven percent of the members of the House of Representatives...
...a faceless technical intelligentsia instead, against whom the isolated citizen is, in fact (never in theory) helpless...
...These independent Jews have still heavily registered and voted Democratic, although no Democratic candidate can assume their automatic support any longer...
...his rights have never been challenged, they have merely become irrelevant...
...We are, each of us, assigned to categories, and then informed that the categories to which we have been assigned do not matter, will not be permitted to matter...
...On the issues that mattered to the Jews, the Democrats were closest to them...
...It will qualitatively change the political status of American Jews, casting them— together with world Jewry—politically adrift for the first time in half a century...
...Until 1920, most Jews voted Republican...
...This most unpromising political and social future grows apace, and its growth is nurtured especially by the Democratic Party, which has become the party of the mass society...
...Somehow it comes to be imagined that the television set—for in direct primaries we have no choice but to depend on television—is a democratizing medium...
...It is the sense of its happening that accounts for much of the new Jewish unease...
...One can hear the rhetoric, "After all, the President is President of the people, not of the states") And the atomizing effect will be total, the party itself destroyed...
...The logical conclusion is plain: a direct national primary...
...The image is not of an agglutinated blob, but of a large number of individuals floating like chargeless atoms through the political space, relating not so much to each other as directly to the government...
...Factionalism is boosted, for the candidate of one faction can win, over and over, in all the direct primaries, and never be bound to so much as nod to other factional interests...
...There is a political model which speaks of pluralism, of bargaining and negotiating and compromising, of incremental decency, of equity, and there is a political model which speaks of conflict, of ideology, of purity, equality, of the public interest as if the public were a mass of undifferentiated citizens with uniform needs and with uniform values and with uniform desserts...
...At one time, it was possible to slough off the independents as the least informed and the most indifferent sector of the electorate...
Vol. 5 • October 1980 • No. 9
