The Stubborn American Jewish Voter
11 Heshvan 5785 (Nov 12, 2024)
If you’re a long-time follower of Low Effort Zionist Memes, it should come as no surprise to you that we supported Donald Trump in last week’s presidential election. While we all have our own range of feelings on the man, we all agreed that he was the best choice not only for the United States, but for the Jewish people as well, and the reasons are obvious. In his first term, Trump implemented a groundbreaking approach to foreign policy which effectively made him the most pro-Israel president of all time. He recognized a united Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and the security buffer that the Golan Heights provide. He moved the US embassy, and established peace treaties between Israel and four Arab countries, forging a pathway to many more ahead.
Trump gets a lot of credit from right-wing Jews for his foreign policy record, but what he’s done for Jews at home is arguably just as impactful. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump White House supported lawfair campaigns against states which violated our right to attend synagogue services and form minyans in person. Trump’s hardline stance on immigration has reduced the number of immigrants coming into the United States from Latin America, the Middle East, and other places with higher levels of antisemitism. Trump’s Supreme Court justices are currently tearing apart the affirmative action regime which has driven Jews out of top-level universities so effectively that many Ivy League schools now have fewer Jewish students than they had at the height of the quota system.
Yet despite this record, the Jewish community of the United States didn’t seem to be under the impression that Trump was the guy for them. Two thirds of American Jews voted Kamala whereas just under a third voted for Trump, according to exit polls. It’s important to note that Trump did break ceilings with Jewish voters in this cycle but, the Democratic party still enjoys the majority vote share of American Jewry.
Although Republicans have been slowly making gains with Jews since Obama’s first term in office, many right-wing Jews are disappointed that our more liberal counterparts didn’t give the Democrats more backlash in wavering on their support for Israel in its defensive war against Iran’s proxies. But this right-wing jewish frustration and disappointment is nothing new:
Don’t they see the left is turning against us? Are they plainly stupid? Do they not care about the interests of our people?
It’s easy to stereotype liberal Jews that way, but I think most of us know deep down that it’s not really true, or at the very least, too crude to satisfy our frustrations. Most of my liberal aunts and uncles are intelligent and successful people who sent their kids to Jewish schools, Jewish camps, and regular trips to Israel. It’s safe to assume that most of us know left-leaning Jews here or there who share this profile.
So at a certain point, it’s probably fair to ask if we’re the ones who are deluded. Let’s venture to dissect our own Jewish involvement in the sphere of the right wing.
Jews and the Religious Right
Once a fringe movement in American society, Evangelical Christians have grown over the past century to become one of the most powerful forces in American culture, and since Ronald Reagan have found a welcoming home in the Republican Party. As a consequence, the Evangelical movement has driven much of the Republican Party’s agenda since the 1980s, including opposition to the LGBT movement, opposition to abortion, and the maintenance of America’s culturally Christian character. In turn, White Evangelicals’ support for the Republicans regularly approaches Saddam Hussein margins, with Trump taking home 80% of their vote in 2024.
The Republican Party’s religious character is unique relative to other competitive right-wing parties in Western democracies. Most Western democracies don’t have religious enough populations to sustain a religious party, and the European continent’s history of religious wars and persecution makes the intertwining of religion and politics that much more suspect.
American Christianity took a different course from its continental counterpart. Under a rubric of religious pluralism, America has developed into one of the most religiously diverse societies on earth with few (but not zero) religious wars and rare cases of religious persecution. Religious discrimination and persecution isn’t entirely absent from the American story, but it has hardly ever manifested to a degree that would require such feelings to be made taboo. Splitting the rift between American and European Christianity even further is the following fact:
Evangelicals, constituting the most politically powerful Christian movement in America, not only reject the antisemitism found in Euro-Christian history, they actually exhibit a high degree of philosemitism.
Jewish Republicans like to point to this fact when pointing out the pro-Jewish bona fides of the Republican Party, but most liberal Jewish Americans have generally been skeptical of Evangelical philosemitism. Some will point to the fact that many Evangelical Christians use Jewish outreach as a means of proselytism, a fair point that does warrant legitimate caution. Others say that Evangelicals only support Israel in an effort to bring about the apocalypse, although this is somewhat of a misnomer which reflects the beliefs of only a fringe minority of Evangelical Christians. Probably the most common concern that Jews have about Evangelical Christians, however, is that they’re not quite as philosemitic as they appear, and that any Jew who knows their own history would be foolish to willingly empower Christian fundamentalists no matter where they exist.
Such concerns may not be entirely unfounded. While Evangelicals may currently be the face of Christian religious politics in the United States, they represent a demographic minority of America’s Christians and do not hold a monopoly on religious conservatism in the United States. The project of making America a more Christian nation is not a political project unique to Evangelicals, and many of the most prominent figures in the conservative movement are Catholics or members of mainline Protestant churches. None of these churches have the same affinity for Jews that Evangelicals have, and the vast majority of them have a long history of discrimination against and persecution of Jews up to and including the present day, with many of these churches endorsing explicitly anti-Israel agendas.
This is especially important because while Evangelicals may be a powerful force in politics, they push well below their weight culturally. Turn to any conservative media outlet that’s meant to appeal to a mass audience and you’ll find few Evangelicals to speak of. Tucker Carlson is Episcopalian. Candace Owens is Catholic, as are Megyn Kelly, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingraham, Dan Bongino, and the majority of the commentators at the Daily Wire (although Andrew Klavan is a Jewish ‘convert’ to Anglicanism and Jeremy Boreing is an Evangelical). Glenn Beck was also raised Catholic, but has since become Mormon. Aside from Boreing, Charlie Kirk is the only major Evangelical I can think of in American conservative media.
As a result, there’s a high degree of disconnect from the politics Evangelicals are advancing in government and the cultural forces they’re unleashing outside of Washington. The men and women in Congress who are most commonly described as “Christian nationalists” are Evangelical and take an uncompromisingly pro-Israel position. Meanwhile, if you go on X, those who describe themselves as “Christian nationalists” are predictably antisemitic.
Evangelicals may like Jews, but Evangelicals are a demographic minority and, ultimately, for the project of building a more Christian America to succeed, they’re going to rely on the support of other Christian nationalists, most of whom do not share in their exuberant philosemitism. In other words, the Evangelical agenda is a package deal, and that package includes empowering other Christian nationalists who are much more partial to the antisemitism of European Christianity. To support this movement as a Jew is to assume that the Evangelical Christians will always represent the political vanguard of Christian nationalism, and that it won’t ever be surpassed or usurped by a more antisemitic variant of Christianity. I don’t think expressing skepticism toward this assumption is entirely irrational.
Jews and Conspiracies
As I mentioned, Christian conservatives have been influential in the Republican Party for decades, but under Trump a new group of people have been welcomed into the party. This is not a religious movement, although it has many religious members, but much like the Evangelicals were also once considered part of the fringe of American politics, they are a group most had little interest in courting. The group I’m talking about, of course, is conspiracy theorists.
When Trump first announced his run for the presidency in 2015, he very quickly gained the support of America’s conspiracy theorists, who he in turn was eager to court. At one point he even appeared on the show of arch-conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, reassuring him that he will be happy with Trump’s presidency. And while promoting the likes of Alex Jones, Trump regularly attacked the mainstream media as ‘fake news.’
Since then, we’ve seen the fruits of a movement which rejects traditional sources of information in favour of conspiracy theories. The Democrats are satanic pedophiles sacrificing children below a pizza parlor. The Covid-19 vaccine gives you AIDS. The 2020 election was stolen by Dominion Voting Machines, the Democrats, and Venezuela. French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife is a man. The Rothschilds use space lasers to burn down California’s forests. Jews control America. These are just some of the conspiracy theories promoted by widely accepted and influential members of the Trump movement.
To be clear, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to conspiracy theories. Both during and after the Covid-19 pandemic I readily engorged myself in many MAGA conspiracy theories. There are broader truths driving these takes. The media does lie to you, government corruption is very real, and the overreach we saw during the pandemic was unambiguously tyrannical. But one of the fundamental problems with conspiracy theories is that they’re built on a lack of evidence, not a preponderance of it. Those who espouse them often focus in on weird coincidences, anomalies, or unexplained events and extrapolate from that. They then tie in these conspiracies with other conspiracies to build a whole multiverse of conspiracy theories, which leaves those who fall far enough down the rabbit hole completely disconnected from reality.
What do I mean by this? Allow me to give you an example. One man who has been the centre of many conspiracy theories as of late is Jeffrey Epstein, and as of right now we still don’t have his client list. Why not? Well, we know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of very powerful connections who may have been involved in his child sex abuse, including some powerful people who have been publicly accused by victims. But who are these powerful people, as a group? There have been accusations made by former intelligence officials that Epstein was working for Mossad. What would he have been doing for Mossad? Considering the nature of his crimes, presumably running a honeypot ring to entrap Epstein’s powerful clients into being subservient to Israel. That makes sense because, as we all know, Israel has too much power over America. How else could they commit 9/11 and get away with it?
As you can see here, with just the inclusion of a few other conspiracy theories, you can basically come to the conclusion that Jeffrey Epstein was killed to hide Jewish involvement in 9/11, all based on extrapolation from information which, at the outset, is flawed. There is no such thing as an “Epstein client list” and no investigator has ever suggested that Epstein ever kept a list of his clients. For that matter, there isn’t any evidence that Epstein has “clients” at all, and the results of the various criminal and civil trials regarding his activities suggests that he was trafficking children for his own personal use, and potentially a few close friends. But with only partial information, it’s easy to keep extrapolating to the point where your conspiracy theory overlaps with another conspiracy theory, and now you’re trapped in a whole conspiracy theory canon where all the falsehoods you’ve internalized reinforce each other.
So while you, the conspiracy-believing reader, may not be under the impression that Epstein was killed to cover up Mossad’s involvement in 9/11, the reality is that the only reason you don’t believe this is probably because you’re Jewish, and you know the internal dynamics of the Jewish community well enough to know that what antisemitic conspiracy theorists say about us is a bunch of nonsense.
But most people, including most conspiracy theorists, aren’t Jews, and the fact is that Jews are an inseparable part of the conspiracy theorist canon. Antisemitism itself largely manifests as a conspiracy theory unlike other forms of bigotry. And while Trump himself may not personally insert antisemitism into his conspiracy theories, much like the Christian right, conspiracy theories come in a broad package, and enabling those who spread conspiracy theories, even if they may not personally be antisemitic, inevitably enables the large number of antisemites who inhabit the conspiracy multiverse.
Jews and the Establishment
As Hannah Arendt noted in Origins of Totalitarianism, Jews have historically feared the gentile commoners they lived around much more than their gentile rulers. While there is no shortage of examples of antisemitic governments inciting pogroms against Jews, they pale in comparison to the number of pogroms incited by ordinary peasants, and it was often the local government or even institutions like the Catholic Church stepping in to stop the violence. Arendt leaves out the fact that Jews are smarter and (therefore) richer than other demographics, but the point she makes is broadly correct: that Jews, when given the opportunity, tend to gravitate towards power.
And no gentile nation has given Jews more of an opportunity to rise to the top echelons of power than the United States.
Not only are Jewish Americans an incredibly successful demographic, but they rose to the top of American society in a relatively short period of time. The vast majority of American Jewish families arrived in the country in the late 19th and early 20th century, by which point the country was largely already settled. They mostly arrived from Eastern Europe, poor and destitute. But by the 1920s, Jews were already establishing themselves as factory owners, businessmen, and media personalities. By the 1960s, less than 100 years after Jews began arriving en masse, Jews were already beginning to integrate themselves into the American establishment. By the 1990s, Jews made up an astonishing proportion of billionaires, Ivy League graduates, journalists, judges, and other elite positions that were hugely disproportionate to our meager 3-5% share of the population.
People can point to Jewish intelligence, Ashkenazi education, and work ethic as reasons for this success, but the story goes deeper than that. The reality is that the Democratic Party has been critical to the success of Jewish Americans.
The tiny Jewish community that lived in America prior to the 1880s largely voted alongside their neighbors: Southern Jews voted Democrat and Northern Jews voted Republican. But with the mass migration of Eastern European Jews, along with Italian and Irish Catholics, into the American Northeast, local Democratic Party organizers implemented a strategy which essentially consisted of recruiting these immigrants right off the boat.
The Democratic Party created a massive patronage machine which connected newly arrived immigrants with housing and jobs, and in return expecting loyalty to the Democratic Party. And loyalty they received. These immigrants not only turned cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago into firm Democratic Party strongholds, along with their respective states, but these places became the intellectual centers of the Democratic Party. Throughout the 20th century, Democrats nominated candidates for president from Massachusetts, New York, or Illinois a full 40% of the time.
While no Jews have made it to the top job in the United States (presumably to the amusement of the Irish, who now can boast two US Presidents), the Democratic Party has still brought Jews a tremendous amount of political success. Jews have served on multiple occasions as the mayors of major cities, almost always as Democrats. Of the 17 Jews to be elected governor of a state in the 20th century, 15 of them were Democrats (another was an Independent). All but one of the Jews appointed to the US Supreme Court were appointed by Democrats (the sole Republican appointee was a Sephardic Jew whose family arrived in America before the Revolution).
And these trends continue to this day. Of the nine Jews serving in the United States Senate, all of them are Democrats except Bernier Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, and two new Jewish Democrats were just elected to join them. Republicans, meanwhile, have only sent one Jew to the Senate since the turn of the century (he was later defeated in 2008 by Al Franken, another Jewish Democrat). Meanwhile, of the 26 incumbent Jewish Congressmen, only two are Republican (although another is set to join them after the 2024 elections). For all the talk of Jews losing relevance in the Democratic Party, Biden appointed a record number of Jewish Americans to his cabinet in this administration, with nearly a quarter of his cabinet being Jewish.
So while Republicans can boast a strong record on Israel, historically and currently it has been the Democrats putting Jews in positions of political power, not Republicans. And as I wrote, this process began from the moment Jewish immigrants stepped off the boat more than 100 years ago. This is not a chicken and egg problem; Jewish people are rewarding Democrats for providing us access to political power.
This access to power has paid off politically, and I think the past year has made this especially apparent. While we can (and frequently do) criticize the Democratic Party’s attitudes towards Israel, it’s important to recognize that these voices have largely been ignored by the Democratic Party establishment. Though he tried to play both sides rhetorically, Biden has seemingly given up on even the facade of trying to restrain Israel, and has largely provided Israel with most of the material support it needs to conduct the war since it began last year. Kamala occasionally paid lip service to pro-Palestine protesters, but this was probably more out of stupidity than malice, and her campaign did a great deal to distance itself from them.
Compare this to left-wing parties in Europe or Canada which have come to openly and unapologetically embrace terrorism. It’s very likely that, if Jews were to abandon the Democratic Party, that they would move more rapidly in that direction. With that in mind, it’s not overly clear that it’s in the interest of Jewish people to abandon the Democratic Party, which whether we support them or not is going to be in power half the time.
The Hard Sell
One of the most famous stories of Jewish history is that of the Golem of Prague. There are many variations of it, but most of them generally follow the lines of a Rabbi creating a magical being called a golem to defend the Jewish community from antisemites, only for the golem to go mad and start attacking the Jewish community itself.
If you were to take the points I made above at face value, you could easily come to the conclusion that Trump is a golem-type figure. He may be supporting Jews and Israel right now, but the long-term consequences of the cultural forces he releases will result in more antisemitism in the future.
However, I think there’s good reason to be skeptical of such a conclusion. For one thing, Evangelical Christians have been a major force in the Republican Party for half a century now and, despite non-Evangelicals always playing a role within the coalition, the party’s support for Israel has only strengthened as time goes on. One could point to the rise of antisemitic Christian nationalists online, but this is not the first time such an alternative to Evangelical Christian nationalism has emerged. Pat Buchanan, a Catholic with no love for Jews, ran to lead the Republican Party in 1992 and 1996 as the representative of the party’s Christian nationalist contingent and was resoundingly rejected. A younger generation that has taken up his mantle may be loud on X, but it’s unclear what portion of such online rhetoric actually originates in the United States at all. Given that nobody of this persuasion has made it into Congress, one could conclude that much of it is astroturfed, and much of what remains is promoted by teenagers who haven’t matured politically yet.
The conspiracy issue I’d argue would be a more worrisome long-term trend, but I don’t really see the evidence to suggest it is actually a long-term trend. Trump seems to be growing more conspiratorial with age, but he doesn’t seem very interested in conspiracies which don’t personally involve him and, without another election to win, I doubt he’s going to be vastly expanding the Trump conspiracy canon. Conservatives, much more so than liberals, also tend to be quite partial to the whim of whoever leads their movement, and it’s unlikely that someone as ready to indulge conspiracy theories as Trump will lead the Republican Party in the future. Most smart people who attain that kind of power don’t believe in them and have enough shame to not spread them. Additionally, as the memory of Covid-19 fades into the distance, probably the single greatest catalyst for the explosion of conspiracy theories in US politics in recent years will be out of mind.
Nevertheless, I think with all this in mind we can understand why convincing Jews to switch to the Republican Party is a hard sell. Though Democrats have antisemites lurking at the grassroots levels of their parties, the right type of rhetoric could easily awaken an antisemitic consciousness in Republicans as well, and it’s better to go with the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Especially when the devil you know has a robust, century-long track record of putting you and those who came before you in positions of power.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s no hope, actually there’s quite a lot of it. Republicans in New York and New Jersey have done remarkable work narrowing the Democratic Party’s margins in recent elections for both state and federal offices. With the rapidly growing Orthodox Jewish population playing a massive political role in both states, the natural vote share for ideological conservatives has grown organically. This also goes without mentioning the crossover of former old-school Jewish democrats turning to Republicans for common sense policy. If and when the day comes that Jews have better odds getting elected on Republican tickets, higher chances of earning appointments under Republican leaders, that’s when we’re going to see Jews start switching over from the Democrats en masse. Until then, the ground game is the best game we have: talking to individual Jews, selling them on the agenda of the Republican Party, and flipping their states red so the rest of them will follow.
- Beau Chasse
Brilliant explanation of the great divide as I call it. We have to understand that this is really complex for Democrat ✡️'s like myself. It's been...a struggle to say the least!