You may have noticed that The Chronicle in this issue does not contain much coverage of this year’s elections. I think you should know why.
This time around, the election fits very awkwardly with Chronicle production and publication deadlines. Add to that difficulty our imperative as a non-profit, tax-exempt organization that we cannot endorse or appear to be endorsing any candidates for political office.
It therefore seemed to be a better use of our limited resources in at least this election cycle to let the general news media handle election coverage. We could then reserve our space for more specifically Jewish events that aren’t covered in the general media and that would still have news value in early November.
Nevertheless, I do not wish to omit any discussion of the election. Instead, I want to do a little analysis about the one fact that is probably as sure a thing as U.S. politics ever has — that the majority of the U.S. Jewish community, nationally and locally, is going to vote Democratic and liberal, as it has for decades. It could be a smaller majority if reports about a general U.S. Jews’ disillusion with President Obama’s views of Israel are accurate. But if I were a gambler, I would bet that it would still be a majority.
This community characteristic drives some Jewish conservatives, religious and secular, to distraction. Jewish neoconservative Norman Podhoretz wrote a whole book about the issue, published last year as “Why Are Jews Liberals?” And in nearly every election cycle I can recall since I first joined The Chronicle staff, Jewish Republicans and conservatives predicted that “the Jewish romance with the Democrats is over,” or words to that effect, only to find the day after the election that the “romance” continued.
I have not read Podhoretz’s book, but I have been thinking about the issue for many years. I would like to propose a tentative and different-than-usual theory partially to explain why — and a theory that I hope will promote some community discussion. To give due credit, I have to thank the Libertarian Party for literature that set me in this intellectual direction — though I am not a member of that party, and I do not endorse it, its candidates, or its policies.
Two areas of human behavior can cause problems that can require governmental intervention: personal behavior and economic behavior. To give examples: Personal behavior includes such matters as religion, sexuality, public order, interpersonal crimes, freedom of speech, and others. Economic behavior includes buying and selling, manufacturing, labor-employer relations, business law, environmental pollution and protection, contract enforcement, and others.
Both need some government regulation to create an orderly and stable society. The questions are: How much and how stringently? Libertarian literature proposes that people take four basic political stances:
• The classic left-liberal stance is that, by and large, personal behavior should be allowed as much freedom as possible, but economic behavior should be regulated as stringently as possible.
• The classic right-conservative stance is that, by and large, personal behavior needs to be regulated as stringently as possible, but economic behavior should be allowed as much freedom as possible.
By the way, this contrast “refudiates” (in the new coinage of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin) the demagogic canard that “liberals favor big government, conservatives favor small government.” In truth, they both like “big government.” They just want “big government” to do different things.
• The Libertarians believe that both economic and personal behavior should be as free as possible of government regulation. (These folks are the real believers in “small government.”)
• The classic totalitarian stance – left and right, secular and religious – is that the state should regulate both economic and personal behavior as stringently as possible.
(Some Jews may find this schema reminiscent of the four character types limned in a few passages of Pirke Avot, chapter five.)
I think this model may clarify why the majority of American Jews lean toward the classic left-liberal stance. Most of us feel that allowing as much personal freedom as possible is in our interest. As a minority group, we want freedom of religion and from religious coercion; and with that goes freedom of other personal behaviors, such as sexuality. At the same time, most of us fear unregulated economic behavior, which among other things could result in educational and business discrimination against Jews.
I also think this schema may clarify why a minority of Jews tends to the classic conservative position. The members of this group generally seem to be Orthodox Jews who feel a religious mandate to be concerned about personal behavior even of non-Jews (the “Seven Laws of Noah”); or business-people, or at least business-minded-people, interested in fewer economic constraints.
This schema should not be accepted too rigidly. Inconsistencies abound in the positions some people in all these abstract “camps” may take on specific issues. Many controversies, like proposed legalization of marijuana, involve both personal and economic behavior matters. Finally, how U.S. support for Israel fits into all this is a complex subject for another time.
Still, this verbal “map” helps me to make sense of the U.S. political “territory” more often than not. Might it help you? What do you think?
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