1980: Reagan and the Jewish Vote
Thursday, September 16th, 2004My father, a Warsaw ghetto survivor, will vote for Ronald Reagan on Nov. 4 — casting his ballot for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in his 32 years as an American. He says he is voting against Carter.
The president’s failure, in the eyes of the Jewish-American community, overshadow his one real triumph in foreign policy, bringing Israel and Egypt to the bargaining table at Camp David. His waffling on the UN vote against Israel in March and Billy Carter’s relationship with anti-Zionist Libya have bred suspicion and resentment, solidifying the disllusionment with the Democratic Party that began with George McGovern’s candidacy in 1972.
But whatever objections Jewish voters have to Carter, they should carefully ponder the implications of the alternative: electing a man whose major supporters wish to “re-Christianize” America. Fundamentalist right-wing Christianity, both in the US and abroad, historically has incorporated or tolerated anti-Semitism. Fueled by a fear of social change and a sense of moral self-righteousness, its followers viewed Jews as outsiders, or worse.
Today’s fundamentalist New Right clings to a simplistic, paranoid perception that “radicals, perverts, liberals, leftists, and Communists” are responsible for the nation’s woes.
“We’ve got to bring some holy fear to the American system before it destroys us,” declared one preacher at an evangelical rally featuring Reagan as a keynote speaker.
Not long ago, the ideological forerunners of the New Right blamed America’s problems not on secular liberalism, but on a conspiracy of Jews. During the 1920s and 30s, men like Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin carried on the tradition of what historian Richard Hofstadter scalled “the paranoid style of American politics.” They explained away economic and political difficulties with tirades against the “International Jew”.
Anti-foreign, protectionist tendencies reached a peak in the 1920s, when the wholesale immigration of Italians and Jews coincided with a conservative backlash. One historian described the era as “probably unmatched in American history for xenophobia and paranoid suspicion.”
The national mood was set by the 1919 Red Scare (which warned of a conspiracy by German – Jewish bankers and Russian – Jewish Bolsevicks) and US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s raids on thousands of aliens and suspected Communists, anarchists, and radicals. During the postwar depression beginning in 1920, Ku Klux Klan membership grew from 5,000 to 5 million, and Ford began to repring in his widely read Michigan newspaper excerpts from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
The 1930s saw a new wave of Christian conservative reaction, this time with avowedly fascist leanings. The Silver Shirts was a group that advocated the creation of an American fascist dictatorship, to be called the Christian Commonwealth. Father Coughlin, a popular radio personality, harangued about the Jewish role in the origins of coumminism and urged the creation of a “state-capitalist” system. Coughlin’s organization put its own presidential candidate on the ballot in 1936, and got 2 percent of the vote.
World War II redirected America’s concerns to a more threatening enemy than “internaional Jewry,” and so right-wing paranoia was held in check until the mid-1950s, when McCarthyism ushered in the New Right.
The relatively moderate public voice of the New Right still seeks scapegoats on whom to blame for the society’s ills. Phyllis Schlafly, the prominent anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist and long-time Reagan supporter, wrote in a 1964 pro-Goldwater tract that a “small group of secret kingmakers” within the Republican Party are “perpetuating the Red Empire in order to perpetuate the high level of federal spending and control” and are nominating only those presidential candidates who “will sidestep or suppress the key issues.”
Schlafly has addressed such overtly anti-Semitic groups as the Liberty Lobby and the Rev. Billy James Hargis’ Christian Crusade. She has also named Henry Kissinger as a member of a conspiracy to weaken America from within. (Other plotters, according to her, have been Robert McNamara, Walter Lipmann, Clark Clifford, Averell Hariman, Dean Rusk and J. William Fulbright.)
Schlafly represents a new generation of Christian right-wing ideologues who are far too adroit to make anti-Semitic statements. After all, anti-Semitism went out of style after the Holocaust, due as much to the submergence of European – Jewish idenity into mainstream culture as to Christian guilt pangs. There are occasional slips by public officials, such as the 1974 warning against the “Jewish influence” in media and government by the late Gen. George S. Brown, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But most Americans treat then with embarrassment and disdain.
American Jews must not view this fashion of intolerance with a blind eye to the past. The fundamentalist New Right, like the old, does not share the pluralistic, secular, democratic ideals that make America safe for Jews and other religions, racial and political minorities. Even if Jews are not now castigated by name, the political strategy of someone like the Rev. Jerry Falwell (“Get them saved, baptized and registered”), clearly excludes them.
The reactionary right has been looking for an “acceptable”Republican ever since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 defeat gave the party back to the relatively liberal Eastern wing. A President Reagan would not mean an American pogrom, but as Paul Weyrich of the right-wing Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress said, “We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure in this country.”
Jewish voters did not support such rightwing presidential contenders as Goldwater or George Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate in 1968. But as the case of my father shows, a conservative mood has shaken loose the liberal hold of the Jewish vote.
In this close race, that vote is being wooed as never before by beoth major parties (and by independent candidate John Anderson). Carter may be unacceptable to many. But can a Jew vote for Ronald Reagan?
Herb Fox, October 1980.
