Monday, March 15, 2010

Loyal To The Death (To The Democrats)

I've considered this for a long time:

For all of my looooong life, the Jews have been so deep in the pocket of the Democratic Party it would make Chris Matthews blush. Maybe… just maybe… (I know old habits die hard)…. thanks to Barack Obama, that is about to end...

The love affair between African-Americans and the Democratic Party has been similarly useless for blacks. In the forty years I have lived in Los Angeles, I haven't noticed life getting significantly better in South Central, a region of the city in which Republicans are about as scarce as killer whales.

This doesn't mean I think Jews or blacks or anybody else should become Republicans. They should think for themselves and even change sides when it's advantageous.

2 comments:

Ellen K said...

What is troubling to me is that at the same time Jews as a demographic support the largely liberal agenda, I am hearing in the general population far more anti-Jewish rhetoric. Part of that has to do with the incursion of a large and cohesive Muslim population at my school. But part of it comes from the political notes played out in popular media and music.

David Foster said...

"But part of (the anti-Jewish rhetoric) comes from the political notes played out in popular media and music"

If you trace this rhetoric back, it mostly originates in academia, which is now the engine of anti-Israel opinion in Western society.

The probability that an individual is anti-Israel is generally in proportion to the strength of his connection to academia and its transmission and amplification facilities (NYT, PBS, NPR, etc) This is one main reason why evangelicals tend to be strongly pro-Israel...it's not just religiously-driven; it's also that they're usually totally outside the academic/NYT force field.