J.J. Goldberg is my favorite left-wing intellectual. He makes an effort to understand different points of view and when he makes an argument, he usually treats the other side fairly.
We Americans aren’t who we thought we were. That’s why our presidential contest, like the rest of our politics, is so incoherent. We argue about jobs, immigration, abortion and guns. But those aren’t really what’s at stake. In reality we’re fighting over the nature of American society, and our problem is that we’ve become a nation of tribes. We know it, but we act, each of us, as though we’re above it. As though our neighbors are savages, but we ourselves are high-minded Athenians. Alas, we’re all tribesmen.
Our tribes are amalgamated into two great confederations, rather like the old Iroquois federation. Each side debates internally over issues, but unites around group loyalty. Each side thinks it represents the best of the nation and only the other side is a band of hunter-gatherers. It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.
Now it’s reached crisis level. And if it’s a crisis for America, it’s a double-bind for American Jews. Jews are a tribe among the tribes, but we’ve planted our feet in both camps. It’s an untenable position. It’s tearing us apart as a community. And it could get worse.
For the past half-century, Republicans have been the party of white people. Democrats — who haven’t won a majority of whites since 1964, and only once broke 45% — have become the party of minorities, bohemians, rebels and dreamers. Each party knows it about the other, but denies it in itself.
Democrats see Republicans as people who believe that we’re not all the same, that difference is an innate human trait and that we should value solidarity with those who are like us. Republicans see Democrats as people who believe that everyone is basically the same under the skin, that we’re all free to construct our identity and that we shouldn’t favor those who seem most like us on the surface. These contrasting ways of understanding difference go a long way toward explaining why so many white voters are lining up behind Donald Trump. It also explains a lot about voting habits among Jews…
If my reading of the cultural difference between the tribes is correct, the Republican Party is the natural home for Orthodox Jews. It goes way beyond Israel. Belief in innate difference and tribal solidarity has deep roots in Orthodoxy.
By that token, non-Orthodox Jews belong in the Democratic Party. The idea that we’re all the same under the skin is Jewish Americanism’s foundational doctrine. But as the parties polarize and Democrats become more committed to minorities and dissenters, the place of Israel — and, increasingly, of Jews — becomes strained.
Democrats talk about their commitment to wages and workers, but in a crunch those issues nearly always take a back seat to race and gender.
