Last Saturday, while Northwestern Jews were re-evaluating how seriously they took the sundown-to-sundown no-food- or- drink mandate, Republican presidential candidates, activists and ministers were at the Values Voters Summit, a conservative powwow where Republican bigwigs prove their bona fides to Christian conservatives.
The day before, Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress introduced Rick Perry and called Mormonism a “cult” and argued that the GOP nomination ought to go to “a genuine follower of Jesus Christ.” After his speech, Jeffress said that “the idea that Mormonism is a cult is not some fringe conservative idea.” And while Romney is looking more and more like the eventual nominee in light of Rick Perry’s slow-motion collapse in the polls, the attitudes of people like Jeffress show the Republican Party is not likely to be the home of many ethnic or religious minorities any time soon.
David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who is now something of a dissident conservative, pointed out that the bulk of the summit was on Saturday. This meant that Jews could not attend and were implicitly not seen as potential “values voters.” This is not to say that the Republican Party and conservative movement are not welcome to Jews. Eric Cantor , the House Majority Leader, is Jewish, as is William Kristol , one of America’s most influential conservative journalists.
Moreover, Republican politicians trip over themselves to support Israel, and especially its conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And still, in a race between the hawkish John McCain and Barack Obama, Obama won the Jewish vote by an overwhelming amount, as Democrats nearly always do. This happened despite conservative party efforts to paint Obama as potentially hostile or unsympathetic to Israel because of his past associations with figures like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian intellectual and activist. The old saying goes, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”
The association between Jews and the Democratic party goes beyond the issues and reflects the Democratic party’s historical openness towards marginalized groups. Influential Republicans, along with many Republican voters, always seem to say America is a “Christian nation” or imply that “real American” means “Christian.” And while anti-Semitism is no longer present in the GOP, there is a marked hostility towards minority religions, whether in Jeffress’s anti-Mormon bigotry or in the idea, spread by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, that “Sharia law” is a real threat to the American constitution. Jews have an almost instinctive negative reaction to this type of conspiratorial talk aimed at non-Christians. It’s no surprise that Jewish Republicans have been flocking to fellow religious minority Mitt Romney, and that Romney has pointedly avoided Sharia panic.
Romney, however, has hardly been a paragon of openness and inclusion. In an effort to win over conservatives unhappy with Rick Perry for signing legislation that offered in-state tuition to illegal immigrants who attended Texas high schools, Romney released an ad slamming Perry. The ad featured a relatively lengthy excerpt of former Mexican president Vicente Fox praising (in accented English) the bill. The implication is that if a Mexican politician supports something that helps out (overwhelmingly Latino) illegal immigrants, it is screwing over native-born Americans, who have to pay around $100,000 for out-of-state tuition at Texas public universities. It is not hard to find out why even native-born Latinos who want, say, lower capital gains taxes may find this type of rhetoric off-putting.
Of course, the Republican party can make up for losses among minorities by simply picking up more and more of the white vote. However, as the country becomes more diverse, the Republican base needs to spend more time thinking about who can, one day, be just like them.
Matt Zeitlin is a Weinberg senior.
He can be reached at [email protected]
