Voting for Our Enemies

Culture Lag and the "Liberal" Jews 

 The French Revolution of 1789 resulted in the murder of the French king Louis XVI and the election of a directory or assembly of delegates to a governing body which then constituted the French government. Before the king was murdered, there were those members of that assembly who wanted to maintain a limited monarchy, while others wanted to abolish the monarchy altogether.

Those who sought to maintain the monarchy were seated to the right of the speaker’s desk and were labeled conservatives because they sought to conserve the monarchy. Therefore conservatives are called “right” to this day. Those seeking to abolish the monarchy sat to the left of the speaker’s desk and are therefore called “left” to this day. The media also call those labeled left “liberals” or “progressives.”

The end of the French Revolution came with the ascension of Napoleon Bonaparte as Emperor of France in 1804.

Today, in 2019, American Jews largely vote for so-called liberal causes and the Democratic Party. In the past the Democrats constituted the “solid South,” which meant that Democrats furnished all the politicians who maintained total segregation of the races in all southern states and were responsible for prohibiting blacks from voting or enjoying any civil rights whatever. It is an astonishing contradiction that the very party responsible for Jim Crow laws and for the murder of the Jewish Leo Frank are now favorites of the very Jews who were denounced by southern Democrats and the Ku Klux Klan, whose members voted for the racist Democratic Party. The police who sent dogs at blacks seeking to eat at a lunch counter were all Democrats. George Wallace, the governor of Alabama who would not allow blacks to attend the University, was a Democrat, as were the registrars who would not let blacks vote. The cops who murdered a Jewish student seeking to help black civil rights agitators were Democrats.

 Even today, the Democrats waved a Palestinian flag at their last convention, as only 35% of Democrats support the survival of Israel and Arab congress members insult American Jews. 86% of Republicans support Israel.

American Jews are in the forefront of those who denounce President Trump, who moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognized the Golan as part of Israeli territory, and has been more supportive of the Jewish people than any other president in our history.

Nevertheless American Jews support their enemies, the Democrats. This peculiar behavior is explained by the concept of culture lag. Sociology teaches that culture lag consists of beliefs and actions which reflect social conditions of the past. The conditions which were at one time responsible for such beliefs and actions have long disappeared, while the beliefs and actions they provoked continue to exist.

The American Jewish community consists almost entirely of the descendants of two and half million Eastern European Jews who came to this country between 1884 and 1924. In 1881, Czar Alexander II was murdered on the streets of St. Petersburg, and his son Alexander III became Czar. Alexander III brutally persecuted Russian Jews, leading to the immigration of these 2½ million, who mainly settled in New York City. These Eastern European Jews were desperately poor. They did not know English, had few skills with which to earn a livelihood, and were largely poorly educated. Therefore they were forced to accept the most abominable work in the sweatshops working in the needle trades. They made clothes working in unventilated factories for as much as 12 hours a day, after which they took work home and labored for half the night  to earn a few pennies more. Both adults and children were hungry most of the time, as they were spending their lives in overcrowded apartments in so-called “tenements,” consisting of three rooms housing eight or nine people. These conditions existed principally in what was called the lower east side of Manhattan. Vastly overcrowded, the area was rat infested and filthy and the locale of abject poverty. Education was out of the question for these people, for they worked day and night just to barely exist. The misery of the Jewish population of the 1880s-1920s cannot  be exaggerated. There were no minimum wage laws, there were no old-age pensions  or other Social Security laws. There was no health insurance and there were no medical benefits. Anyone who became sick lost his job and starved and died. There were no social service agencies and the government did nothing for the poor. Except for Woodrow Wilson, Republicans furnished the presidency, including McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The owners of the sweatshops were almost all Republicans. Then came Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. His so-called New Deal made strikes legal, instituted a minimum wage, promoted the interests of labor unions, created unemployment compensation, and invented a host of other legislation reputedly helping the poor. The impoverished Jews looked at Roosevelt as their savior despite the fact that he was a malicious anti-Jewish hatemonger who deliberately prevented German Jews from entering this country, thereby sending them into the Nazi gas ovens. The fate of the German Jews did not interest the American Jews then alive. Their interest was in escaping the horrors of poverty and the following nightmare of the Great Depression. History proves that Roosevelt’s New Deal failed. In fact, unemployment was even worse in 1938, five years after Roosevelt’s ascension, than it had been in 1933. It was the Second World War which finally ended the depression, as millions were drafted into the armed forces while others worked in the defense industries.

Nevertheless Roosevelt became the hero of the Jewish community and because he was a Democrat the generations which had suffered so much in the 80s, 90s, and 20s educated their  children to believe that the Democrats were their friends and the Republicans their enemies, when exactly the opposite is fact.  This inheritance of beliefs that were meaningful in the past but do not really apply in the present is called culture lag.

Sociology teaches that that that which is believed to be real is real in its consequences. So American Jews believe that their enemies are their friends and their friends their enemies, and that is the reason why American Jews keep voting for Democrats.

Shalom u’vracha .

Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including The American Drug Culture (with Dr. Thomas S. Weinberg & Dr. Ursula A. Falk, 2018).

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