I was poking around in historical election statistics the other day and one number happened to leap out at me. In 2000, 81 percent of Jews voted for Al Gore while only 17 percent voted for George Bush. The same study also showed that only 4 percent of the electorate was Jewish. This indicates that only .68 percent of the support for the Republican party in 2000 was Jewish. Even godless atheists, Carthage to the Christian Right’s Roma Mater, proved to be demonstrably more Republican-friendly.
A similar pattern held true for 2004. Despite some pre-election hooplah about how pro-Palestinian Democrats and the War on Method would cause George Delano to become the most popular Republican president among Jews since Reagan , John Kerry still won the Jewish vote with ease, 76 percent to 24 percent.
Since most Jews vote left-liberal and since there aren’t very many of them in the first place, you might think that the Jewish influence in the nominally conservative media would be quite small. You would also be wrong, since a survey of conservative opinion leaders Townhall and National Review indicates that around 20 percent of the conservative commentariat identifies itself as Jewish, which is approximately 21 times more than an affirmative-action style analysis would tend to indicate.
Now, I reject affirmative action in both concept and application, and furthermore, I believe that publishers have the right to publish whoever they want. If the Heritage Foundation wishes to turn Townhall into a sister publication to the Jewish World Review, that’s their business and no one should stop them from doing so, although it might raise some questions about precisely what heritage the foundation has in mind. And yet, I also think it is potentially significant that at a time when a supposedly conservative Republican-dominated government continues to comport itself in a markedly less and less conservative manner, a “conservative” media drawn disproportionately from the least conservative group in America continues to cheer its anti-conservative, left-leaning strong central government policies.
There is no need for right-wing affirmative action. What may be in order, however, is for men and women of the right to consider who does, and who does not, truly share their political ideology of freedom, human rights and small government when they select their standard bearers.