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**APRIL 16, 2024**
On the Prospect website
Schumer Carries Water for Crypto
When it comes to backdoor schemes to help the financial industry, the
frequently progressive Senate majority leader is still the senator from
Wall Street. BY ROBERT KUTTNER
California Public-Transit Agencies Confront Rider Harassment
New laws require the state's largest systems to survey riders about
their safety concerns. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
Democrats Must Start Distinguishing Themselves on Insurance Policy
Amid a crisis for homeowners, Democrats have done little while
Republicans pursue an agenda of bailouts and deregulation. BY JORDAN
HAEDTLER & KENNY STANCIL
Strategies for Victory
Tom Tomorrow brings you This Modern World BY TOM TOMORROW
Meyerson on TAP
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**** Guess Which Two American Religions Share
the Same Political Orientations
Muslims and Jews, that's who.
Last week, the Pew Center came out with the latest in its periodic
reports
on Americans' partisan leanings, finding an almost even division of
the populace between Democrats and Republicans. What makes the 75-page
report invaluable is its breakdown of those alignments by every subgroup
imaginable. Of particular interest to me was its data on the partisan
alignments of different religions.
Some of that data told us what we already knew: that regular churchgoers
are a lot more Republican than the occasionals, and hugely more
Republican than the nevers. In the realm of the not-surprising, we also
learn that 85 percent of white evangelicals are or tilt Republican, and
84 percent of Black Protestants are or tilt Democratic. What's notable
about all the groups of respondents who gave themselves a particular
religious identity (as opposed to those who said they didn't belong to
any particular faith) is that almost none of those groups (Protestants,
Catholics, Mormons, and all their racial and class subgroups) had
remotely similar partisan alignments (though none were so radically
dissimilar as the white evangelicals and the Black Protestants, whose
alignments differed by a cool 169 percentage points).
Except, that is, for two religious groups, both rather small, that had
nearly identical rates of partisan alignment. Sixty-nine percent of Jews
described themselves as either Democrats or Democratic leaners. So did
66 percent of Muslims.
As most of the polling took place in 2023, you could think, as I
initially did, that the Muslim rate of alignment had declined since then
due to President Biden's persistence in providing unconditional aid to
Israel throughout its war on Gaza. But in fact, the polling of Muslims
was conducted in February of this year, by which time northern Gaza had
been reduced to rubble and well over 20,000 Palestinians had been killed
in the process.
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So let's try to unpack this. To begin, the opposition to Biden's
policy of unconditional aid comes entirely from Democrats-and not just
from the Democratic left. Virginia's center-left Sen. Tim Kaine has
been trying to force the administration to get congressional approval
for its continuing incremental shipments of military equipment to
Israel. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi has signed on to a letter calling
for a cessation of aid so long as Israel violates international laws
requiring humanitarian assistance (like food) to civilian populations.
And even on the left of this debate, Michigan Democrat Rashida
Tlaib-the only Palestinian American in Congress-has not uttered even
a syllable about leaving the Democratic Party, even as she has
excoriated Biden for persisting in his policy of unconditional aid.
I suspect, too, that Muslim Americans remember that almost as soon as he
assumed the presidency in 2017, Donald Trump sought to ban immigration
from seven largely Muslim countries, on the grounds that they were,
well, largely Muslim. I also suspect that that is seared into most
Muslim Americans' memories, to a far greater degree than it is to the
non-Muslim college students and other young people who are raging
against Biden, Israel, and, among some of them, Jews.
But there are other, deeper reasons why the political inclinations of
Jews and Muslims are similar-save, of course, on the issues of
Israel-Palestine. Each has experienced, and continues to experience,
bigotry rising to the level of murderous violence. Each has felt the
need to join larger coalitions-often, the same coalitions-that
defend minorities and minority rights. Each has benefited from the work
of civil libertarians.
One such civil libertarian is the dean of UC Berkeley's law school,
who has infuriated right-wingers by refusing to sanction or punish on
free-speech grounds the law students who have attacked, sometimes
blindly, every institution and person they claim to be perpetuating the
war in Gaza. Erwin Chemerinsky believes freedom of speech extends to
those who make even the most wrongheaded claims, and he's taken a good
deal of right-wing abuse for doing so. Yet despite his decades-long
support for creating a viable Palestinian state and his concurrent
criticisms of Israeli governments, not to mention his national
leadership in progressive interpretations of the Constitution (if you
want to read how the 14th Amendment's affirmation of equal justice
calls into question the existence of the Senate, check out Chemerinsky),
he's been subjected to antisemitic vilification for supporting the
existence of Israel. It was only when the students whose rights he'd
defended took over a party he was giving for law students at his home
that he thought those students had gone beyond the broad boundaries of
the First Amendment.
Palestinians have real enemies. It doesn't help their cause when their
advocates relabel their defenders as their foes. Wars engender fury, but
there's a deep reason why the nation's two most prominent religious
minorities-Jews and Muslims-poll alike.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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