Hewitt Talks To Republican Jews

CONSERVATIVE talk-show host talked to the Republican Jewish Coalition recently, reports Current Jewish Issues. He was not optimistic when it came to the next presidential election.

People look back at the 1980 election, Hewitt told his audience, and remember only that it was a landslide. But, of course, in fact it was a close-run thing and Reagan only began to break away in the last week. Hewitt remembers. He was there.

The 2008 election is going to be just as difficult.

[I]t is going to be a long and difficult and often bloody 20-30 years ahead of us. That’s a very tough hard message to sell in 60 seconds . . . especially when Democrats insist on saying it’s not so, and that we can retreat from Iraq without the carnage following us home, and that we can pretend that the radicalization of the Islamic population in Europe is neither far advanced nor continuing.

Sooner or later, rank-and-file Jews are going to break conservative and Republican. Jewish intellectuals have been a major force in the conservative movement. Jews are prominent in conservative talk radio. But most Jews are still hesitant to join a party that is identified with Christianity, the scourge of Jews for a thousand years.

But Jews have survived the progroms, and they have done it by being adaptable. They have never known from where the next progrom would come. For over a century they have thought that the Enlightenment and secularism have been the safest place for the Jews.

But now we see rising anti-Semitism among western secular elites and the secular rank-and-file. Is there really safety for Jews on the left?

What will flip Jews into the Republican column will be a defining event in the Middle East. Let us hope it is not the destruction of Israel.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

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David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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