17
The clinton-era peace process collapsed in January 2001. In September 2001, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon opened an era in which questions of war and peace in the Middle East preoccupied Americans as never before. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq saw hundreds of thousands of American troops engaged in bitter combat across the region while Americans nervously awaited new terror attacks, debates over the wars and over Middle East strategy dominated American politics.
Inevitably, the relationship between the United States and Israel came under close scrutiny in the course of these debates, and both supporters and opponents of the relationship grew more passionate and engaged. For some Americans, the relationship was a contributing factor that led Al-Qaeda to attack the United States and distancing the country from Israel was a necessary step in preventing a long and bitter war between the United States and much of the Islamic world. For others, the attacks of 9/11 demonstrated the importance of the alliance as never before. Those who hated Israel hated the United States as well, and the best and fastest way to prevail in what some called “the long war” against terror was to work more closely than ever with our closest ally in the Middle East.
The twenty-first-century debates over Israel policy were new in another way. From the 1940s through the 1970s, American liberals and leftists had ordinarily been supportive of Israel, while conservatives and Republicans were often more critical. By this century, as noted earlier, the two sides had largely changed places. While no American political party is monolithic and many shades of opinion could be found in both parties, on the whole Republicans and conservatives had now become Israel’s most full-throated and least critical supporters, while opinions among Democrats were increasingly mixed.
The deep connection between Israel and the American right is unique. In no other country has a profound emotional and ideological connection between Israel and traditionalist conservatives, free market conservatives, and nationalist conservatives become a major political force. Yet in the United States, the bond with Israel has not only been a hallmark of most conservative political action for more than a generation; the bond has been a common tie that helped hold the fractious conservative coalition together.
From the beginning, the American right’s embrace of Israel was problematic for the largely liberal and Democratic majority of American Jews. Fifteen hundred years of grim history in Europe had taught Jews that popular Christianity was often twisted into antisemitism. The ugly history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe had shown that populist nationalism could also turn toward Jew-hatred. The anti-welfare-state, antisocialist ideas that inspired Ronald Reagan struck a large majority of American Jews as both mean-spirited and wrongheaded.
While Herzl had predicted that a Jewish state would be able to overcome antisemitism in other countries and form useful connections with them, the emerging alliance between Israel and the American right was not what he had in mind. Herzl expected that the emigration of Jews from other countries to Israel would gradually eliminate antisemitism, and that formerly antisemitic parties and politicians would learn to treat the Jewish state as just another factor in world politics.[1]
What happened on the American right was not that. What drew the American right to Israel was not the perceived normalcy of the Jewish people and state but their perceived uniqueness, whether as a focus of God’s intervention in history or as the focus of bitter, irrational hatred by groups who often also hated the United States and its capitalist economy and, as some would put it, its settler state ethos and cowboy culture.
For the Republican Party to fall in love with Israel, the eastern Republican establishment had to fall. In the 1950s, the American establishment looked much as it had since the Civil War: overwhelmingly Republican, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant or culturally Protestant, overwhelmingly based in the great cities of the Northeast and the Middle West, with an enclave along the Pacific coast stretching from Seattle to San Francisco. The banks, manufacturing companies, stock and commodity exchanges, universities, publishers, foundations, and law firms based in these cities dominated both Republican Party politics and national life. While the streets of the great cities, and increasingly their city halls, teemed with Irish and Great Wave immigrants, the boards of directors who ran both the for-profit corporations and the nonprofit foundations, hospitals, and universities were drawn almost entirely from “old stock” Americans.
The domination of this American establishment was not only ethnic and racial. It was regional. The Civil War had brought both the abolition of slavery and the victory of northern industrial capitalism over the slave-based commodity capitalism of the South, and the domination of the urban manufacturing economy of the North over southern and midwestern farmers. Southern white resistance succeeded in installing a racial hierarchy and Jim Crow laws across the former Confederacy, but for many years it was unable to challenge the ability of the victorious Northeast to make economic and trade policy that favored industry over agriculture, cities over the countryside, Wall Street over Main Street, and the North over the South. Southern and midwestern farmers and local businesses united to fight the hard money, pro-monopoly Republican power structure, but for the first fifty years after the Civil War their occasional political victories did little to weaken the entrenched economic and cultural power of what came to be called the eastern establishment.
Beginning with the upheavals of the 1960s, the power of the eastern establishment in the Republican Party would gradually weaken. This did not mean a new era of nonhierarchical politics was developing in the United States. The American establishment was not lying on its deathbed; it was undergoing a metamorphosis. Over time, this process would yield a new, socially liberal multiethnic American establishment based largely in the Democratic Party. This new incarnation of the American establishment would dominate the universities, foundations, publishing houses, museums, cultural institutions, broadcasters, and corporate boards almost as effectively as the old incarnation, but it would gradually drop the Republican affiliation, the Protestant religious character, and the ethnic and racial exclusivity of its predecessor. The protean new American establishment would bring Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, and Hollywood into a powerful and fateful alignment.
This shift worked itself out over several decades, and was often generational: the sons and daughters of liberal Republicans became socially liberal, fiscally conservative Democrats. As the base of the Republican Party became more socially conservative and more demonstrably (some would say, obstreperously) Christian, the elite shift away from the GOP accelerated. By the start of the twenty-first century, what was left of the WASP establishment was largely Democratic; the Hamptons, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Cape Cod became, at least during August, among the most Democratic places in the country. A liberal Republican establishment continued to exist, but its power in the Republican Party continued to dwindle.
Rebirth of a Nation
The so-called Reagan Revolution was one of the most unexpected developments in American political history. The once marginalized right, a collection of fringe figures espousing what most American intellectuals and political activists regarded as discarded, discredited ideas, roared back from Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964 to wrench American history into a new direction. Power shifted regionally in the United States as well in these years, from the Rust Belt North of declining factories and crime-ridden, fiscally strapped cities to the Sun Belt that stretched from modernizing and growing southern cities like Charlotte and Atlanta to the prosperous landscapes of Southern California. For the South, in particular, it was a heady time. A new generation of southern Republican leaders like Georgia’s Newt Gingrich made the audacious claim that the South was no longer America’s problem region, backward, bigoted, and blighted, but was now a modern, forward-looking place, leading the United States as a whole toward a brighter future.
Israel was part of the glue that held the Sun Belt coalition together and was encoded into the ideological DNA of the Republican Party from the Reagan era through the Trump years. The connections were often missed by those who saw the New Right primarily in terms of its economic agenda. How and why a program of deregulation and smaller government at home meshed with support for a small and in the 1970s still semisocialist country thousands of miles away was not immediately obvious. But the connections, though indirect, were strong. The Sun Belt Republican coalition was both unlikely and inherently unstable. Pious evangelicals, honky-tonking southern good ol’ boys, blue-collar midwestern Catholics, and elite neoconservative policy intellectuals were not naturally drawn toward one another.
Support for Israel helped unite Southern California with the old South, creating the Sun Belt alliance that dominated American politics for a generation. It helped to enlist often skeptical Jacksonian populists in support of an economic and social program and a foreign policy vision that would propel the United States to victory in the Cold War and shape a generation of Republican policy at home and abroad.
“In Your Heart You Know He’s Right” was the slogan for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. “In your guts you know he’s nuts,” responded the Democrats,[2] and most voters sided with them as Goldwater lost the presidency in the largest popular vote landslide since FDR defeated Alf Landon in 1936. By 1980, when Goldwater’s political heir Ronald Reagan took up the New Right banner against President Jimmy Carter, somehow those same ideas had moved to the mainstream. From 1980 through 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama defeated another Arizona senator in the Goldwater-Reagan tradition, the New Right was the dominant force in American politics. Even when, as from 1993 to 2001, Democrats controlled the White House, they found it necessary to co-opt rather than oppose key New Right themes. As president, Bill Clinton balanced the federal budget, reformed welfare to encourage recipients to reenter the labor market by limiting benefits, and passed some of the toughest crime legislation in American history.
The New Right challenged the political orthodoxies of New Deal America; as a movement largely grounded in the ex-Confederate states, it also shook the balance of power in regional politics. The South has not, historically speaking, been America’s trendsetter. It has more often been the exception than the rule, more stepchild than favorite son. It was not all that obvious even in hindsight how what since before the Civil War had been seen as the most backward region of the country emerged in the 1970s to set the national agenda, how the most Democratic region of the country reshaped the Republican Party in its image, how a region that still venerated the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy revived full-throated American nationalism, how the least developed, most agrarian, and most anticapitalist American region midwifed the greatest extension of global financial capitalism in the history of the world, and why the most inward-turning and anti-imperialist region of the country supported a global American foreign policy of enormous ambition and idealism for thirty years.
It was not, however, the South as a whole or even the white South as a whole that brought this about. Those responsible for the transformation, first of the South and then of the country, were the heirs of the New South pragmatic southern progressives who tried to steer a middle course between agrarian populists and Bourbon Democrats—whose ranks included many plantation owners and other members of the prewar southern elite—to promote modernization and development in a backward and impoverished region.
When American historians look at the post–World War II history of the American South, the civil rights movement fills center stage, as it should. The discipline, focus, and moral leadership of southern Blacks astonished the region, the nation, and the world. It was not just that leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. made eloquent speeches or stood for uplifting principles. It was the patient courage and human dignity of people in all walks of life who insisted on their rights under God and the Constitution. Southern Blacks stood up to insidious economic pressure and outrageous violence. They could not be cowed; they would not stoop to the violence and vandalism of their opponents. That America could produce a people and a movement of this grace and strength is one of our greatest national accomplishments; that we needed such a movement is one of our great national shames.
But the civil rights movement was not the only thing that was happening in the post-1945 South. Even as the Black South began to see some of its long-deferred hopes move toward fruition, pro-business white moderates were also reaping the rewards of decades of work.
The end of Reconstruction left southern whites divided into two large political camps and one small one: Bourbon Democrats, agrarian populists, and New South modernizers. The Bourbons had little interest in improving conditions for either poor Blacks or poor whites. While remaining under the Democratic umbrella the Bourbons were conservatives, supporting the gold standard and opposing all forms of business regulation. They were more interested in preserving their own privileged status than in building up either the region or the country as a whole.[3]
Opposed to the Bourbons were agrarian populists, small farmers in many cases who wanted cheap money and tough regulations on railroads, banks, and other companies seen as exploiting them. In some cases, white southern populists made alliances across racial lines with Black southerners against Bourbon rule, but such alliances were mostly short-lived and always vulnerable to race-baiting politicians ready to exploit prejudice for political gain.[4]
A much smaller third force also existed. These so-called New South supporters were the closest thing the South had to the Progressive movement in the North. Like the Bourbons, men like North Carolina’s Josephus Daniels and South Carolina’s James Byrnes were frankly and fully pro-capitalist. But unlike the Bourbons, they wanted to transform the southern status quo—to promote public education, to invest in infrastructure, improve public health, and otherwise bring the South into the twentieth century. It was largely due to their efforts that school attendance finally became compulsory throughout the South, that state bureaucracies were at least partially professionalized, and that various progressive “good governance” reforms were introduced. At times they supported the regulation of nonsouthern companies like railroads and banks, but they wanted taxes and regulations to remain low overall.[5]
While the Bourbons were happy with the racial status quo, believing that poor whites could always be manipulated into supporting Bourbon policies as long as the race card was available, the New South Democrats were on the whole embarrassed by the suffocating consequences of entrenched southern racial attitudes and sought to downplay the race issue. They supported segregation in the aftermath of Reconstruction because they believed that an ordered, administered system would reduce the outbreaks of violence that disfigured the South and made it unattractive to investors. It was also a concession to the reality that the Bourbon Democrats could always checkmate attempts to provide public services like schools unless the mass of white voters felt that first, Blacks and whites would not mix in the schools and, second, that funds collected from white taxpayers would be spent primarily on white people.
The three-cornered fight for supremacy between Bourbons, populists, and New South progressives was perhaps more bitter—and was certainly harder for outsiders to follow—because the post-Reconstruction South had shifted to a one-party system that was quite peculiar in other ways. Not only were most Blacks excluded from voting, but poll taxes and other factors discouraged poor white voting as well. This opaque system produced results that often confounded outsiders, but over time some patterns emerged. There was a premium on outsize personalities and sometimes outrageous political behavior. Electoral corruption was widespread and routine, with ballot box stuffing common. Loyalties were often tribal. Once one candidate played the race card, it was hard for competitors not to follow suit.
Through it all, New South progressives continued to pursue what we would now call a regional development strategy, and over time it began to pay off. The idea was to attract northern industry and investment to the South. To achieve this, the South would need to build better railroads and, later, highways and airports. It needed cheap and reliable electric power, partly to run factories and partly to make air-conditioning—a technology that would change the arc of southern history almost as dramatically as the cotton gin—widely available. It would need to achieve basic universal literacy and improve public health. And it would need to be competitive on costs, offering lower wages, lower taxes, and less burdensome regulation than states in the North.
As late as the 1930s, the southern states were desperately poor. In 1940, the per capita state income in Mississippi, the poorest state in the union, was $212 per year—20 percent of the figure in wealthy Delaware.[6] In 1940, 15 percent of Arkansas residents had a high school diploma, less than half the percentage in California, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia.[7] While more than half of young people between sixteen and twenty living in western states were enrolled in school in 1940, fewer than a third of young people in Kentucky, North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina stayed in school after age sixteen.[8] While Blacks were at the bottom of the economic ladder across the South, poor whites lagged well behind the rest of the country as well. Unpainted cabins without running water or plumbing were still relatively common sights into the 1950s and 1960s in some areas; chain gangs of convicts still toiled on the roads. Prevailing wages were considerably lower across the South. In textiles, the lowest paid category of industrial employment, southern workers earned 18 percent less in the South than their northern counterparts before World War II.[9] This was an improvement from 1922, when Alabama textile workers earned 21 cents an hour compared to 40.9 cents an hour in Massachusetts,[10] but stark wage differentials remained, and skilled factory and industrial jobs remained scarce across the South.
The New South strategy had already begun to enjoy both economic and political success in the late nineteenth century, but it took the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War buildup to bring the South closer to parity with the rest of the country. Federal spending played a critical role; long-serving southern Democrats controlled key committees in Congress and ensured that the South had its fair share and more of any available money.
Thanks to New Deal projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the South was able to power the factories and military bases needed for World War II. Waves of new factories propelled urbanization across the region. The Interstate Highway System linked southern cities with each other and with the national market. The G.I. Bill jolted sleepy southern universities into new life. Cheap Veterans Administration loans gave the rising generation of white southerners access to modern housing. (Shamefully, Black veterans were only able to use G.I. Bill money in underfunded and less developed all-Black institutions, and were generally unable to find bankers willing to lend them money for housing.) With space program facilities dotting the South in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Huntsville, Alabama, Houston, Texas, and elsewhere; with nuclear facilities in Georgia and South Carolina; bustling navy yards and giant military bases including Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, and Fort Hood, the South teemed with federal facilities hosting everyone from rocket scientists to GIs undergoing basic training.
The waves of prosperity that flooded across the South helped solidify the political appeal of the moderates over both the populists and the Bourbons. As more southerners moved off the farms, and the sharecropper system disappeared, agrarian populism seemed less relevant. And working for good wages in an air-conditioned factory did not seem like exploitation to people who had grown up in rural or small-town homes without electricity or piped water.
The greatest challenge moderate leaders faced was the civil rights movement, and the most emotional issue was school integration. The Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregated school systems inherently unconstitutional and ordered the integration of public schools across the country. Moderates, who had long understood that southern racial politics were, if nothing else, “bad for business,” did their best to temporize and find ways to avoid scenes like the violent mobs in cities like Little Rock and Birmingham, Alabama. However, white opposition to integrated schools was so strong that several states made plans to close all of their public schools rather than integrate. Some went so far as to repeal state constitutional provisions that required the state to provide free public education for their children.
At first, moderates were unable to make much headway against the public reaction. Over time, however, cooler heads began to prevail. By the 1950s, most white southerners understood how important northern investment was to their future. Major corporations were increasingly reluctant to operate segregated facilities. Northern managers and their families did not want to be transferred to cities where mobs of angry white people spat and screamed at small children on their way to school. Cities like Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, where the violent resistance to peaceful civil rights activism was particularly brutal, received worldwide publicity that community and civic leaders elsewhere were determined to avoid. Quietly, in city after city and town after town, white moderates were able to marginalize the extremists, and move with Black leaders toward local progress.
As consequential for southern politics as the civil rights cases, the 1964 Warren Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims and subsequent cases radically recast power at the state level. Previously, state laws and constitutions magnified the power of rural voters by allowing and in some cases mandating radically unequal representation. Alabama’s state constitution, for example, allocated one state representative to each county regardless of population.[11] The reapportionment of state legislatures that followed these decisions shifted the balance of power in southern politics permanently toward the cities and growing suburbs, away from the most conservative rural districts.
Between the economic prosperity and urbanization that New South policies had brought to the South, the evident practicality of the moderates’ approach to the civil rights movement, and the shift in political strength that followed the “one man one vote” decisions, the New South was more dominant in southern politics than ever before. Throwback populists like Alabama governor George Wallace still existed, but by the end of the 1960s the American South was firmly on the road if not to true racial reconciliation and justice, at least to formal racial equality and was fully invested in the idea that maintaining a “competitive” business climate was the high road to prosperity for all.
Meanwhile, even as New South thinking triumphed in the old Confederacy, another kind of New South was rising in the West. California today is a blue state, but the red California of the Reagan years was a cornerstone of the new American right. Orange County was a citadel of Republican power, and the Southland, as Californians affectionately called the southern third of the state, was home to conservative institutions like Pepperdine University and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (known today as Biola), and gave rise to such distinctive American religious forms as the suburban megachurch. Many of the country’s most conservative politicians hailed from this part of California, where a vibrant aerospace industry provided stable, well-paid jobs to the children and grandchildren of the Okies and other migrants who brought southern culture, southern religion, and southern politics with them.
Energy was to the Southwest what cotton had once been to the South: a basic commodity on whose production and sale the whole region depended. Vast oil deposits across the Southwest extended from the Gulf of Mexico to Los Angeles. Historically, the founders of the southwestern oil industry were refugees from the rise of Standard Oil in the Northeast. As the Rockefeller colossus used its monopoly and political power to squeeze rivals, wildcatters and independents left the oilfields of Pennsylvania and Ohio for the Southwest.[12] There, the rich oilfields of these still remote regions allowed them to create companies strong enough to remain independent from northeastern banks and oil companies, and they laid the foundations for a Sun Belt establishment that rejected the liberal politics and liberal religion of the establishment Rockefeller Republicans.[13]
Like the South, the Southwest was a major beneficiary of federal infrastructure investment and defense spending from the Depression into the Cold War. Huge irrigation projects supported the expansion of agriculture and the rise of new cities. Electricity generated by facilities like the Hoover Dam provided power for air-conditioning and factory operations. With the United States engaged in three major Pacific wars between 1941 and 1971, an enormous aerospace and national defense complex grew up in the Southwest.
Los Angeles, already the global dream factory thanks to its dominance of the film industry, helped pioneer a new kind of urban civilization based on the car and the freeway rather than subways and commuter trains. Caught up in this tsunami of prosperity, the Okies and other Depression era migrants could hardly believe the golden dream of California living that unfolded around them.
But like their southern peers, the entrepreneurs and business leaders of the Sun Belt came from a tradition of laissez-faire economic thinking. Combining the individualism of the West with the self-reliance and self-confidence of newly successful entrepreneurs, the southwestern elite saw no contradiction between a pro-free-market stance and a heavy reliance on government-funded public works and infrastructure. Without the South’s bitter heritage of defeat and resentment, they still had a healthy suspicion of northeastern banks and corporate giants. For the most part, they viewed labor unions as a threat to their competitiveness, and resented what they saw as the heavy hand of federal regulation.
What this meant in politics was that from the 1950s forward Sun Belt and southern entrepreneurs and politicians were drawn toward the Republican Party, seen as more business friendly than the Democrats, but opposed the dominance of the eastern establishment within it. In the late 1940s Richard Nixon’s rise into national politics based on his investigation of establishment hero and Soviet spy Alger Hiss was an early sign that new political forces were rising in California. Arizona senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 victory over New York governor and Standard Oil heir Nelson Rockefeller in his quest for the GOP presidential nomination was funded in part by J. Howard Pew, who had moved to Texas with his father to escape the suffocating power of the Rockefeller clan.[14] Goldwater may have failed nationally, but he was the first Republican to carry the Deep South since the end of Reconstruction. The Sun Belt coalition had arrived.
The difficult economic conditions of the 1970s offered an opening to an insurgent political coalition, but the existence of an opportunity is no guarantee of success. Sun Belt Republicans learned from the Goldwater defeat that Goldwater’s opposition to key civil rights legislation turned many suburban and northern Republican voters away. Goldwater’s opposition was on constitutional not racial grounds, but the lesson seemed clear: no political force that set itself against legal equality between the races could compete at the national level. This was not just true for liberal Republicans and independents in the North. The Southwest was not as racially polarized as the old South, and states like California would remain out of reach for a party that was “too Southern” on race.
A regional agenda grounded in a distinctive regional subculture and speaking to the economic priorities of an underdeveloped part of the country could not easily appeal to voters in the nation at large. To make Sun Belt Republicanism the dominant political force during thirty turbulent years, its architects had to keep the white South on board without compromising the GOP’s appeal west of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Both parts of the task were difficult. When the dust settled after Nixon and Reagan had brought the white South into the Republican Party, the old divisions between Bourbons, populists, and New South party factions remained. When former Alabama governor and arch-segregationist George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, he won five southern states. Men like future speaker of the house Newt Gingrich articulated the longtime antiregulation, antilabor, small government, and balanced budget message of conservative pro-business white southerners. But not all southern whites shared these values. To win, Sun Belt Republicanism would have to feel like the old South to supporters in places like Georgia and Alabama while looking modern and national to voters in places like Alaska and Maine.
The answer was to wrap the coalition in red, white, and blue. Overall, the New Right was a movement of what one could call “hyper-Americanism,” a vision that elevated and intensified selected elements of American culture and history into a dynamic and theatrical political movement. Individualistic capitalism, Christianity, and unabashed and unrestrained American patriotism were the foundation on which Sun Belt Republicanism set up its shop. Sun Belt Republicanism offered visions of economic progress, American civic religion, and American identity that were attractive on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and on both banks of the Mississippi.
In each of these dimensions Sun Belt Republicans made a similar case: that New Deal ideology had fallen away from “true” American beliefs and values, and that what needed to happen was a return from the failing values of post–New Deal America to the solid, enduring verities on which the nation had been founded.
The overregulated crony capitalism of the New Deal state was failing because it had fallen away from the true American capitalist system of free competition. American foreign policy was too full of self-doubt and muddled thinking. Victory in the Cold War required self-confident and courageous thinking, not the timid nostrums of State Department cookie pushers. Above all, the nation was experiencing a social and a values crisis because the liberal Christianity of the Protestant establishment was too tepid and uninspiring to keep America close to God.
What America needed to escape from the dismal social and economic conditions of the 1970s, the New Right insisted, was a revival. To restore American dynamism, the country would have to return to the values that made it great in the first place.
As it happened, the 1980s seemed to demonstrate the validity of this approach. By unshackling capitalism from the chains of mid-century regulation, Americans opened up a new era of economic growth and technological progress. By prosecuting the Cold War more vigorously, the Reagan administration pushed the Soviet Union and its communist empire toward ignominious collapse. And those who called for a return to the “old-time religion” of salvationist Christianity were rewarded with the greatest religious revival in American history, a revival that spread well beyond the boundaries of the United States and helped to bind the South, the Southwest, and much of the Middle West into a new majority coalition in American culture as well as politics.
The economics was the easy part. As they watched factories close and opportunities shrink, the idea of “competitiveness” appealed to many voters. America needed a new model for industrial policy and the Sun Belt had one ready to hand. The rising prosperity of the Sun Belt states was so evident that hundreds of thousands of Rust Belt residents were packing their bags to build new lives in Sun Belt cities from Charlotte, North Carolina, through the rapidly growing Fort Worth–Dallas metroplex and Phoenix into Los Angeles and San Diego. Whatever the Sun Belt had, it seemed to be working. Why not give it a try?
But people do not live by bread alone. The New Right needed more than an economic policy agenda. Sun Belt Republicanism needed to renew the American spirit as well as the American economy. To do so, it drew on the religious and cultural history of the South, tempered by the experiences of the Southwest, to offer a new kind of civil religion and patriotic vision that, for a time, united the white South, strengthened the Sun Belt coalition, and appealed to many middle- and working-class Americans around the country.
There were two complementary elements to the new platform for American life that the Sun Belt proposed. First, the religious movement exemplified by the ministry of post–World War II evangelicals like Billy Graham sought to renew the American spirit through a religious revival. Second, the patriotic synthesis of Ronald Reagan linked Jacksonian populist nationalism to an expansive vision of American power and ideals that united much of the country behind the foreign policy vision of the Sun Belt right.
Israel played a central role in both the religious and the patriotic projects of the New Right. As a fulfillment of biblical prophecy in a dark hour for the human race, the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and their seemingly miraculous victories over larger and richer enemies helped empower the preaching of a generation of American evangelists. As an example of a nation blessed by God overcoming its enemies through the strength of its values, Israel was a powerful symbol of the role of America in the world that animated the Reagan right.
Israel worked in Sun Belt politics like the bronze serpent that Moses raised in the desert. Those who gazed on it were healed, and the higher it was exalted, the more widely the blessings flowed. None of this came from Planet Vulcan; to understand the sources and significance of Israel in Sun Belt Republicanism, we need to look in a different direction. Sun Belt Republicanism’s deeply rooted support for Israel owes much more to Planet Billy Graham and Planet Andrew Jackson than to the efforts or the sentiments of American Jews.
Located for the most part in so-called flyover country, these two planets are relatively unknown to the foreign policy pundits and policymakers who cluster along the Acela corridor from Boston to Washington. That is unfortunate. The views of evangelical Christians and populist nationalists are often decisive in the political struggles around American foreign policy. But anyone who wants to understand the role that Israel plays in American life must venture beyond Acelaland into the mysterious recesses of l’Amérique profonde.
The World of Billy Graham
America was not just facing economic and foreign policy crises in the 1970s. It was facing a spiritual crisis. The loss of the Vietnam War challenged long-held beliefs about America’s invincibility. The manner in which it was fought undermined confidence in America’s virtue as well. The civil rights movement was forcing a long, deep look into the American past. Many Americans who had long assumed that their country was a beacon of hope and a tower of liberty first began to wrestle with the role of slavery and racial injustice in American history.
At the same time, the irrepressible conflict between the individualism fostered by a consumer society and the discipline required to maintain traditional social structures erupted in the 1970s. The feminist movement and the early stirrings of what would grow into the movement for lesbian and gay recognition and rights raised basic questions about family life. More and more women wanted to work outside the home, and as cheap and reliable birth control became widely available, both men and women saw less need for traditional marriage. The “cultural contradictions of capitalism” as outlined by sociologist Daniel Bell were on full display as Americans attempted to negotiate a growing divide between their inherited values and their lived experience.[15]
The sense of insecurity about the ideological and institutional foundations of American life deepened the persistent underlying fears about the fragility of human civilization that never ceased troubling Americans who lived under the shadows of the Cold War and a nuclear holocaust. The idea that the rise of the United States was part of a global movement toward the establishment of a peaceful and prosperous world, toward the culmination of human history in abundance and liberty, was not just a comforting story Americans liked to tell themselves. It was one of the crucial beliefs that held the country together. What if that wasn’t true? What if the cool apocalypse of the American Dream was an illusion, and that illusion was beginning to dissolve?
In a country with deep Christian roots like the United States, a social crisis of this depth and intensity inevitably had repercussions in the world of religion. So-called mainline Protestant denominations had long dominated American cultural and intellectual life. They were increasingly under pressure as the descendants of Catholic and Jewish Great Wave immigrants rose to positions of leadership in politics and culture. The upheavals of the 1970s would further disrupt what remained of the cultural hegemony of the mainline churches even as their membership began a sustained generational decline. By the twenty-first century the social influence and financial heft of some of the most important institutions in American life had largely faded away. Intellectually, demographically, and financially, mainline Protestantism had plunged into a steep decline which left these churches unable to play their traditional role at the center of both spiritual and intellectual life in the United States.
American Catholics were not ready to step into the void; Roman Catholicism in the United States, as in much of the West, was confronting a set of theological and vocational challenges in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. With nuns, priests, and brothers leaving their orders and in some cases the Church,[16] American Catholics were preoccupied by internal organizational problems and were not in a position to replace mainline Protestantism at the ethical and religious center of American culture.
Led by Billy Graham, a North Carolina–born Southern Baptist minister who became the greatest revivalist and preacher on American soil since George Whitefield’s triumphal eighteenth-century career at the height of the Great Awakening, a movement of Sun Belt Christianity rose to fill the void left by the decline of mainline Protestantism. Graham and his fellow evangelicals, as they called themselves, united the Sun Belt behind a specific version of Protestant Christianity that both reaffirmed key elements of classic southern Protestant religion and reshaped southern religion into a force that could have a national and indeed international impact.
“Evangelical” is one of the many words in our cultural vocabulary that can mean many different things. The word comes from ancient Greek, where it literally means “good news.” The early Christians spoke of their message of divine redemption as “the good news.” In English, the word “gospel” comes from Anglo-Saxon roots meaning “good news.” Martin Luther used the term “evangelical” to describe his theology in order to underline what he believed to be its close connection to the original message proclaimed by Jesus’s original followers. “Evangelical” is still used as a synonym for Lutheran denominations and theological ideas, and Lutheran churches continue to use the term (written with a capital “E”) as part of their official denominational names.
The term was appropriated by a group of American conservative Protestants who founded the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 to describe an approach to Christianity that was conservative in doctrine but much more open to engagement with contemporary scholarship and politics than the self-described fundamentalists who dominated the world of conservative Protestantism at the time. Over the next fifteen years Carl F. H. Henry, Billy Graham, and Harold Ockenga helped define a new approach built around six key beliefs: that although human beings are made in God’s image, the consequences of sin have so twisted and ruined human nature that without divine grace human beings cannot lead good lives or approach God; that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross and his subsequent resurrection from the dead have opened a path, the only path, by which human beings can recover from a condition of spiritual failure and death through accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior in a process known as being “born again”; that the Holy Spirit acts in the lives of those who have accepted Christ to enlighten and improve them; that the Bible was directly inspired by God and is the supreme authority for believers on matters of faith and morals; that it is a religious duty to share one’s faith with nonbelievers; and finally that Christians should engage in the intellectual and political life of their times.
The new synthesis highlighted some elements of classic conservative southern Protestantism and downplayed some of the most important and distinctive elements in the southern fundamentalism that previously dominated both the states of the old Confederacy and the new Southwest. The new evangelicals reiterated their absolute faith in the infallibility and divine inspiration of the Bible, but for the most part downplayed ideas like the “Young Earth” version of anti-Darwinism which held on the basis of biblical calculations that the universe was only about six thousand years old. They broke with the theological defense of segregation and racial inequality. They dropped the denominational hostility and rivalry that was once a primary feature of southern and conservative religious culture. They dropped the bitter anti-Catholicism that had long been a mainstay of conservative Protestantism. They also accepted the Pentecostal movement into the fold.
These were radical steps. Most of them would have been impossible a decade before the war—or would have been so divisive that they would have split the white South rather than uniting it. Billy Graham invited Catholics to share the platform with him at public meetings and included Catholic clergy among the counselors to whom those who came forward to make “decisions for Christ” at his revival services were referred—a step that was as controversial at the time as his 1953 decision to reject racial segregation at his revival meetings.[17] Graham’s efforts to act as a bridge between the old South and the Northern establishment forced him to strike a difficult balance. While he preached against racism, he did not support the passage of the Civil Rights Act. As it was, there were some significant figures who did not go along with the new thinking, but Graham and his associates were gradually able to marginalize them, in part because of the impact of Graham’s success in the pulpit, in part because the younger generation of conservative American Christians preferred the new ideas.
In retrospect, the critical insight that Graham and his associates brought to American religion was that the deepest divide in contemporary American Christianity was not the line between Protestants and Catholics. It was not between believers in infant baptism and believers in adult baptism. It was not between Pentecostal and charismatic Christians and those who regarded with skepticism and suspicion such characteristic phenomena of the Pentecostals as “speaking in tongues.” It was not even between conservatives and liberals or “fundamentalists” and “modernists.” To oversimplify a complex distinction, the great divide was between “ethical Christianity,” the belief that the moral teachings of Jesus Christ and his followers are the core of Christian faith, and “salvationist Christianity,” the belief that the core of Christianity is the miraculous salvation of believers through Christ’s suffering and death.
During sixty years in the national spotlight, Billy Graham’s preaching returned over and over again to a few basic ideas: that without God no human political creed or movement could solve the world’s problems; that the only way forward was for individuals to repent of their sin, accept Christ as their savior, and begin a new life; that God was supernaturally at work in history and that the terrifying developments in the political and international spheres reflected his long prophesied judgment on the failures of humanity.
It worked. Graham’s message caught fire, and the evangelical movement not only became the most visible expression of conservative Protestantism in American life for the next sixty years, but a transformative force in American culture and politics. This evangelical surge came just as the mainline Protestant churches (often more liberal both theologically and politically) were losing members in what amounted to a mass defection. Between 1965 and 2012, membership in the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church declined roughly 50 percent, while the American Methodist church saw a decline of 33 percent. Meanwhile, evangelical churches saw a membership explosion. The Assemblies of God (for our purposes, Pentecostals are part of the evangelical world) grew by 430 percent, and the Southern Baptist denomination grew by 46 percent. From 1965 to 2013, the Evangelical Free Church of America’s membership increased 750 percent.[18]
Graham’s breakthrough onto the national scene came in 1949, when the still unknown thirty-three-year-old preacher opened a revival meeting in downtown Los Angeles two days after Harry Truman announced that the Soviet Union had just detonated a nuclear bomb. Graham’s message of apocalypse and judgment struck a chord in the City of Angels. As celebrities made decisions for Christ at Graham’s rallies and William Randolph Hearst publicized the new preacher, local print and broadcast media rushed to cover the phenomenon.[19] The then-prominent and influential newsweeklies Time and Life ran stories about him, and the crowds grew.[20] Graham’s message highlighted two themes: the imminence of apocalypse as demonstrated by the Soviet threat, and the traditional message of salvationist Christianity that the only way to save your soul and save the human race was to accept the miracle of redemption through the love of Jesus Christ.
For the first time since Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken turned the elderly fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan into a national laughingstock at the Scopes Trial over evolution in Tennessee, salvationist Christianity had a spokesman whose message commanded the attention and the respect of Americans in all sections of the country and from many different cultural and religious backgrounds. And Graham’s evangelical synthesis meshed with the emerging religious culture of Southern California. The defensive mindset of embattled southern fundamentalism, the entanglement with populist and left-wing economics, the ugly racism carrying over at times into theology: the baggage of the old South had no place in the rapturously sunny Californian Southland.
That the rise of this evangelical movement contributes in some way to increased American support for Israel is well known, but the dynamics behind the relationship are not widely grasped. Those who say American policy is pro-Israel because evangelicals are strong have missed at least half of the story. It is less that Israel is strong in American politics because of evangelical support than that the existence of Israel helped evangelical religion become a major force in American life. For hundreds of millions of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians in the United States and beyond, the rise of Israel is seen to prove the truth of salvationist Christianity in the real world.
The return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the establishment against all odds of a powerful Jewish state in the deserts of Palestine strikes many people as a concrete demonstration of the essential truths of the Christian religion. God exists; he drives history; he performs miracles in real time; God’s word in the Bible is true.
In the United States, the focus by salvationist Christians on Israel acted as a weapon against skeptics and, perhaps especially, ethical Christians. It solidified the claim of contemporary evangelicals to religious authenticity in the light of American Protestant history. Historically, it helped marginalize those within the world of American salvationist Christianity who preferred the pre-Graham fundamentalism to the evangelicalism that overshadowed it. Israel energized evangelical Christianity, it reaffirmed core evangelical beliefs, it drew converts, and it marginalized opponents on the theological and cultural right.
The existence of Israel has given a tremendous boost to the credibility of a variety of speculative interpretations of biblical prophecies about the end of the world among some believers, but it did more to focus than to create a sense of apocalyptic expectancy among Christians at large. In an era like ours, dominated by apocalyptic forebodings, it does not take a Jewish state to make many people feel as if the end of the world is at hand.
Evangelicals were if anything more worried about the end of the world than most. They tend to be skeptical about the effectiveness and even the goodwill of the secular bureaucrats and the weak international institutions that, for liberal Christians and secular progressives, are humanity’s best hope against the dangers around us.
It was not just the survival and the return of the Jews that caught evangelical attention. It was that all the right people hated them. Jew-hatred was, for salvationist preachers, confirmation of a central Christian doctrine: the depravity of the unredeemed. Fallen man, classic Christianity teaches, is not innocent; the power of sin causes people actively and spontaneously to hate God and the signs of his presence.
Evangelicals look at what seems to be the obsessive and compulsive attention of the United Nations to condemnations of and attacks on Israel, often made by countries whose human rights record is far more atrocious than anything Israel can be accused of, and see evidence of the unreasoning hatred against the things of God that evangelical doctrine teaches them to expect among the unsaved. The fire and fury of hate that surrounds the Jewish people, the irrational but seemingly immortal foulness of antisemitic conspiracy theories from fascists, communists, radical Muslims, and secular post-Christians simply confirms the evangelical idea that fallen humanity hates Israel because the existence of the Chosen People is a standing rebuke to those who deafen their ears to God’s call.
The religious importance of Israel to American salvationist Christians was personal as well as global. Not even the most dedicated believers remain free from all doubt. Am I really saved from my sins? Am I wasting my time praying to an imaginary sky god? Is death the end of all things? Will my prayers be answered? Will I see my loved ones again? Does the Creator of the Universe care about my happiness and well-being?
For the hundreds and thousands of questions and doubts that surface in the minds of religious people, the existence and the prosperity of Israel provided reassurance and relief. That they regarded the country whose existence provided such comfort and solace with affection should not come as a surprise. Millions of American Christians were warmly attached to the Jewish state, not as a result of television news, newspaper reports, or social media posts, but because it seemed to them that the existence of Israel made their lives more meaningful and their beliefs more secure.
There was another important relationship between Zionism and evangelical religion. From the Reformation forward, a high regard for the Bible has been a hallmark of Protestantism, but through much of the twentieth century the historical accuracy of the Bible came under sustained attack by modernist scholars and archaeologists. Both the Old and New Testaments, critics said, were filled with legendary accounts. They were written long past the times they purported to describe. The scribes who copied the manuscripts were prone to error. The declining authority of scripture was one of the principal intellectual drivers of the retreat of salvationist Christianity among the educated and professional classes.
Zionism had little interest in the New Testament, but many Israelis believed that the legitimacy of the Zionist project depended on a defense of the historical accuracy of the Hebrew scriptures. Those, after all, were the documents that demonstrated the presence of the Jewish people in the Holy Land. If the Old Testament was a tissue of fabrications and legends, if David and Solomon had never existed, if Judaism was a cultural fabrication of the Hellenistic period, if the story of Abraham was a pious fable, what business did modern Jews have in a land that had never really been theirs?
Both evangelical Christians and Zionist Jews, including secular as well as religious Jews, wanted to demonstrate the historicity of the Hebrew Bible and the accuracy of its text, and Zionist Jews moved enthusiastically into the field of “biblical archaeology.” Using the Bible as a guide, they fanned out across the land to discover signs of ancient Jewish inhabitants as well as, where possible, establishing the historical accuracy of biblical accounts. These archaeologists, like many of their counterparts in a time when nationalists around the world sought to demonstrate the glories of their culture and the legitimacy of their territorial claims through the study of the physical remains of the past, had an agenda, but they were professionally trained, and their discoveries were reported on in the media and analyzed in scientific journals.
American evangelicals and conservative mainline Protestants received the results of these efforts like manna from heaven. The first Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jewish documents dating from before the time of Christ, hidden away in caves and preserved for two millennia by the arid conditions of the Judean desert, were dramatically unveiled in a Jerusalem press conference in 1948. The first scrolls were found by Bedouins; Eleazar Lipa Sukenik, head of archaeology at Hebrew University, bought three of them and an intensive search over the next decade uncovered many more, ranging from large scrolls to tiny fragments.[21] Patiently assembled, the material would ultimately provide rich insights into the religious and political conditions of ancient Judea, and do much to resolve doubts over the integrity of the received biblical text.
That would not be all. Sukenik’s son Yigael Yadin had served as head of operations for the Jewish forces in the War of Independence, but returned to archaeology after his military career. Yadin led excavations in Hazor and announced what he believed were gates built by King Solomon and evidence that supported the biblical account of Joshua’s campaigns.[22] Yadin’s interpretations, like much in the field of archaeology, were and remain controversial, but these and other excavations provided conservative Protestant preachers and apologists with important evidence for their claims about the Bible.
Biblical archaeology continues to play a significant role today both in Zionist politics and evangelical apologetics. Following the Israeli conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, Israeli archaeologists began to examine the neighborhood of the ancient temple, finding evidence of the biblical “First Temple” that existed before the Babylonian conquest.[23] In 2005, excavators found what they claimed was the palace of the pre-Babylonian Jewish kings, and objects found at the site have been linked to people named in the biblical book of Jeremiah.[24] For Zionists, these discoveries offer support for Jewish claims to Jerusalem; for conservative Protestants, they offer evidence of the antiquity and the accuracy of the Bible itself.
Given these realities, the rapid growth of pro-Israel political movements like CUFI (Christians United for Israel) is not hard to explain.[25] But there was another benefit to evangelicals in a close association with Israel. The growing fascination with Israel among salvationist Christians tended to weaken what remained of the elements in the fundamentalist movement who resented and would, if they could, resist the hegemony of evangelicals whose orthodoxy and authenticity they felt they had reason to doubt.
Forward-thinking evangelicals like Billy Graham and Carl Henry faced significant opposition from more conservative, often economically more populist and racially more polarizing figures. Both in the old South and across the Sun Belt, it was necessary for the new pro-business, New South sensibility in religion and culture to marginalize the old populist and fundamentalist culture. Bringing a focus on Israel to the front of the Christian agenda served this purpose well.
The old fundamentalism had always had a strong populist streak. This was partly about class; the post-bellum South had a socially stratified denominational hierarchy. Presbyterians and Episcopalians were at the top, with Methodists close behind. Baptists, the majority faith among much of the white (and Black) South, might sometimes occupy a less exalted social position, especially in the older cities and towns of the region, but were highly differentiated among themselves. Further down came the Pentecostals, often referred to disparagingly by higher and drier religious denominations as “Holy Rollers.”
In general, the further down one was in the social scale, the more fundamentalist one’s doctrine and the more rigid one’s lifestyle. Episcopalians and Presbyterians drank freely (“Wherever three or four are gathered together, there is always a fifth” as people used to say about Episcopalians), danced, and, while mostly supernatural and salvationist in their understanding of Christianity, were much readier to accommodate elements of modernist thought and biblical criticism than other southern Christians. Methodists were generally expected to dance decorously and to drink less if at all, and Baptists and Pentecostals were opposed to drinking, dancing, and in many cases to tobacco and the use of cosmetics. (“You can’t go to Heaven/With your powder and your paint/’Cause it makes you look/Like what you ain’t,” as an old southern gospel song put it.)
The evangelical movement was anything but monolithic, but socially and ideologically it was much closer to the pro-business and racially moderate sensibilities of the New South than to the populism and identity politics often found among poor and less educated whites. One could say that evangelicals were the New South at prayer, and the triumph in the South of evangelicalism was in part about the recasting of old class and cultural differences within the white South.
White southern populism on the other hand was associated with fundamentalism in religion, and the populists’ suspicions of big business, in particular finance, were very much a part of the message of many fundamentalist preachers. Like William Jennings Bryan, many fundamentalists saw themselves in a battle with both Charles Darwin and Wall Street. For some, the failure of evangelicals to attack “Romanism” with sufficient vigor, to make a biblical case for segregation, or to make the fight for Prohibition a central element of their political engagement were signs of creeping liberalism and moral cowardice.
Southern politicians who appealed to this constituency embraced political and economic messages sharply at variance with the pro-business attitudes of New South developers and industrialists. Early in Graham’s career, preachers like Gerald K. Smith, a notorious antisemite as well as a supporter of Louisiana’s arch-populist governor Huey Long, still claimed a significant following.
For evangelicals, pointing to the rise of Israel as a proof of biblical prophetic truth offered an opportunity to burnish their credentials as true Bible-believing salvationist Christians while making open antisemitism a mark of Cain in the Christian church. Billy Graham might not, as some fundamentalists wished he would, preach about how the dinosaurs went extinct in Noah’s Flood, but when he preached that God was working a miracle that was on the front page of every newspaper in the world it was hard not to accept him as a Bible-believing Christian. And it was hard to keep the flames of antisemitic conspiracy theories burning brightly when the conspicuous success of the Zionist project was a principal pillar of the case for Christian faith.
For American evangelicals, the rise of Israel was good news.
It was also good news for American Jacksonians.
The Other New South
The Sun Belt coalition united two New Souths: the pro-business, urban, and suburban political coalition that came to dominate politics across much of the old Confederacy in the post–civil rights era, and the politically and religiously conservative Southwest, made up of Southern California, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma. (In fact, the Sun Belt coalition stretched farther than this—it also included the Mountain West where, as in Southern California, the political culture managed to reconcile the region’s dependence on federal infrastructure and subsidy programs with a fiercely individualistic and pro-business ethos.)
Beyond both of these, and critical to the success of the Sun Belt coalition under both Ronald Reagan and the Bush family, was what can fairly be called a third New South. Blue-collar white workers in the Middle West, called Reagan Democrats in the 1980s, had been, like most southern whites, loyal supporters of the New Deal before transferring their allegiance to Ronald Reagan in 1980. The North’s Reagan Democrats came in two basic types. One was made up of descendants of white southern migrants drawn to the Middle West since the nineteenth century, first by fertile farmland and then by the factory jobs of new megacities like Chicago and Detroit. These migrants gave a strong southern flavor to southern Ohio and Illinois along with much of Indiana and were found in and around the declining manufacturing hubs as well as in rural areas.
The other big group among Reagan Democrats were blue-collar and rural white voters with roots in the waves of European migration to the region between the Civil War and the Johnson-Reed Act. Many were Catholic; most had been reliably Democratic voters at least through the 1960s. The economic turmoil of the 1970s hit these voters hard. Prices for gasoline and home heating skyrocketed; inflation eroded savings; factory closures destroyed jobs, drove home prices down, and eroded the tax bases of local governments facing unprecedented strains.
What came to be called the culture wars also had a role to play. As late as the 1960s, the consensus morality of the American establishment was fairly close to traditional morality as taught by both Catholic and Protestant churches. Secular American society condemned sex outside marriage, homosexual activity, and (in middle-class circles) divorce. Those taboos began to weaken as early as the 1950s when the wide availability of antibiotics turned syphilis from a horrifying fatal disease into an inconvenience and the individualism and hedonism intrinsic to a consumer society began to change attitudes especially among young people. The advent of oral contraception in the 1960s and the popularization of feminist ideas widened the gap between traditional values and the dominant values of American society. After Roe v. Wade and the rise of what was at the time known as gay liberation, the gap would widen into a chasm that half a century later remains a prominent feature in American life.
As the Democratic Party increasingly defined itself as a party open to the latest new perspectives on human sexuality and related issues, the gap between tradition-minded northern Catholics and the Democratic establishment widened. Like southern evangelicals, this once loyal Democratic constituency was increasingly drawn to the social conservatism of Sun Belt Republicanism. Here, too, the Graham reconstruction of southern religion helped. By working with Catholic clergy at his revivals, and by stressing the common salvationist theology that traditional Catholics and evangelicals shared, Graham and the new breed of evangelical preachers and activists laid the foundation for an ecumenism of the right that would include conservative Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Jews who supported traditional moral teachings against the post-1960s values revolution.
I’ve written about the Jacksonian school of American foreign policy in Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World and I made mention of it earlier in these pages. America’s Jacksonian heritage is a complex but powerful set of values, perceptions, and associations originally found among the poor Protestant Scots-Irish who arrived late in the colonial period and settled in the less fertile uplands and mountainous areas of the southern and Middle-Atlantic colonies. Jacksonian culture has been the largest single element in the formation of non-elite white culture in the United States.
Originally a nativist and anti-Catholic subculture that flourished on the frontier, twentieth-century Jacksonianism evolved to attract the multiethnic, multiconfessional white working class of the Middle West. The newer “Crabgrass Jacksonians” share some basic beliefs, attitudes, and interests with the old Jacksonians. In domestic politics, Jacksonians tend to be suspicious of the federal government, resistant to the claims of the progressive and bureaucratic state, but strongly committed to government transfers and entitlements believed primarily to be protecting middle-class Americans.
Jacksonians mix conservative and liberal beliefs in ways that frequently confound those unfamiliar with this most distinctive and widespread of American subcultures. They are both populist and instinctively egalitarian; the Jacksonian belief that all working members of the folk community are equal in dignity and rights to everyone else was, historically, a cornerstone of American democracy. Yet at the same time, Jacksonian tribal feeling has at times been a major support of Jim Crow legislation, the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, the rise of the KKK, and other dark episodes in American history. Like Andrew Jackson himself, Jacksonians express some of the highest and lowest elements in the American character.
Jacksonians’ expectations of politicians tend to be low and their engagement with politics can be erratic, but when Jacksonians find a charismatic leader in troubled times, they can exhibit great loyalty and persistence. In quite different ways, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Jack Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan all found ways to engage Jacksonian America. Bill Clinton owes much of his political success to his fluent command, increasingly rare among American elites, of Jacksonian language and ideology. Later in the twenty-first century, Jacksonians would prove to be the most committed and persistent elements in Donald Trump’s political coalition.
While many American policymakers think of foreign policy in terms of opportunities—creating a global order, spreading human rights, promoting democracy, fostering economic development—Jacksonians take a more realist, even tribal approach. They are much more motivated by dangers and threats. Jacksonians are suspicious of free trade agreements and of human rights crusades. They would far rather fight a war for oil than a war to build democracy in West Kleptostan. They can tolerate foreign dictators quite well—as long as those dictators don’t challenge or threaten the United States. Partly because so many Jacksonians have military experience, Jacksonians are not in awe of the military establishment. They know very well that the Pentagon wastes money and plans poorly. While successful generals can become Jacksonian heroes, staff officers and Pentagon administrators in gold braid do not necessarily command much admiration. Even so, Jacksonians believe that national defense is the most important reason we have a national government and are willing to support a large defense establishment.
Historically, Jacksonians are sometimes an irresistible force in American politics, and sometimes an immovable object. After triggering events like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Jacksonian America demanded vigorous and even harsh action against those responsible. At other times, Jacksonian resistance can block overseas deployments and scuttle treaties. When Jacksonians are fully roused, as they were after Pearl Harbor or early in the Cold War, they become a dominant political force, and no president or Congress can disregard their views. At other times, and on many issues, Jacksonians tune out the noises coming from the political system which proceeds by and large as if they didn’t exist.
Jacksonians look at world events very differently from most American and European policy experts and foreign policy professionals. Jacksonians are not great believers in just war theory or in a robust role for international law. In any war, Jacksonians believe in using all the available force to win; Sherman’s March to the Sea is an excellent example of Jacksonian ideas of warfare at work. In wars against “dishonorable opponents,” like the Japanese in World War II who, Jacksonians believed, carried out a dishonorable “sneak attack” at Pearl Harbor and then went on to mistreat American prisoners of war, Jacksonians believe in taking off the gloves. With full-throated Jacksonian approval, Japan was subjected to the most extensive and brutal bombing campaign in human history, with total casualties in the hundreds of thousands in the six months between March 1945 and the end of the war.[26]
Jacksonian attitudes in foreign policy contain what can look like an odd and troubling mix of Manichaean dichotomies and realist beliefs. Jacksonians are deeply skeptical about attempts to build a liberal international order based on human rights and democracy. They have little faith in international institutions and believe that many foreign countries are incapable, at least for now, of establishing democratic governments and prosperous market societies. They think about foreign affairs in terms of threats and security questions, as I said, and they have more confidence in the Pentagon on the whole than in the State Department or USAID. In the early years of Israel’s existence, when it was perceived as the weak darling of internationalists, Jacksonians were neither interested nor impressed. Over time, their attitudes toward Israel changed and this would have important consequences for the Republican Party and for the politics of Israel policy in the United States.
Jacksonian Zion
Strength is the foundation of the Jacksonian affinity for Israel. Jacksonians admire strength. They can be romantic retrospectively about past heroes and they admire courage against the odds and last stands. But they prefer winners to the “beautiful losers” favored by more sentimental observers of international politics. Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War while the United States was struggling in the quagmires of Vietnam first drew the attention of Jacksonian America to the Jewish state. The refusal of the Arabs to make peace afterward, and the adoption of terrorist tactics by some Palestinians, heightened what Jacksonians saw as a contrast between a strong and upstanding nation and, again from their particular and partial point of view, what they saw as its cowardly, incompetent, and treacherous opponents.
It is not just Israeli strength that appeals to Jacksonian America. It is Israel’s approach to power. This can be hard for people not raised in a Jacksonian milieu to understand: some of the very things that make Israel most unpopular around the world actually make Jacksonians respect Israel more.
Jacksonian beliefs about war, for example, mesh well with some of Israel’s more controversial policies. When Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters send a few rockets from Gaza into Israel, and Israel occasionally retaliates with its air force and tanks, much of the world is appalled by what it sees as a “disproportionate” Israeli response. Overreacting to a provocation is, many feel, as bad as launching the original attack. This is not how many Israelis feel, and American Jacksonians agree.
For Jacksonian America, the most logical and appropriate response to a terrorist attack is a massive response that breaks the will and the ability of the enemy to resume hostilities. While one should try to avoid civilian casualties if possible, the original aggressor bears all the guilt for all the deaths caused in the ensuing conflict. When American Jacksonians see Israelis launching massive attacks on Gaza and talking about trying to break Hamas in response to rocket attacks, the Jacksonians support the effort and wish Israel well. Far from agreeing with European and other critics of Israel’s response, Jacksonians wish that more of the NATO allies shared what they see as the refreshingly honest and realistic approach to war that the Israelis have. They believe that if more countries had the courage and determination of the Israelis, there would be many fewer terrorists and the world would have more peace.
Jacksonians see no problems with the controversial American prison for captured enemy combatants established at Guantánamo during the Bush administration. Similarly, they are comfortable with Israeli actions on the West Bank that many find unacceptable. Jacksonians tend to support strong and even harsh measures against terrorists, and they think the job of American presidents is to protect the American people regardless of what squeamish human rights lawyers think about the methods employed. While Israel’s actual policies are often more restrained than Jacksonians would like, and its military is far more concerned about legality than the average American Jacksonian would be in a similar situation, nevertheless Israel’s clear determination to defend its people and its military resonates deeply with Jacksonian ideas about how a country should defend itself.
A strong U.S.-Israel alliance appeals to most Jacksonians in part because they like Israel and admire its approach to world politics, but Jacksonians instinctively think in “America First” terms and their support for an alliance ultimately depends on their views of whether they think an alliance with Israel is good for the United States. Where Wilsonians look for common values in choosing allies, Jacksonians look for allies with similar interests, and by interests Jacksonians mean primarily enemies. Believing as they do that fear is the most important factor in international relations, Jacksonians look for allies who can help the United States overcome the enemies it fears. Believing as they do that nations do not act altruistically, Jacksonians look for countries who fear the same enemies that the United States fears and, ideally, fear them more than we do. That fear, and their eagerness to win American help against their enemies, will keep allies helpful and loyal. Jacksonians also look for evidence that an ally or potential ally is committed to its own security. They do not think it is America’s place to provide free guarantees to foreign countries that refuse to invest in their own defense. America’s help should go to those who are prepared to earn it.
From this standpoint, Israel appears to be an exemplary ally. The United States and Israel share so many enemies that anti-U.S. signs can often be found at anti-Israel rallies and that those most prominently associated with the cry of “Death to America!” will often also be found shouting “Death to Israel!”
Ever since the oil embargos and the seizure of American diplomatic hostages during the Iranian Revolution, Jacksonian America has mostly seen the Muslim Middle East as dominated by the hatred of America and everything it stands for. The wars in the Gulf, the long-standing hostility of the Iranian regime, and the attacks of 9/11 further strengthened this impression.
The rise of the threat of Middle East terrorism has made Israel’s position seem even more sympathetic to Jacksonians. To Jacksonians deeply concerned about what they believe to be serious and long-term threats from the Middle East, Israel looks like a good ally to have, if only because Israel’s geographical position and relations with militant Islam put it even more firmly in the crosshairs than the United States. Israel needs American help in what is ultimately a war of survival, and so Americans can count on Israel being there through thick and thin. Rather than wanting to distance themselves from Israel in the hope that this will deflect the terrorists’ wrath from the United States, Jacksonians see Israel’s regional unpopularity as an asset because it ensures that Israel is fully committed to the common cause. Beyond that, Jacksonians do not believe that it is either prudent or wise to let fear of your enemies make you abandon your friends. This, in their view, is cowardly and dishonorable behavior that signals weakness and invites attack.
Israel’s enemies have always, despite their best efforts, been Israel’s most helpful friends. It may not be rational in the sense that non-Jacksonians understand the meaning of the word, but every time a violent mob burns American and Israeli flags side by side in the Islamic world, every time a United Nations office issues what to Jacksonian ears sounds like a grotesquely one-sided condemnation of Israel for behaving exactly as Jacksonians under enemy fire would behave, every time a suicide bomber kills innocent people out of a twisted and fanatical belief, every time a village of Christians flees their ancestral homes in terror, American Jacksonians become less interested in the case against the Jewish state and more eager to deepen our alliance with it.
Finally, Israel holds up its end of the bargain when it comes to defending itself. While rich countries like Germany reject any and all American requests to pay an appropriate share of NATO’s costs, Israel invests in excellent military forces and is not afraid to use them. In 2020, Israel spent 5.6 percent of its GDP on defense, compared to 2.2 percent in Britain, 2.1 percent in France, 1.4 percent in Germany, and 3.7 percent in the United States.[27] For many Jacksonians, Israel is a better, more trustworthy, and more useful ally than most of the NATO countries. While both Germany and Japan have had major American bases on their soil since World War II, the American military presence in Israel is minimal. Israel does more, many Jacksonians feel, and asks less, than many of the American allies that coast on American security guarantees while criticizing both Israel and the United States nonstop.
The alliance with Israel, far from looking like a strategic liability to Jacksonians, looks like a source of strength and prestige. One advantage, in the Jacksonian mind, is the signal Israel’s success sends about the wisdom of alliances with America. Israel is a small country that (until recent oil and gas discoveries changed the picture somewhat) had few natural resources and a much smaller population than many of its enemies. Criticized by Europe, ostracized by the Muslim world, Israel has only one true friend in the world—and look at how well Israel is doing. It is prosperous, extremely well armed and well integrated into global financial markets. The message to other countries: there is only one country in the world whose friendship you need. If the United States is your ally, even if everyone else turns against you, life will go well. Jacksonians believe that this perception around the world will help keep America safe.
Similarly, ever since the United States became Israel’s principal arms supplier during the Cold War, Israel’s wars and confrontations with its neighbors have served to showcase the superiority of American technology and weapons. When Israel’s American-supplied arsenal overmasters its rivals in conventional warfare, governments all over the world get two messages. First, you want to have the kind of relationship with the Americans in which you can buy their top-shelf hardware, and second, you do not want the Americans so annoyed with you that they sell the really powerful gear to your opponents.
Finally, Jacksonians have come to see Israel as a kind of symbolic surrogate of the United States. Their view of Israeli Jews—as a Chosen People with a unique message, embattled in a hostile world by the enemies of God, united against hostile outsiders in an unbreakable unity of kith and kin—applies the ideas that Bible-reading Protestant Christians in the British Isles and the American colonies once held about the ancient Hebrews to the Jews of today. It is easy for scholars and skeptics to take issue with this vision, but its roots are deeply implanted in American culture.
As Israel has gone from strength to strength it has become a kind of talisman for many American Jacksonians. Recent generations have seen Jacksonian America undergo a series of shocks and challenges. The civil rights movement undermined long-held ideas about the nature of American society and forced Jacksonians to confront some of its historical demons. A culture and belief system shaped in a rural, ethnically homogeneous America had to adapt to life in multiethnic suburbs. Feminism and the gay rights movement forced Jacksonians to take another look at the relationship of their traditional social values and assumptions to the individualism that Jacksonian culture cherishes. As Jacksonian America struggles to make its peace with a host of new forces and new ideas, signs of continuity with the past are welcome. The modern Israeli success story appears to vindicate both Jacksonian principles and biblical religion; there is a balm in Gilead that soothes the wounded soul.
Apocalypse, admiration, alliance, identification: these pillars of the relationship between Israel and Jacksonian America would only deepen after the attacks of 9/11. With Jacksonian and evangelical support more critical than ever to a Republican president, George W. Bush would struggle to integrate the convictions of his base into a strategic response to terrorism. Both his successes and his failures would reflect the unexpected tensions of a twenty-first century that did not appear to be following an American script.