The condescending ignorance of Mitt Romney

Sandy Levinson

I agree wholeheartedly with Jack's analysis of the Romney speech. Indeed, if truth be known, I found myself in relatively rare agreement with David Brooks in his analysis in today's New York Times, which concluded that Romney "asked people to submerge their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end." It was an insulting and dangerous speech, far more so than the culture-war rantings of Pat Buchanan some years ago, about which Molly Ivins said "they sounded better in the original German." Buchanan was never thought really "respectable" by mainstream Republicans or the press; nobody ever thought that he might actually become President. That's not the case with Romney. Perhaps, of course, he is simply the smarmy opportunist he appears to be, with the best evidence being precisely what Jack pointed to: his ostentatious definition of Jesus as "the Son of God and Savior of Mankind" just moments after he solemnly told us that he wasn't going to discuss any theological propositions.
More than ever, I think the only Republican candidates one can possibly have any respect for are Ron Paul, John McCain (most of the time), and, in his own way Mike Huckabee, who is willing to take on the yahoos on immigration and the theological tax cutters on duties to the poor, who by definition have no taxes to cut.

In some ways, I found the truly most offensive passage in Romney's speech to be his basing his professed esteem for Jews on "the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages." This is worse than opportunistic. It is glitteringly stupid, revealing a sensibility that literally knows nothing whatsoever about Jews (and, I suspect, most of the other religions in his litany--whatever onethinks of Islam, it is hard to reduce it to the duty to pray five times a day). Even Orthodox Jews could not meaningfully say that they practice "the ancient traditions," such as animal sacrifice and polygamy. One of the rich ironies, with regard to Romney and his discomfort about Mormon polygamy, is that one of the "ancient traditions" of the Judaism that he professes to admire was polygamy. Ashkenazic Judaism (i.e., the Judaism of Northern and Eastern Europe) did not condemn polygamy until the 11th century; Sephardic Judaism (i.e., the Judaism in North Africa and the Middle East) practiced polygamy into the 20th century. Yemenite Jews who came to Israel in the 1950s sometimes came with two wives. This is for starters, of course. Most American Jews, if they affiliate at all with institutional Judaism, are Conservative or Reform, which are defined in substantial measure by their repudiation of "ancient traditions."

To be sure, I suppose that one might find some linkage between contemporary Judaism and selected "ancient traditions," but any serious discussion would be capable of pointing to the fact that Judaism, like all other religions, has a history, and one can no more reduce Judaism to a "soundbite" (other, perhaps, than rejection of Jesus as "the Son of God and Savior of Mankind") than, indeed, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Obviously, my sensitivity on this particular point comes from my own Jewish identity, but since I also view myself as one of those peculiar "secular Jews," I was also insulted, as was David Brooks, to his credit, by Romney's seeming to have no place in his America for secularists of any stripe.

A bit of shameless self-promotion: The University of St. Thomas Law Review has a very interesting symposium published several months ago on the occasion of the Supreme Court's having a Catholic majority. St. Thomas is a school I admire greatly, not least because it takes extremely seriously trying to figure out what is the mission of a self-consciously Catholic law school in the 21st century United States (beyond opposition to abortion). All of the contributions to the symposium are worth reading--there is one by our Balkinization colleague Brian Tamanaha--but I will also mention my own, which addresses the question whether we can have an adult conversation in contemporary America about the relationship between religious commitments and political action, particularly when it has become a convention, totally opposite from the Kennedy era, to proclaim the connection between one's being religious and how one acts int he political world. (Incidentally, as I point out, Bill Clinton was as willing to play this version of the "religious card" as George W. Bush. That, indeed, is what makes it a new "convention," that candidates across the political spectrum are increasingly wearing their religious commitments (even if not necessarily their theology) on their sleeves. I'm not optimistic about our capacity for informed, intelligent, and respectful conversation on the point, and Romney's speech did nothing at all to dissuade my pessimism.
Posted 4:49 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]