The good news from the recent donnybrook over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, the Hitler fanboy with a sizable social-media following, is that it has at last forced conservatives to reckon with the sewer pipe of antisemitism bursting through their walls.
Better news: Many have risen to the occasion. That includes Sen. Ted Cruz, who called out his fellow Republicans for being too timid to condemn Carlson; The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which denounced “this poison in their own ranks”; and Heritage Foundation people who resigned in disgust after Kevin Roberts, the organization’s president, offered a lickspittle apologia for Carlson. Even Roberts felt compelled to disavow his own performance, though he persisted in describing Carlson as “my friend.”
Not a new problem
The bad news is that none of this is going away anytime soon. If ever.
Antisemitism was supposedly banished twice from the conservative universe: first in the 1950s, when William F. Buckley Jr. decreed that nobody on the masthead of the antisemitic American Mercury would appear in the pages of his own National Review; second in the 1990s, when he said it was “impossible to defend” Pat Buchanan from charges of antisemitism. Such was Buckley’s prestige on the right that none other than Carlson issued his own denunciation of Buchanan: “I’m not hysterical on the subject,” he said on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” in 1999, “but I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews.”
Now the Heritage Foundation and various conservative publications are pressing the Trump administration to award an unrepentant Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The notion that Winston Churchill, not the German Führer, was the villain in World War II — another of Buchanan’s hobbyhorses — is again gaining ground on the right.
Buchanan’s obsessive loathing of Israel, along with his conviction that the pro-Israel lobby dictates U.S. foreign policy, is also gaining ground — a mirror image of the views of the anti-Israel left and a reminder of the French aphorism “Les extrêmes se touchent.” Extremes meet.
How did this happen? Cynicism is one reason.
‘Socialism of fools’
“The fact that antisemitism is the socialism of fools is an argument not against, but for, antisemitism; given the fact that there is such an abundance of fools, why should one not steal that very profitable thunder?” Leo Strauss, the philosopher, observed in 1962. Bluntly, his point was that a bigotry for morons — aka, “The Jews did it” — will always be political gold in a world of morons. Candace Owens, the right-wing podcaster, gets this: Her popularity has soared as her Jew-hatred has become more overt.
A second factor is the forced merger of Christianity with conservatism.
Mainstream American conservatives used to believe our sacred texts were the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution; “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and “The Road to Serfdom.”
Now it’s the New Testament. We once thought that religious convictions should be a little more respected in our secular Republic. Now this is supposed to be a Christian regime that tolerates Jews. (Others, not so much.) When Carlson, speaking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, compared the slain conservative to Christ brought down by “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us?’” the inference could have been lost on nobody.
Among conservatives, he paid virtually no price for it.
Then there’s political ideology. The MAGA movement is not antisemitic. But many of its core convictions are antisemitic-adjacent — that is, they have a habit of leading in an anti-Jewish direction.
Opposition to free trade, or to a welcoming immigration policy, or to international law that crimps national sovereignty, are legitimate, if often wrongheaded, political positions. But they have a way of melding with hoary stereotypes about “the International Jew” working across borders against the interests of so-called real Americans. You can be sure that, somewhere on social media, someone will respond to this column by pointing out that my Kishinev-born grandfather changed his name from Ehrlich to Stephens — evidence, supposedly, of sneakiness in my DNA. It’s the type of right-wing identity politics you inevitably get where the question of where you are from matters more than the question of where you are trying to go.
Finally, it bears reminding that antisemitism isn’t merely a prejudice. It’s a conspiracy theory about Jews. Who actually killed Christ? Or brought on the bubonic plague? Or got America embroiled in unnecessary wars in the Middle East? Or replaces American workers with cheap immigrant labor? The idea that modern politics amounts to a malicious scheme organized by an insidious cabal of deep-state insiders and globalists at the expense of ordinary people is now received wisdom on the right, paralleling far-left convictions about the purported evils of Zionists and their billionaire backers.
Jews don’t have the luxury of being indifferent to either threat. The tsunami of progressive antisemitism that hit after Oct. 7 is being followed by another wave, just as tall.
Bret Stephens is a New York Times columnist.