WhatsappFragmentation threatens to empower extremes on both the left and right of the political spectrum.
In both America and Britain, a disturbing restructuring of politics is underway that appallingly hinges on the demonization of Israel and the loathing of the Jews. The way this animus has been deforming liberal and left-wing politics has long been obvious.
New York has elected a radical mayor, Zohran Mamdani, an obsessive Israel-hater who promotes the extreme left agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The Democratic Party has increasingly been turning against Israel. Its “Squad” of radical Israel-bashers was mirrored in Britain by Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left “friend” of terrorists who was ousted as leader of the Labour Party because of his extremist views.
Although more centrist, the current Labour government under Sir Keir Starmer has been unprecedentedly hostile to Israel, too, as well as pursuing ruinous left-wing policies.
The forces of conservatism are desperately needed to fight all this. But conservatism is having a crisis of its own.
In America, there’s an escalating civil war over the mindset promoted by the immensely influential podcaster Tucker Carlson, the former cable-TV host at Fox News. He regularly platforms Holocaust deniers, fascism apologists and antisemites like the white supremacist, pro-Nazi, pro-Stalin freak Nick Fuentes.
Heritage, the leading think tank of the conservative establishment, has been tearing itself apart over these views. Its president, Kevin Roberts, stuck up for Carlson and defended the right of Fuentes and other Christians to “critique” Israel without being called antisemitic.
However, Roberts went on to suggest that Israel puts pressure on Washington to act against American interests through the “globalist class,” code for hidden Jewish power and a key antisemitic trope.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance has also left uncomfortable questions hanging in the air. At a Turning Point USA rally, he failed to rebut antisemitic suggestions, including a claim that the Jews had persecuted the Christians, and implied that Israel had somehow controlled American presidents other than Donald Trump.
These attitudes are alarmingly widespread. Conspiracy theories that a “great replacement” of white people is underway in America, that Hitler was right and that the Jews are trying to drag the United States into foreign wars in the Middle East against its own interests are now commonplace within influential circles, especially among the young “Zoomer” age group.
Rod Dreher, an American conservative writer and editor living in Hungary, says Beltway insiders have told him that between 30% and 40% of the Zoomers who work in political Washington, D.C., are fans of Fuentes.
On my recent visits to America, I was told that this rise of “radical populism” had developed from a constellation of resentments harbored by young white people, particularly young men. With many of them left behind economically and unable to afford a house, they have been discriminated against through diversity and equality laws.
The resentment is being further driven by “father hunger,” the fact that so many of these young men have been brought up without a committed dad. There’s also huge fury at those seen to have dragged the United States into catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With liberal ideologues denouncing America for its original sin of “whiteness,” what has developed on this wing of MAGA is a kind of populist ethno-nationalism wrapped up with strident misogyny and antisemitism.
The thought bubble in these circles runs something like this: the postwar liberal settlement has failed; the liberal West brought down Hitler; Hitler should have won.
This parallels the scarcely less breathtakingly dumb syllogism on the left, which goes like this: the Western nation state creates nationalism; nationalism created Hitler; get rid of the nation, and you’ll get no more Hitler.
Those who feel overwhelmed by developments that seem to threaten their whole world generally develop conspiracy theories and fixate upon scapegoats—a process that invariably leads straight to the Jews.
Conservative Zoomers thus blame Jewish “neocons” for the war in Iraq. This is absurd, since the principal administration figures who took the United States into that war were non-Jews, while Israel actually opposed it on the basis that the real threat wasn’t Iraq but Iran.
These radical populists also single out liberal Jews for causing the collapse of the West through race and gender identity politics. Liberal Jews can be criticized, of course, for subscribing to such socially destructive opinions.
However, blaming them for a politically mainstream worldview pushed mostly by gentiles, despite the fact that some of the most prominent opponents of these policies have been neo-conservative Jews, is to tumble down the Jewish conspiracy rabbit hole.
Among the ethno-nationalists, there are also disturbing echoes of the Christian antisemitism that poisoned Europe for centuries. The view that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy is gaining traction among Protestants and Catholics alike, putting into reverse the hitherto ironclad support for Israel by America based upon the reverence for Hebrew scripture among evangelical Christians.
This has all led to a frightening convergence. Left-wingers blame the Jews for capitalism. Right-wingers blame the Jews for liberalism and for denying the divinity of Jesus. Islamists blame the Jews for all the evils of the world. So left, right and Islamists are all now linked to each other by loathing of the Jews.
Alarming as this is in itself, the consequences for politics are likely to be seismic.
America’s Democrats and Britain’s Corbynite hard-left both turn off mainstream voters who reject their extremism. In parallel, if the Republicans are identified with white-nationalist conspiracy theorists, they will also lose great swathes of the public.
However, these extremes of both left and right now have significant and growing traction. In Britain, Corbyn’s hard-left, the ultra-left Greens and the Islamists represent a huge body of feeling that is anti-Israel and anti-West.
Competing with Labour for the same constituency, they will all damage each other. In theory, that would benefit the conservative side of politics. But that grouping is itself divided between the populist insurgency Reform and the Conservative party.
The likely outcome, said the astute political philosopher John Gray in London this week, will be a seven-party split. Reform may emerge as the biggest party in this fragmented chaos, but radical leftists and Islamists will be greatly empowered.
In America, said Gray, after Trump leaves office, the forces of ethno-nationalist radical populism are likely to become even stronger.
At the same time, Mamdani has laid down a blueprint for a merging of radical progressivism and Islamism. That alliance of extremes will damage Democrats and benefit Republicans. But if Republicans are divided between mainstream conservatives and radical populists, they will destroy themselves.
More balefully still, this Zoomer generation—having never been taught the history of the worst that humanity has done to itself—is so profoundly alienated from a liberal democratic culture they believe has badly failed and comprehensively lied about it that they see nothing wrong with authoritarianism and fascism.
The political consensus over reason and morality disintegrated when the left adopted Palestinianism as its cause of causes and turned exterminatory Jew-hatred into a badge of conscience.
That, in turn, lifted the constraints against antisemitism that had previously existed on the right. Antisemitism has exploded on the right because the left gave it permission. In other words, the old guardrails against Jew-hatred have disappeared.
Ideological capture—making impermissible any challenges to the dogma of Palestinianism, identity politics or other “progressive” causes—has turned left-wing views into a hermetically sealed thought system. But on the right, there’s been a parallel retreat from rationality and truth.
Gray says that if politicians continue to fail and thus alienate the public still further, the West could be looking at the rise of real fascism or authoritarianism within a decade.
None of this portends well for the Jews of America and Britain.
The way to respond is to fight like hell: to fight to destroy the progressive ideologies that have hollowed out Western civilization; to fight to turn back the tide of Islamization; and to fight to reconnect Christianity to its Jewish parent by affirming, promoting and celebrating the historic, biblically based identity and culture of America and the West.
