Isn't antisemitism necessary for the conservative project in the way that class structure is for the liberal? If your prime concern is maintaining hierarchy and holding back hordes of barbarian savages, the notion of a perfidious, cunning cabal of shadowy rootless cosmopolitans weakening you is natural. How else could the Master be beaten by the Slave?
It needs something structurally resembling antisemitism at least. In the UK a lot of this energy has been re-directed towards Muslims with extremely similar tropes/symbolism to the classic antisemitic ones and our OG version of it was arguably anti-Catholicism.
Yeah Cromwellian anti-Papism is very similar. I was going to mention Arendt and her quote "if the Jew did not exist the anti-Semite would create one" but my comment ran long. You can see it most recently in Israel where Likudnik ideology requires a shadowy, international cabal hypnotizing the world against the righteous outpost in a sea of barbarism.
You definitely need some sort of population against which to direct the mob's anger and violence - and, more importantly, a class of humans or subhumans to whom they can feel superior in some way. This is one of the main functions of ICE being given free rain to attack and humiliate its victims, to give the mob members who make up its ranks a sense of power and, by extension, pride and self-worth.
Apparently some people thought that role was now occupied by undocumented immigrants and Muslims and that Jews had been accepted into the superior class due to their 'shared Judeo-Christian values' or what have you. Illegal immigrants especially have a lot of parallels to Jews in Europe having extremely contingent and unstable forms of membership in society, including citizenship and right of residence being given and taken away capriciously. Now they're finding out that this acceptance was an illusion.
Some have. The conservative Jews I know are far more preoccupied with anti-semitism on the left which, while it definitely exists, has nowhere near the strength and institutional reach of conservative anti-semitism. Aside from the ever constant references to George Soros, and the embrace of figures like Carlson, Owens, and Fuente, the number of Nazi-adjacent members of the trump regime should clue them in that anti-semitism isn't just a bug of contemporary American conservativism but an enduring feature.
Antisemitism is not at all parallel to anti-immigrant sentiment. A self-styled herrenvolk needs a subaltern race to whom they can feel superior. And that is indeed how anti-immigrant sentiment works. It also explains Nazi attitudes toward Slavs, or US attitudes toward people of color. The herrenvolk can then subordinate the inferiors, as with US black people or Dalits. Or the herrenvolk can eliminate them, either through "final solutions" or forced expulsions.
But antisemitism has a different mechanism. The herrenvolk feels *inferior* to the Jews (or Parsees, or overseas Chinese or Indians): somehow cheated by subtle machinations which they do not quite understand. Subordination is out of the question, since the inferiors cannot subordinate their natural superiors. This leaves elimination. There is an option for eliminating superiors that is unavailable for inferiors: intermarriage or other forms of total assimilation.
Early 20th century antisemitism in Eastern Europe or in the Austro-Hungarian empire (where Hitler grew up) tapped into both of these sentiments. The antisemites were resentful of the Jews who had managed to raise to bourgeoisie after the legal restrictions on what they could actually do and own were lifted. But there was also a huge class of extremely impoverished Jews who lived in the Pale of settlement or who came to Europe (when they didn't go to the US or to Palestine) fleeing czar Alexander III's antisemitic laws and the pogroms. So Jews were to antisemites, at the same time, a symbol of a reviled capitalistic class and a symbol of the poor huddled masses. They later also became a symbol of socialism... Basically the scapegoat for everything the antisemites disliked about modernity.
Excellent post! I'd say that the mainstream Republican party started to normalize antisemitism around the 1990's, when the term "elite" became a standard term of political abuse. The word "elite" was carefully defined to include and exclude just the right people. Excluded: most richies. Included: journalists, financiers, lawyers, entertainers, academics, internationalists, etc. IOW: Jews.
Mainstream Republicans use "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as an instruction manual. And as ever, it works well with the mob.
That Fuentes origin story is straight out of Mein Kampf. The moment of revelation where the ‘normie’ realises his white consciousness almost despite himself. Actually sent a chill down my spine
"Hitler does not present himself as a fanatical Jew hater from the outset. Instead, he makes a point of authenticating his anti-Semitism by depicting it as the result of a learning process."--Koschorke, A., Butler, E. [Translator] (2017). On Hitler’s Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism.
david duke used the same schtick in his bildungsroman *my awakening*
"But, again, that’s sort of the story of the entire right. At best, they were highly irresponsible and overly fixated on resisting “woke” and “P.C.” "
Actually, if you were at all interested in retaining some sort of cultural autonomy and keeping culture from becoming entirely overwhelmed by politics, there were good reasons to resist "woke" and "P.C." Unfortunately, the right was not interested in any of them; it just wanted to impose its own versions of "woke" and "P.C." on the culture, based on an absurdly partial and overly militaristic reading of "Western culture." Thanks to them, we are stuck with a version of Western culture that trivializes or omits altogether all the good stuff it produced over the centuries.
Trump won in 2016 by distinguishing himself in the GOP primary by criticism of the Iraq War.
Your 2020 article even suggests differences over the Iraq War as a cause of the split of Carlson & co. from the "bomb Iran" neoconservatives.
Like, well David Frum is a great guy today but he wrote one of the most disastrous speeches in US history - "Axis of Evil."
Few people can parse the difference between a cohort of an ethnic group which militates on behalf of "the home country" to the detriment of the interests of the USA and the ethnic group as a whole.
There have been several instances, from the German-American Bund, through Greek-Americans fighting the presence of Turkey within NATO, to Irish-Americans like Rep. Peter King playing footsie with the IRA planting bombs in London. Organized Jewish-American support for attacking Iraq was a particularly notable example.
I agree that many ethnic groups have argued on behalf of their home country to the detriment of (perceived) US interests. This would also include Armenian-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, Hungarian-Americans, Polish-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans, and perhaps black Americans. It's the American Way!
But this has seldom harmed perceptions of the ethnic group. There has only been blowback for Jewish-Americans and (in WWI) German-Americans.
Considering the support for the "home country" : It's about scale, impact, and duration. Out of the examples you provide, only the Cubans have had any significant impact by enforcing the counterproductive embargo on Cuba.
The USA's sponsorship of Israel has led to a series of foreign policy and military disasters in addition to the raw dollar expense of it.
In addition to that, there's been an unprecedented attempt to abridge free speech rights to suppress criticism of Israel. Tens of millions of NIH research grants to Harvard Public Health School etc stopped in order to pressure Harvard to shut down Gaza protests and academic discussion. This infringes not just on Americans' right to speak but also on their right to listen.
Of course there is an ur-antisemitism that comes out of medieval Europe and revived in European fascism. But in my life in the USA, I haven't seen anything like the antisemitism currently being expressed. You'd only hear old Polish guys ranting or poor black guys telling you Jews controlled everything. Now it is being mainstreamed.
My short-term remedy would be to treat Israel like the foreign country it is and let it go its own way as long as it doesn't act against US interests. Perhaps we should force a settlement of Israel / Palestine a la Bosnia and Kosovo.
Neoconservatives were not all Jewish and it’s not clear to me they were even advocating on behalf of Israel. It’s true they weren’t antagonistic towards Israel, like the Nazi Carlson.
Whatever Fuentes represents ideologically, he’s certainly politically beneficial to the Trump coalition. Crude stormfront Nazis have always been useful to helping the unconditional defenders of Israel, who have institutional power, seem reasonable and necessary, not to mention feeding into the general climate of antisemitism hysteria (it doesn’t matter that it’s coming from the right, they can blame it on the left without breaking stride) that takes the edge off the actual campaign of anti-Muslim/anti-immigrant mania that issues directly from the White House. Fringe fascists are mostly of utility to the mainstream ones.
“Antisemitism hysteria.” I don’t think it’s hysterical in the least for me to be concerned that there have to be armed guards outside my synagogue and that a Nazi is on a #1 podcast. Do you?
Looking back it seems like the true nature of the Buckley excommunicating the Birchers thing was not so much that a binding and consistent cordon sanitaire was established, but a relationship of power whereby the Buckleyite Conservatism Inc. elites of the movement had the authority to draw or not draw the line in any given case, and as you point out sometimes to change their mind.
And in this grim chapter we see how that authority has ended. Tucker, Buckley's aesthetic if not intellectual heir, has absolutely no power or sway to write a figure like Fuentes out of the movement, it is increasingly the other way around.
Maybe it's just glib to point out that every conservative/authoritarian plan copies the arc of "Frankenstein." But it happens so often and so obviously I'm beginning to think that's what Shelley was really dramatizing, this template where you stitch together a monster out of parts and set it on your enemies, but then it turns on you.
Isn't antisemitism necessary for the conservative project in the way that class structure is for the liberal? If your prime concern is maintaining hierarchy and holding back hordes of barbarian savages, the notion of a perfidious, cunning cabal of shadowy rootless cosmopolitans weakening you is natural. How else could the Master be beaten by the Slave?
It needs something structurally resembling antisemitism at least. In the UK a lot of this energy has been re-directed towards Muslims with extremely similar tropes/symbolism to the classic antisemitic ones and our OG version of it was arguably anti-Catholicism.
Yeah Cromwellian anti-Papism is very similar. I was going to mention Arendt and her quote "if the Jew did not exist the anti-Semite would create one" but my comment ran long. You can see it most recently in Israel where Likudnik ideology requires a shadowy, international cabal hypnotizing the world against the righteous outpost in a sea of barbarism.
That was Sartre I believe
You definitely need some sort of population against which to direct the mob's anger and violence - and, more importantly, a class of humans or subhumans to whom they can feel superior in some way. This is one of the main functions of ICE being given free rain to attack and humiliate its victims, to give the mob members who make up its ranks a sense of power and, by extension, pride and self-worth.
Apparently some people thought that role was now occupied by undocumented immigrants and Muslims and that Jews had been accepted into the superior class due to their 'shared Judeo-Christian values' or what have you. Illegal immigrants especially have a lot of parallels to Jews in Europe having extremely contingent and unstable forms of membership in society, including citizenship and right of residence being given and taken away capriciously. Now they're finding out that this acceptance was an illusion.
Some have. The conservative Jews I know are far more preoccupied with anti-semitism on the left which, while it definitely exists, has nowhere near the strength and institutional reach of conservative anti-semitism. Aside from the ever constant references to George Soros, and the embrace of figures like Carlson, Owens, and Fuente, the number of Nazi-adjacent members of the trump regime should clue them in that anti-semitism isn't just a bug of contemporary American conservativism but an enduring feature.
Antisemitism is not at all parallel to anti-immigrant sentiment. A self-styled herrenvolk needs a subaltern race to whom they can feel superior. And that is indeed how anti-immigrant sentiment works. It also explains Nazi attitudes toward Slavs, or US attitudes toward people of color. The herrenvolk can then subordinate the inferiors, as with US black people or Dalits. Or the herrenvolk can eliminate them, either through "final solutions" or forced expulsions.
But antisemitism has a different mechanism. The herrenvolk feels *inferior* to the Jews (or Parsees, or overseas Chinese or Indians): somehow cheated by subtle machinations which they do not quite understand. Subordination is out of the question, since the inferiors cannot subordinate their natural superiors. This leaves elimination. There is an option for eliminating superiors that is unavailable for inferiors: intermarriage or other forms of total assimilation.
Early 20th century antisemitism in Eastern Europe or in the Austro-Hungarian empire (where Hitler grew up) tapped into both of these sentiments. The antisemites were resentful of the Jews who had managed to raise to bourgeoisie after the legal restrictions on what they could actually do and own were lifted. But there was also a huge class of extremely impoverished Jews who lived in the Pale of settlement or who came to Europe (when they didn't go to the US or to Palestine) fleeing czar Alexander III's antisemitic laws and the pogroms. So Jews were to antisemites, at the same time, a symbol of a reviled capitalistic class and a symbol of the poor huddled masses. They later also became a symbol of socialism... Basically the scapegoat for everything the antisemites disliked about modernity.
"The socialism of fools"
Excellent post! I'd say that the mainstream Republican party started to normalize antisemitism around the 1990's, when the term "elite" became a standard term of political abuse. The word "elite" was carefully defined to include and exclude just the right people. Excluded: most richies. Included: journalists, financiers, lawyers, entertainers, academics, internationalists, etc. IOW: Jews.
Mainstream Republicans use "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as an instruction manual. And as ever, it works well with the mob.
That Fuentes origin story is straight out of Mein Kampf. The moment of revelation where the ‘normie’ realises his white consciousness almost despite himself. Actually sent a chill down my spine
"Hitler does not present himself as a fanatical Jew hater from the outset. Instead, he makes a point of authenticating his anti-Semitism by depicting it as the result of a learning process."--Koschorke, A., Butler, E. [Translator] (2017). On Hitler’s Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism.
david duke used the same schtick in his bildungsroman *my awakening*
"But, again, that’s sort of the story of the entire right. At best, they were highly irresponsible and overly fixated on resisting “woke” and “P.C.” "
Actually, if you were at all interested in retaining some sort of cultural autonomy and keeping culture from becoming entirely overwhelmed by politics, there were good reasons to resist "woke" and "P.C." Unfortunately, the right was not interested in any of them; it just wanted to impose its own versions of "woke" and "P.C." on the culture, based on an absurdly partial and overly militaristic reading of "Western culture." Thanks to them, we are stuck with a version of Western culture that trivializes or omits altogether all the good stuff it produced over the centuries.
Bibi has given them a huge boost.
https://anniegottlieb.substack.com/p/untitled?utm_source=publication-search
The Iraq War is the root of this trend.
Trump won in 2016 by distinguishing himself in the GOP primary by criticism of the Iraq War.
Your 2020 article even suggests differences over the Iraq War as a cause of the split of Carlson & co. from the "bomb Iran" neoconservatives.
Like, well David Frum is a great guy today but he wrote one of the most disastrous speeches in US history - "Axis of Evil."
Few people can parse the difference between a cohort of an ethnic group which militates on behalf of "the home country" to the detriment of the interests of the USA and the ethnic group as a whole.
There have been several instances, from the German-American Bund, through Greek-Americans fighting the presence of Turkey within NATO, to Irish-Americans like Rep. Peter King playing footsie with the IRA planting bombs in London. Organized Jewish-American support for attacking Iraq was a particularly notable example.
It's not the root of the trend because it goes back farther, but it is important.
I agree that many ethnic groups have argued on behalf of their home country to the detriment of (perceived) US interests. This would also include Armenian-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, Hungarian-Americans, Polish-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans, and perhaps black Americans. It's the American Way!
But this has seldom harmed perceptions of the ethnic group. There has only been blowback for Jewish-Americans and (in WWI) German-Americans.
Considering the support for the "home country" : It's about scale, impact, and duration. Out of the examples you provide, only the Cubans have had any significant impact by enforcing the counterproductive embargo on Cuba.
The USA's sponsorship of Israel has led to a series of foreign policy and military disasters in addition to the raw dollar expense of it.
In addition to that, there's been an unprecedented attempt to abridge free speech rights to suppress criticism of Israel. Tens of millions of NIH research grants to Harvard Public Health School etc stopped in order to pressure Harvard to shut down Gaza protests and academic discussion. This infringes not just on Americans' right to speak but also on their right to listen.
Of course there is an ur-antisemitism that comes out of medieval Europe and revived in European fascism. But in my life in the USA, I haven't seen anything like the antisemitism currently being expressed. You'd only hear old Polish guys ranting or poor black guys telling you Jews controlled everything. Now it is being mainstreamed.
My short-term remedy would be to treat Israel like the foreign country it is and let it go its own way as long as it doesn't act against US interests. Perhaps we should force a settlement of Israel / Palestine a la Bosnia and Kosovo.
Neoconservatives were not all Jewish and it’s not clear to me they were even advocating on behalf of Israel. It’s true they weren’t antagonistic towards Israel, like the Nazi Carlson.
The viper bites them, but do they feel its venom? We do, but do they? I still can’t tell.
Watching Richard Hannania seethe over the full groyper takeover on the right is a silver lining, I am ashamed to say, albeit a very very thin one.
Whatever Fuentes represents ideologically, he’s certainly politically beneficial to the Trump coalition. Crude stormfront Nazis have always been useful to helping the unconditional defenders of Israel, who have institutional power, seem reasonable and necessary, not to mention feeding into the general climate of antisemitism hysteria (it doesn’t matter that it’s coming from the right, they can blame it on the left without breaking stride) that takes the edge off the actual campaign of anti-Muslim/anti-immigrant mania that issues directly from the White House. Fringe fascists are mostly of utility to the mainstream ones.
“Antisemitism hysteria.” I don’t think it’s hysterical in the least for me to be concerned that there have to be armed guards outside my synagogue and that a Nazi is on a #1 podcast. Do you?
Looking back it seems like the true nature of the Buckley excommunicating the Birchers thing was not so much that a binding and consistent cordon sanitaire was established, but a relationship of power whereby the Buckleyite Conservatism Inc. elites of the movement had the authority to draw or not draw the line in any given case, and as you point out sometimes to change their mind.
And in this grim chapter we see how that authority has ended. Tucker, Buckley's aesthetic if not intellectual heir, has absolutely no power or sway to write a figure like Fuentes out of the movement, it is increasingly the other way around.
Maybe it's just glib to point out that every conservative/authoritarian plan copies the arc of "Frankenstein." But it happens so often and so obviously I'm beginning to think that's what Shelley was really dramatizing, this template where you stitch together a monster out of parts and set it on your enemies, but then it turns on you.