This column will be boring to read. You know I try. I really do, but there is no other way. This week I write about antisemitism. There is so much of it about, and so much is said about it, that by now, you must as be bored with it as I am. But it is because there is so much of it that we must rouse our interest yet again. I’ll be quick. I don’t wish to bore you, but it’s interesting.
Some people say we are witnessing the New Antisemitism, an infusion of Islamist zeal into the radical Left. The alignment suggests a certain novelty, but I must report that the New Antisemitism is pretty much like the Old, only with extra diversity, which is the conformity of our age. If the New Antisemitism feels new, it is because, since 1945, it was considered vulgar, at least in the Western liberal societies, to say that Jews are poisoning the wells, rigging the financial system, and sacrificing children, so they must be purged from society.
These stupidities can now be asserted without sanction or ridicule, providing “Israelis” and “Zionists” are substituted for “Jews.” Again, this is not new. It is how the Soviets talked. It is how the Arab League, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Khomeinists of Iran still talk. It is how the Nation of Islam has always talked and how the Western Left has talked since 1967. It is how Americans have been taught to talk by the universities since then. The American exception is that the professors fooled the parents into paying for the corruption of their children. A novelty, after all.
The least novel variety, the Old Antisemitism, was marginal for decades after 1945. The Christian churches repented for a millennium of incitement. The Old Right lost its grip on the Republican Party when William F. Buckley Jr. excluded the Jew-haters from National Review. The racists of the backwoods Right were antielitist, semiliterate, and on a budget: three reasons not to send your children to study with Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Yet now the Old Antisemitism is back, speaking the novel language of the New.
The Old Antisemitism’s political revival on the Right began in 1992 when Pat Buchanan, who denied the motives, means, and scope of the Shoah, launched the first of his two candidacies for the Republican presidential nomination. It received a further boost after 9/11, when the Buchananites, notably at the American Conservative, advanced the New Left’s line that American Jews were working for Israel’s Likud party and were the puppeteers of America’s Middle Eastern wars. The economic crises of the Great Recession of 2008 and the COVID-19 panic created further resentments to exploit on the Right by using the Left’s analysis, and the internet offered a new means of distribution. But it was the Left’s campaign of identity politics that brought antisemitism into the American mainstream.
“You taught me language,” Caliban tells Prospero in The Tempest. “My profit on’t is, I know how to curse.” Buchanan, as the first Republican candidate to rebel against identity politics, was the first Republican candidate to seek the electoral profits of its curse. He wanted to restore Christianity to the town square after the New Left’s campaign of desacralization. But his strategy, racializing the resentments of the white majority in the name of Christian ethics, was little more than the New Left in whiteface.
There is something of King Lear in Buchanan. Instead of reversing a decline, he hastened it. His fire and brimstone scorched his enemies in the Republican Party, but the Buchanan apocalypse made the Democrats look reasonable. The Left pushed identity politics further into the institutions and pushed Christianity further out of public life. After 2008, the Woke Left cursed America and taught that race was everything. And now the identitarians of the “Woke Right” are also cursing America, and especially the Jews, in the name of whiteness and Christianity, and in the name of their left-wing enemies.
Buchanan’s story is pathetic in both the small and tragic senses. It is not boring. It is intriguing. The issues that tormented and enraged him — the decline of Christianity and public morals, free trade and demographic shifts, George H.W. Bush’s tax policies — had nothing to do with the Jews. Yet to Buchanan, all of it somehow had everything to do with the Jews. Since then, Buchanan’s rage has curdled into the Woke Right’s impassioned loathing of America and dumb fantasies about Israel.
The motives and rewards of this kind of thinking lie in the mind and the passions. That is why the logic of its rationalization is always false — and why the appeal to reason usually fails. But a liberal society cannot function unless reason manages the passions. If the second Trump administration is to succeed in unmaking the state that identity politics built, it must disown the identitarians, antisemites, and race fantasists of the Right, too. This is essential if Americans are to remain free and equal under God and law.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
