Costless courage.
One of the things that I’ve always detested about a certain segment of the left is what I often call “bravery on the cheap.” We saw a lot of it during the George W. Bush years. Some critics of the administration would assert that Bush was Hitler reincarnated and then pretend they were Martin Niemöller heroically speaking truth to power by opposing him. Hollywood was full of this sentiment. Actors would win an Oscar® and use their acceptance speech to vow they won’t be silenced or some such.
For starters, telling an auditorium full of Hollywood liberals exactly what they wanted to hear didn’t take a lot of courage. The last time I saw real courage at an awards ceremony, it was when Ricky Gervais told the assembled bigwigs that no one cares about their political opinions.
The much more important point is this: If Bush was Hitler—or even Hitlerish—very few of these people would say boo about him, because they’d be terrified. It was precisely because Bush was not anything like Hitler that people could criticize him without paying any price at all. Martin Niemöller was sent to a concentration camp. Naomi Wolf got a book contract, Michael Moore got another movie deal, etc.
A lot of protest-addicted people are like the dogs who act ferocious when they’re on a leash or behind a door. But when the leash comes off, they smell the other dog’s butt and say, “It’s all good.”
I mean, look at how Hollywood and academia have kowtowed to China over the last decade. They can’t even be counted upon to oppose a foreign authoritarian regime when doing so comes at a price. The anti-Bush vitriol was all performative bravery on the cheap precisely because there was no price to pay and, often, there was ample upside.
George Orwell made a related point as only Orwell could. People revered Gandhi for his courage in speaking truth to power against the British, without ever acknowledging that it was precisely because the British were British—i.e., a liberal people—that his nonviolent tactics could work.
Gandhi, Orwell wrote, “believed in ‘arousing the world’, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again.” There are any number of legitimate criticisms of British rule in India, but if the British were Hitlerite or Stalinist, no one would know who Gandhi was.
Why am I bringing this up? Because today elements of the right are playing the same game.
I’ll start by making a provocative observation. There is a very good case to be made that Donald Trump is the best friend Israel has ever had in the Oval Office, with the possible exception of Harry Truman, who was the first world leader to formally recognize the state of Israel. It is certainly the case that many Israelis believe this. So does my friend John Podhoretz, a far closer student of these things than most. One doesn’t necessarily have to agree completely with this observation to concede that it is not just plausible, but actually quite defensible. Unlike any previous president, Trump gave Israel a green light to defeat its enemies. It remains to be seen whether the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were as successful as the administration claims or as friends of Israel hope, but the mere fact that Trump did it is huge. The Abraham Accords were arguably the greatest triumph not just of the first Trump administration, but of any administration with regards to securing a peaceful future for Israel.
When was the last time you heard about Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Kevin Roberts, Matt Gaetz, et al attacking Donald Trump for being a supporter of Israel? To be fair, they have offered moderate criticisms. In June, Tucker whined that the attack on Iran made Trump “complicit in an act of war”—which was kind of true. But then he called Trump to apologize. How much credit you get for speaking to power when followed up with an apology I’ll leave to others.
The point is that for all the meek, brief, and discrete criticisms of Trump’s support for Israel, these people offer orders of magnitude more chest-puffed outrage and obloquy for the Jooz, AIPAC, “Zionism,” “neocons,” and “organized Jewry,” as Nick “Team Hitler” Fuentes likes to say.
It’s all pathetic bravery on the cheap.
It’s amazing how often we hear people whine that any criticism of Israel is labeled “antisemitic.” “You can’t say” this or that about the perfidious bagel-snarfers and their illegitimate country or you’ll be “canceled.” And yet, most of what one reads and hears about such matters in the mainstream media, from the U.N., from podcast bros, is highly critical of Israel. Whole courses are taught in elite schools about Israel as a “settler-colonial” outpost of the American empire or some such. Pat Buchanan made such claims into a lucrative cottage industry. There’s a whole think tank (sorry, “action tank”) basically dedicated to this line of thinking. Israel-hating Zohran Mamdani, who just a couple years ago said that, “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” was just elected mayor of what Jesse Jackson famously called “Hymietown.” Sure, Jackson apologized, but he wasn’t “canceled.” Nor was Al Sharpton canceled for railing against Jewish “interlopers.” And none of the right-wing jabroneys have been canceled either. They’re all making bank off “speaking truth to power” against a strawman.
Let’s take seriously the idea that Jews “control” everything, including, as recently reelected Democratic member of the Council of the District of Columbia Trayon White once claimed, the weather. More specifically, White claimed the Rothschilds control the weather to profit from natural disasters. Just to be bipartisan, Marjorie Taylor Greene famously endorsed the idea that the Rothschilds have space-based laser-shooting lasers for similar reasons. Let’s take such ideas seriously. Do you think all of these people would be saying such things if they actually believed it?
Some are legitimately crazy, so maybe they would. But most of these people say this crap precisely because they know at some deep level it’s nonsense. It sounds courageous to ignorant people, but it’s actually a form of soul-sickening cowardice.
I don’t want to get into another disquisition on horseshoe theory, but I think the cowardice on the right comes from the same place as it does on the left.
The word antisemitism was coined by Wilhelm Marr to give Jew hatred a modern, scientific-sounding veneer of seriousness. Before the emancipation of Jews in Europe, Jew hatred was primarily theological. Marr and his heirs wanted to reconceive it as an essentially racial or biological phenomenon. But what drove it was resentment over the comparative success of Jews in an era when Europe’s version of caste and class was unravelling. How dare this hated and persecuted minority, liberated from their ghettos and backwaters, do so well at so many different things, despite all of the formal and informal obstacles put in their way?
The reason for Jewish success is actually pretty simple. Jews are rich—in social and cultural capital. They emphasize education, thrift, and hard work. There are high levels of inter-Jewish trust. If you have even a passing familiarity with Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism it’s not hard to understand that same argument applies to the Jewish ethic (even though Weber himself didn’t exactly apply it to the Jews and what he dubbed their “pariah-capitalism,” which was necessitated by their, well, pariah status).
In short, liberal societies are really good for Jews, and their success often arouses envy and resentment (it also invites admiration and emulation). Jewish success, demographically and economically and in the form of Israel, just pisses some people off. And in a populist age where any success is attributed to a “rigged system,” Jews become scapegoats. If one group is underperforming according to the identitarian left or right, it’s because “the system” is rigged against them. Therefore, the comparative success of another group—Jews, Asians, Mormons, etc.—must be explained by the same logic: They’ve rigged the system for their benefit.
So much of nationalism—both its left-wing and right-wing varieties—basically rests on identitarian logic. Nations are personified. Personal resentments are scaled up into national resentments. Terms like “self-determination” are used as if entire nation-states operate with a single will and identity. “National liberation” almost becomes the pluralized version of personal liberation. In Europe this sort of thinking created ethno-nationalism—a modern idea, regardless of what some nationalists claim. The idea that whole nations were akin to a single organism made up of biologically bound-together true Germans, Russians, etc., was one of the prime sources of modern antisemitism. Those pariahs, enemies within, many nationalists claimed, were poisoning or diluting national purity.
All of this sort of thinking is weaponized against Israel, too. Israel is seen as a foreign body in the Arab and Muslim Middle East. It is deemed an artificial intrusion, despite the biblical, historical, and archeological fact that Israel and the Jews have at least as much of a birthright to the region as any other people, religion, or nation.
Israel’s success is cast as unfair given the dysfunctions and failures of her neighbors (See? I even used a personal pronoun to describe a whole country, and it seems totally normal). Israel must be a beneficiary of a similarly rigged geopolitical system, or because its Zionist agents in America have rigged the American system for its benefit.
It’s all conspiratorial hogwash, for reasons I don’t have room here to lay out. But I will make one point about the most commonly trafficked claim by the faux truth-tellers. The story that many on the new right tell is that America keeps fighting wars for Israel. It’s asserted this as if it’s something everyone knows, when it’s all a slander and a lie. The most common version of the story begins with the first Iraq war and rests almost entirely on bogus nonsense peddled by Pat Buchanan. The first Iraq war was not on behalf of Israel, regardless of how much Buchanan insisted it was. Iraq invaded Kuwait, not Israel. George H.W. Bush was a deeply honorable man, but he was not overly generous toward Israel; he hailed from the “even-handed” school of foreign policy when it came to Israel and the Middle East. When Bush cobbled together the coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait, he excluded Israel from it (for the benefit of the Arab members of the coalition, who bankrolled much of the war). Israel was not particularly in favor of the war. They hated Saddam Hussein, but they also saw Iraq as a check on Iran, Israel’s greater enemy. Israelis believed America was taking its eye off the ball by focusing on Iraq. When Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles at Israel, America demanded that Israel not retaliate. In this sense, Israelis died for America’s war, not the other way around.
But throughout all of this, Buchanan insisted that America was doing the bidding of the Israelis and their “amen corner” in America. It was an antisemitic lie. And that lie, along with the conspiracy theories that give it plausibility to the ignorant and the ignominious, has colored discussion of Israel and the Jooz in Buchanan’s amen corner ever since.
Alas, the new right has convinced itself that Buchanan was “right about almost everything.” That’s why Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation recently beseeched President Trump to bestow the Medal of Freedom on him. What Roberts didn’t do is criticize Donald Trump for being the best friend Israel has ever had—because Roberts, who has condemned antisemitism, is nonetheless convinced that the right desperately needs the energy and passion of those who heroically speak truth to power against the strawman of organized Jewry but lack the courage to pick a fight with the President of the United States. Because that might actually require paying a real price.
Various & Sundry
Hey, I just want to say thanks to everyone who came to the live recording of The Remnant last night at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was just a wonderful bunch of people and their encouragement and support for The Dispatch was truly inspiring and deeply appreciated. Thanks very much to the Acton Institute for hosting, our presenting sponsor the Bahnsen Group, and our friends at Truscott Rossman and America’s Future. We hope to do many more such events in the future.
