I want to write something about this month’s massacre at Bondi Beach and its aftermath, but I think it makes more sense to start with the American side of the antisemitism story. As usual, Australia lags behind American trends; much of what we’ll look at today has, as yet, no real analogue in Australia. But it forms an important part of the context, and some of it at least is bound to come our way before long.
What’s been happening recently in the United States is a deepening split on the Trumpian right between those who are willing to tolerate (if not embrace) explicit antisemitism and those who are not. The conflict has been bubbling under the surface for a while now, but it came into the open two months ago when Tucker Carlson, a darling of the Trumpists, gave a friendly interview on his podcast to prominent neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
A number of prominent conservatives criticised Carlson for platforming Fuentes, but he was defended by Kevin Roberts, the head of the country’s most prestigious right-wing think-tank, the Heritage Foundation. That set off a further round of criticism, as various people started to see things in Heritage that they had previously averted their eyes from. By last week, the organisation had been crippled by the departure of numerous trustees, staff, fellows and other associates, many of whom have left for a rival think-tank, Advancing American Freedom, run by former vice-president Mike Pence.
Antisemitism is nothing new on the American right, and it’s hard to believe that most of those now objecting had not previously been aware of dark undercurrents within their movement. But they had previously trusted in their ability to keep them under control. Two things changed that: one in the Middle East and one at home.
The first was Israel’s brutal war in Gaza following the Hamas terrorist attack of October 2023. Support for Israel plunged across the western world, especially among younger people, and the US was no exception. In both major parties it became possible to air the sort of criticism of the Israeli government that had once been taboo. While that might seem a progressive development, it also served the interests of the more extreme “America First” wing of the Republicans, whose foreign policy preferences tended towards Putinism. And it gave them a valuable asset in a sudden ability to sound reasonable: they could switch from supporting genocide in eastern Ukraine to opposing it in Gaza.
Support for Israel in the Republican Party (and in right-wing parties elsewhere) had long served a dual role. On the one hand, it served as a sort of license for antisemitic behavior: far-right figures could point to their defence of Israel whenever they were accused of engaging in antisemitism themselves. On the other hand, it also kept that antisemitism to some degree in check. Many Republicans genuinely admired Israel, seeing it as the sort of militant ethnonationalist state that they wanted to build, and it was hard to maintain that attitude and at the same time engage in full-blooded attacks on the Jews in America.
But as the imperative to defend Israel has weakened, that restraint has weakened as well. Figures like Carlson now feel free to criticise Israel, and for many Republicans that’s really what “antisemitism” means. They were happy enough with the language of “cultural Marxism” and other antisemitic tropes as long as it was combined with solid backing for Israel; with that gone, it’s harder to ignore what’s going on.
The second thing was Donald Trump’s second term, and the struggle within his administration to define his message and his legacy. Heritage had the early inside running with its “Project 2025”, a blueprint for building an authoritarian state, but many of those involved with it clearly saw it as just a jazzed-up version of traditional “movement” conservatism. Once in power, however, they had to contend with those whose agenda was much more explicitly fascist, among them vice-president J D Vance.
As a century of experience should have taught us, once you let in fascism you let in racial persecution, and the Jews never emerge well from that. Yet many Trumpists seem genuinely surprised to discover that no amount of ideological conformity will save them if they don’t meet the movement’s standards for racial purity – including Vance’s wife (who is Indian-American), who has been targeted by Fuentes, and leading Republican propagandist Ben Shapiro (who is Jewish), who was booed at a conservative conference when he tried to criticise Carlson.
Again, racial animus as a driving force within the Republican Party is not a new thing. Its anti-immigrant wing has been in the ascendancy for a decade and a half, and no-one with an ounce of perception could have joined the Trump movement without realising that racism was central to its appeal. But many evidently believed that they would somehow be exempt, and that white supremacism would only affect others.
It’s far from clear how this will play out. Many of those who have split from Heritage have never been Trumpists at heart, although they have previously muted their criticisms – even Shapiro started out as a never-Trumper, although he later mutated into a loyalist. In order to change the party’s direction, they will need to break into the heart of the Trump movement, and that means somehow convincing them (and convincing themselves), at least at some level, that racism is a bad thing.
If they can’t make that leap of conviction, the neo-Nazis are waiting for them, and the world will become an even more dangerous place.
The World is Not Enough 