The variant of American antisemitism that most closely resembles the traditional form of this ancient prejudice is to be found on the Right. There, the familiar themes of dual loyalties, rootlessness, sinister conspiracy, race pollution, and Christ-killing survive with only minor updates. The white nationalist Right, which is frankly racist, embraces the cruder, hateful slurs, while the national branch of conservatism focuses on the argument that the Jews are not and cannot be full Americans.
There’s not much to be said about the antisemitism of white nationalism. By and large, it’s the same old line, reminiscent of the foul propaganda once to be found in the pages of Der Stürmer. And in the larger context of American antisemitism it is, fortunately, a minor factor, confined to crackpot fringe groups. White nationalist antisemitism is ugly and bears watching, but its appeal is limited.
The antisemitism of national conservatism—or paleoconservatism—is a different matter. The natcons, as they’re called, espouse American nationalism, Christian morality, and traditional values. Theirs is a defeatist conservatism, hag-ridden by fears that large-scale immigration, demographic change, multiculturalism, free trade, globalism, and an interventionist foreign policy are eroding the foundations of American republicanism. This proposition is certainly arguable in the abstract, but the emotions it stirs are dangerous: They’ve spawned not only national conservatism’s close cousin, contemporary Trumpian populism, but the significantly more radical alt-right.
Perhaps the most prominent of national conservatism’s founding fathers is Pat Buchanan. As a politician, columnist, writer and TV pundit he has been highly influential in the development of the national conservative movement. And, it must be said, he has done more than any other individual to infect national conservatism with the virus of antisemitism.
Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review magazine and standard bearer of modern American conservatism, led the charge against antisemitism on the broad Right. It was thanks mainly to him that mainstream conservatism freed itself from its traditional anti-Jewish prejudices. And it was he in 1991 who published a long article on antisemitism in NR (summarized here by the NYT), observing more in sorrow than in anger that “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.”
The “period under review” spanned the years 1982-1990. During that time Buchanan was involved in controversial episodes including his defense of John Demjanjuk, a naturalized American citizen accused of having served as a guard at the Treblinka death camp during World War Two. He also flirted with Holocaust denial and accused Israel of luring the United States into the 1990-91 Gulf War. More recently (2009) he commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two with an article, “Did Hitler Want War?” In it he argued that the Führer was provoked into invading Poland by the Pole’s refusal to accede to his demands.
The charge that American Jews have divided loyalties, and that Israel dictates American foreign policy, is Buchanan’s bequest to contemporary national conservatism. And they’re a good fit, compatible with natcon isolationism and anti-globalism. Viewed in that light, they bear a distinct resemblance to the natcons’ opposition to US involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War. The difference is that opposition to the US-Israel connection is buttressed by anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
In his 1943 essay, “Antisemitism in Britain,” George Orwell made the point that anti-Jewish sentiment in his country derived in part from a perception that only the Jews, obviously and unambiguously, stood to gain from Allied victory in World War Two. For many people, this was enough to conclude that the Jews were responsible for Britain’s involvement in the war. Much the same reasoning—if such it can be called—lies behind natcon thinking about Israel. If US policy in the Middle East benefits Israel, then it must be the case that the Jews are influencing if not dictating such policy—the two Iraq wars being a case in point. No real evidence of this is ever offered, and the feeling seems to be that none is required. If a State Department official here or a think tank scholar there can be shown to possess a Jewish surname, that is enough.
Besides this, there is the undeniable fact that cruder forms of antisemitism crop up in natcon circles, Holocaust denial being the most common such manifestation. Usually the line it takes is that, yes, the Nazis persecuted the Jews and killed many of them, but that the figure usually cited, six million, is far too large. Buchanan himself went there, claiming in 1990 that it would have been impossible for the SS to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews at Treblinka with diesel exhaust, which he falsely argued was insufficiently toxic. Buchanan also opined that Treblinka was not a death camp at all but merely a transit camp. In fact, historians of the Holocaust estimate that 900,000 Jews were done to death in that terrible place.
Wherever it occurs, Holocaust denial is clear evidence of antisemitism. That tremendous crime against humanity has been thoroughly documented and indeed, the death toll may well have been higher than six million. Clearly, to deny the undeniable is the triumph of bigotry over reality.
One final point deserves to be mentioned here, though it will be discussed more fully in the context of the antisemitism of the postmodern Left. One of the ironies of history is that the foundation of the State of Israel, for all the good it did on behalf of the Jewish people, also did much to make antisemitism respectable again. This has long been the case in Europe, where “anti-Zionism” enables people to indulge their traditional bigotries. The claim that one has nothing against the Jews per se, but only against the Jewish state, has now become a staple of contemporary antisemitic discourse in America. What the natcons have against the Jewish state is its alleged, Svengali-like control of US foreign policy—responsibility for which is held to be shared by American Jews.
It will be seen that many of the antisemitic themes surveyed here repeat themselves on the American Left, albeit with ideological tweaks to make them compatible with postmodern notions of imperialism, colonialism and racism. The antisemitism of black nationalism has some points in common with that of the Left, but also some highly distinctive features that will be treated in detail by the next article in this series.