The True Light Again of Savagery

 Did you hear that, just now? That was the sound of a Rubicon being crossed. The leading blights of the MAGA gang just decided to give away the game. For months, if not years, they have flirted with outright antisemitism. But tonight they took the plunge. There is no going back now. Marjorie Taylor Greene said the quiet part out loud. Tonight, she publicly denounced the House's new bill to combat antisemitism—because, she said, it would get in the way of peddling the medieval canard that the Jews killed Jesus. 

Immediately afterward, the rest of the MAGA right followed suit. All the big names jumped in to declare their own support for the myth of Christ-killing. Matt Gaetz backed Greene's core claim that the Gospels tell a story of Jews killing Jesus (never mind that the historical Jesus was a Jewish prophet who would be appalled by the posthumous cult that worships him as a god; that's an argument for another day). Charlie Kirk leapt in to back him up. So did Tucker Carlson. It's all there in the New York Times piece. You can just imagine the spectacle. 

Now consider the fact that this is the same wing of the Republican Party that avows its support of the doctrine of so-called "America First"—the same slogan that antisemites used in the 1930s to oppose U.S. entry into the war to defeat Hitler. Consider the fact that this is the same crew that is most isolationist in its foreign policy and most tepid and inconsistent, of all the right's factions, in its support of Israel (now why might that be? Do you imagine for one second it's because they are full of humanitarian concern for the plight of Palestinian civilians?)

Consider the fact that Trump started his 2024 campaign by consorting with Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers (remember the Kayne West and Nick Fuentes meetings?), and a clear picture starts to emerge. So far, the extent of right-wing antisemitism has been somewhat obscured in the news coverage, because the more traditional wing of the GOP has been united in support of Israel and in denouncing the campus protests. But pay attention to the way Trump has started to speak out of both sides of his mouth on this issue. He knows who his supporters are. He knows which way they will turn when the chips are down. 

My deepest fear is that they will find a way to forge common cause with the "anti-imperialist" and increasingly pro-Hamas far-Left on college campuses. Some varieties of MAGA troll are already starting to tease this possibility, combining a pro-Hamas and Pro-Putin pseudo-leftist critique of U.S. foreign policy with Trump-like screeds against "wokeness" and the Biden presidency. Such a match made in hell would also serve the interests cozily of the authoritarian state actors who are currently pushing anti-Israel and pro-Hamas disinformation on social media, such as Russia, China, and Iran. 

 For years now, observers have warned that the Trump/MAGA phenomenon threatened the return of 1930s-style political reaction. It was only a matter of time before the MAGA movement stopped making any secret of its affinity for the essential element of all true dyed-in-the-wool reactionary ideologies: the one bad seed you will always find if you dig past the surface of any variety of "paleoconservatism," "isolationism," right-wing "populism," "nationalism," or any other euphemism. Every single time, if you wait long enough, these ideologies will drop the masks and show their true face: they will reveal the hard kernel of antisemitism at their core. And that's what MTG reminded us tonight. 

In addition to everything else worrying about this spectacle, it shows how beholden large sections of the U.S. public still are to utterly medieval and barbaric superstitions. Apparently, a large part of the ordinary, everyday believers out there still take it for granted that the Bible says that "the Jews killed Jesus," and that this makes it so. It seems that only the thinnest layer of civilization separates us from a rapid descent back into the Inquisition, blood libel, and pogroms. As the poet John Berryman once wrote, these recrudescences of antisemitism "serve to remind us that culture was only a phase/through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/to the true light again of savagery."

In other words, what we are seeing here is old wine in new bottles. Between the right-wing America Firster contingent, on the one hand, who want to reserve the privilege of calling Jews "Christ-killers," and the pro-Hamas pseudo-leftists on college campuses, on the other, shouting "Glory to the Martyrs" and calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel, there is a difference of labels but not of substance. I quoted in a recent post Vladimir Nabokov's observation that "rowdies [...] are always reactionary," and I find the same point in Gustave Le Bon's classic study of the psychology of crowds: the mob, he writes, is fundamentally conservative. It may change the names of its slogans, but its core ideas will remain the same old ancient myths. 

And the ancient myth that we are seeing rear its ugly head today is the medieval superstition of antisemitism. Whether under right- or left-wing guises, it is essentially the same old set of canards: blood libel, Christ-killing, etc. And I for one want no part of it, no matter how expertly it is repackaged. I will take my stand with Bernard Malamud's protagonist, in his classic novel The Fixer: though uncertain of his Jewish identity himself, he writes, "he believes in their right to be Jews [....] He is against those who are against them. He will protect them to the extent he can. This is his covenant with himself."

Whatever else any of us may disagree about, regardless of whether we are Jews or gentiles ourselves, let us at least agree with Malamud's protagonist to that extent. Let us be "against those who are against them." And tonight, Marjorie Taylor Greene and her host of MAGA cronies removed any lingering doubt people might have retained that they belong to that category.