The Violence of Neurotic Guilt

 We know we've reached a low point in modern history when the "mainstream" conservative movement seems to be openly debating with itself whether to make common cause with Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. But that appears to be what's happening this week—in the wake of Tucker Carlson's interview with Nick Fuentes—and Kevin Roberts's bizarre decision to go out of his way to defend it.

In just the past week, seemingly—the main dividing line within the MAGA movement has become whether or not to join forces with Fuentes's extreme-right "Groyper" movement. Tucker Carlson, the ever-repulsive Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, and the leadership of the Heritage Foundation seem to be on team Neo-Nazi.

Rod Dreher and a handful of others, meanwhile—even though they did more than anyone to convert the Republican Party into a vehicle for blood and soil nationalism of this sort in the first place—now seem to be getting cold feet, as they behold the results of their own handiwork. 

J.D. Vance, meanwhile, has tried to stay out of it. There is some interesting debate to be had as to whether this is due to sheer cowardliness and weasliness on his part—or to outright ideological support for Fuentes's project. (Personally, I incline to the latter hypothesis—Vance, after all, has condemned the ADL for its criticism of extreme right groups, endorsed Germany's neo-fascist AfD party, and suggested that American conservatism needs to lean further into the themes of white nationalism. I think he's just an antisemite and a Nazi sympathizer, guys; it may be as simple as that.)

Either way, though, Vance is coming out of this episode looking as paltry and dreadful as always—as is Trump's whole movement. MAGA has long been a political project of the sewers, but it is smelling especially rank of late, as it ponders and dithers with itself in full view of the public over whether or not it wants to embrace open antisemitism, racism, misogyny, and Neo-Nazism—or merely continue to nibble and flirt around the edges of these things. 

I don't have much to say about this except that scum will out. A movement of scumbags will eventually embrace the scummiest ideas around.

But I am fleetingly interested in this question of why so many awful things eventually consort with Nazism and Jew-hatred, specifically. Why do so many different terrible things come back to antisemitism, in the end? Why is antisemitism seemingly the ur-form of every bad political idea, to which all stupid and awful people will eventually find their way home? 

Noah Millman was writing on his blog yesterday about the close connection that has always obtained between antisemitism and conspiracism. Political antisemitism, that is to say, often takes the form of a conspiracy theory. And just about any conspiracy theory—if you scratch at it long enough—eventually reveals itself to be antisemitic (the "lizard people," in other words, are never just lizard people). 

And surely this not only fits the facts—but also explains some of the same excitement that people often seem to feel about their antisemitism. They act as if they had made a discovery; that they had at last fit the pieces together and made sense of the whole picture. They get the same "aha" moment out of the experience that many of us derive from exposure to any simplifying social theory that seems to account for diverse phenomena. 

That is why, as Mary McCarthy once put it (in reflecting on her conversation with an antisemitic military officer): "for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, [....] It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize." Likewise, Millman writes of "the [...] comfort that the conspiracy theorist receives" from his theories—"the belief that he truly understands the world, earned at the price of accepting his practical inability to change it."

Antisemitism is not only the "socialism of fools," then—but the intellect of fools. The social science of fools. In the same way that someone reading Weber or Marx or Freud might look up and say to themselves: ah, it all makes sense now! The pattern is clear!—so the antisemitic conspiracy theorist feels once he has connected his bits of red yarn from "Israel" to "Bill Ackman" or to "George Soros," or whoever the preferred boogie man of the moment may be. 

I think this goes some way toward explaining the psychological appeal of antisemitism to many people—then—and the reason why extremist political movements keep coming back to draw from that well. But I also think the "excitement"—the thrill of almost pornographic titillation many people seem to experience from dabbling with antisemitic conspiracy theories—derives simply from the moral perversity of it. 

Much of the excitement of any intellectual discovery—going to college and reading Nietzsche or Freud or Marx or whomever for the first time—always stems not only from the feeling that one has discerned a pattern—that diverse phenomena now make sense within a single framework—but also from the feeling that "everything I always thought was wrong," and now the world will never look the same again. 

This is obviously the feeling that many people describe when they have been "red-pilled" into an extremist ideology. It's the dark version of consciousness-raising. "Everything I was taught was a lie! Everything they told me all my life was untrue!" It's the same feeling—except with the opposite political valence—that many a leftist teenager once derived from reading Howard Zinn, say: wait a minute, America hasn't always just been a beacon for democracy, but also staged a coup in Guatemala? 

Since antisemitism is the intellectuality of fools, then—it makes sense that it also partakes, for many people, of the thrill of intellectual revolt. It is thus the rebellion of fools too. Instead of being fifteen years old and realizing—with a frisson of uttering something heretical, that Christopher Columbus was actually a genocidaire rather than a hero; or that the Founding Fathers practiced slavery—the form that pseudo-intellectual rebellion takes among the kids today is to dabble in Holocaust denial. 

I suspect that there is a psychological guilt reaction underlying all of this. In his book On the Natural History of Destruction—about the fire-bombing of Germany during the war—W.G. Sebald notes how many people wrote to him after his lectures were first published with a kind of prurient ecstasy. It was thrilling to them to picture Germany in the role of a victim once more. It relieved some intolerable psychic tension that they had been bottling up for years. 

To this desire for absolution that many of his correspondents expressed, however—this longing to be told that they had suffered more than anyone, and suffered unjustly—Sebald responds with the crucial point: Germany's political leadership brought it on themselves (even if thousands of innocent civilians paid the price): "The majority of Germans today know, or so at least it is to be hoped," writes Sebald, "that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived." (Bell trans.)

So too, I think a lot of the fascination that many people seem to experience with antisemitism today comes not from the fact that the younger generation is ignorant of the Holocaust (as is so often alleged)—but rather from the fact that they know about it perfectly well. 

Just as most modern Germans knew in their hearts—at least at the time Sebald wrote this—that their leaders had provoked the war and committed a genocide—and therefore were frantic for any intimation that actually it hadn't been their fault after all, and that they had been long-suffering victims—so too, I think every gentile is aware on some level that our people have treated the Jews horrendously—over centuries of persecution and discrimination, culminating finally in the Holocaust. 

No one can seriously deny that Christians and gentiles have held the whip-hand for millennia in the West, and that they have used their power and dominance to inflict untold suffering on religious minorities—particularly the Jews. Awareness of this obvious and indisputable fact of history has led to an enormous psychological accumulation over the centuries of guilt and self-reproach. 

Such guilt-feelings can sometimes be externalized productively—into some sort of striving for equal justice and civil rights for all; to make the future better as penance for our shame about the past. 

But such feelings can also—in many people—operate in far less constructive ways. In many cases, they create a psychological need to construct an alternative version of reality—one in which we no longer have to feel guilty; one in which the gentiles have been the real victims all along; and the Jews the all-potent persecutors. They create a perfect inversion of actual historical experience, in other words: Jews become the pogromchiks and the Inquisitors, rather than the other way around. 

There is no historical or contemporary evidence to support such an alternative narrative, of course—but that just makes it seem to many people all the more like "forbidden knowledge." It just increases the frisson they get from believing that they have stumbled upon occult and esoteric truths. 

We often think that if people could just be confronted with the reality of the Holocaust and of the millennia-long persecution of the Jews that they would abandon their antisemitism. But I'm afraid this hope on our part is psychologically naive. 

I'm reminded of an anecdote that George Orwell tells in his essay on antisemitism, about a time he once tried to confront an antisemitic woman of his acquaintance with a book documenting atrocities committed against the Jews. "Don’t show it to me, please don’t show it to me," she reportedly said in response—"It’ll only make me hate the Jews more than ever."

The greater the evidence becomes of the guilt of gentiles, after all, the greater the psychic weight of shame—and therefore, the greater becomes the need for psychological compensation—such as by convincing oneself that the victims of these atrocities must have somehow deserved it. (We are obviously seeing the same dynamic unfold in debates about anti-Black racism in this country too, with the MAGA movement trying to rewrite the history of slavery and the Confederacy in order to escape the psychological toll of guilt-feelings about the centuries of white-inflicted oppression.)

As a Philip Roth character observes in The Anatomy Lesson—the third volume in the original Zuckerman trilogy (in the course of Zuckerman's ferocious correspondence with a Commentary-style older writer who has become one of multiple father-figure stand-ins in the novel who are forever confronting Zuckerman with his guilt-complexes)—in reflecting on the origins of antisemitism: "I am convinced that the quality about a man or a group that most invites the violence of neurotic guilt is public righteousness and innocence."

In other words, the problem is not that not enough gentiles are acquainted with the facts of Jewish innocence and suffering—but that they know it intimately. It's not that people aren't aware of Jewish liberality, Jewish virtue—but that they know all about it—and it shames them; especially when they realize that their own religion—the religion of Christ—ostensibly a doctrine of love and charity—has not actually restrained them at any point in history from treating the Jews (and others) with contumely, sadism, brutality, greed, violence, persecution, discrimination and evil. 

And so, they create for themselves an alternative, perfectly-inverted narrative of reality: one in which the Jews are the persecutors, and the Christians the long-suffering victims. 

There was an interesting moment in Ezra Klein's recent interview with a right-wing Israeli journalist, in which the latter observed that he was never more troubled—in the wake of the October 7 atrocities—than when the Eiffel Tower was lit up with an Israeli flag, as a show of solidarity with the Israeli victims. "Wow," he says he thought at the time; "we must look so miserable that even in France we’re getting legitimacy."

I think what he means—translated into Zuckerman's terms—is that the obvious injustice and suffering Jewish people experienced on October 7 was creating yet another impression of "public righteousness and innocence" on their part—the eternal suffering of the innocent; and the innocence of the suffering. As such—it was bound to eventually produce another psychological urge for compensation—"the violence of neurotic guilt." People would once again be shamed by the spectacle of Jewish suffering—and so they would look for some kind of psychic escape valve: a way to relieve the pressure by convincing themselves the Jews deserved it. 

And they found it in the spectacle of Israel's response to October 7. The awful war that followed this day—the thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians it has maimed and crushed and suffocated and starved and burned to death—has allowed people to fulfill their long-standing fantasy of seeing Jewish people in the role of oppressors rather than victims. 

Much as Sebald's lectures on the horror of the fire-bombing of Germany enabled many modern Germans (in spite of Sebald's intentions to the contrary) to cast themselves as history's victims for a change—so too, there has been many a gentile Christian who delighted in the horrors of the Gaza war, because now they could tell themselves that the Jews, rather than themselves, had been the guilty parties all along, and that they deserved all their suffering. 

(Friends of mine who spend time on TikTok, for instance, inform me that the comment section of a typical video about Gaza on the site will be full of people saying things like: "The Germans were right.")

The reality of these psychological dynamics does not mean that all criticism of Israel or the civilian mass casualties in Gaza is illegitimate. So too, Sebald was not wrong to draw attention to the horrors of the fire-bombing in Germany—which remains an unjustifiable war crime against a noncombatant population—including children—for which the Allied Powers should be ashamed. 

The world is complicated enough to admit of such twisted realities as the fact that Israel really has committed war crimes in Gaza in the wake of October 7—which it is incumbent upon every person of conscience to condemn in good faith—but also that many people around the world sought to amplify evidence of these atrocities in order to fuel their own antisemitic worldview—and that this too must be condemned. 

For all our sakes, I wish that things were morally simpler than this. "I too do not want to hear it / I too, do not want to know it," as Kenneth Rexroth once wrote. But in the quest for a simpler world—a world reduced to a more comprehensible level of moral simplicity—lies yet another snare for fools. For this, too, I suppose, is one of the lures of antisemitism: it makes the world appear more one-dimensional than it is.