Socialism of Fools

 It is rather alarming that at a time when a right-wing would-be authoritarian is actively dismantling all of our democratic institutions and constitutional checks-and-balances, while fighting a needless and illegal war that is driving up the costs of everyday goods, the most politically engaged of our younger generation seem far less interested in any of these things, than they are in what an earlier generation (in the bad old days) would have called, ahem, "the Jewish question." 

What is even stranger is that the new antisemitism does not seem to split along traditional party lines. Rather, it constitutes a new axis in American politics that is dividing both parties' coalitions. 

The New York Times reported yesterday on two primary campaigns in Florida that featured more or less openly antisemitic GOP candidates. One of them—James Fishback—appeared to rank just a few months ago as the outermost antisemitic extreme of the Groyper-ified wing of the GOP. But he has apparently already been outdone by another Florida Republican candidate described in the article, who has reportedly posted things like "District 6 understands the jewish problem."

He went on to receive roughly a fifth of the primary vote. 

The Democrats had their own Groyper candidate earlier this primary season too. Fortunately, she too lost her race—this time around. But that doesn't mean the phenomenon she represents has gone away. 

To the contrary, the Democratic coalition is newly splintering this week over its latest antisemitism controversy, following remarks by the Twitch streamer and one-time El-Sayed campaign surrogate Hasan Piker, which appeared to accuse Jewish Americans of inviting violence against themselves.

People on the left were quick to defend Piker's comments on the grounds that he wasn't endorsing violence against Jews, per se; he was saying that "Jewish institutions" who encourage an association between Judaism and Israel are likely to provoke an antisemitic backlash. 

But when did the bar become so incredibly low that simply not outright endorsing antisemitic terrorism is sufficient? I never interpreted Piker's latest controversial remarks as a call for violence—but that doesn't mean they weren't antisemitic. The comments do seem pretty overtly to blame the victims by implying that Jewish communities are in some way responsible for hate crimes and terrorism against them. 

It's hard to imagine anyone on the left similarly defending a streamer who said that "Black institutions" or "Muslim institutions" encourage violence against their own communities, and that that's why they suffer hate crimes or police violence—and they'd obviously be right not to. Why would this be any different? 

There never seemed to be a strong case that El-Sayed himself is antisemitic. I did find it troubling how prominently Israel featured in a Senate primary in an upper Midwest state that would seem to have very little stake in the matter one way or the other—but, as I've pointed out before, people who support military aid for Israel obviously also want this issue to be a priority—so it is equally as incumbent on them to explain why they think we need to spend even more taxpayer dollars defending a nuclear-armed apartheid state, as it is for the left to explain why they are so single-mindedly fixated on this one cause.

But I do think Piker's latest comments cross a line—and anyone on the left or the El-Sayed campaign who simply tries to change the subject by saying "I'm focused on gas prices" is being disingenuous. 

As I've said in a previous post, it will undoubtedly be a puzzle to future historians to explain why—when Trump was subverting our entire constitutional order—the big issue in American politics spitting both partisan coalitions was not war or affordability or the future of democracy—but the alleged nefarious influence of a vulnerable and historically long-persecuted ethnic minority who make up no more than 2% of the American population. 

This paradox would surprise us more, I suppose, if the same thing had not happened repeatedly before in history. In his capsule biography of Henry Ford, in The Big Money, John Dos Passos describes how he went to Europe in the lead-up to World War I in a naïve bid to bring peace—but he came home toting "the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" instead.  

From then on—in the midst of war, inflation, a global pandemic, and other problems plaguing the globe—this became the one thing Ford truly cared about. "He started a campaign to enlighten the world in the Dearborn Independent," in Dos Passos's sardonic telling; "the Jews were why the world wasn't like Wayne County, Michigan, in the old horse and buggy days.[...] They were behind Wall Street and the international bankers, and the whiteslave traffic and the movies[.]"

The American right in recent years—one notes—has revived every one of these same tropes—even down to the "whiteslave" panic. They wasted no time in turning valid concern about Jeffrey Epstein into fodder for antisemitic conspiracy theories about a sex trafficking cabal; and prominent right-wing institutions have pointedly singled out people with Jewish-sounding surnames in their campaign against OnlyFans and online pornography. 

The incentives for the right to engage in this kind of antisemitic baiting are pretty obvious. It's a classic way to divert populist anger away from actual centers of plutocratic control toward a single vulnerable out-group, whom the gentile members of the elite can dispense with. 

It's pretty obvious, then, why Henry Ford might get interested in antisemitism right around the time mobs of the unemployed and destitute were threatening to converge on his home in the Detroit suburbs—as Dos Passos recounts. It's the classic ruse Brecht describes in the "Song of the Stormtrooper"—when someone comes along crying hunger, "Big Belly" plutocrats can just put a rifle in their hands and tell them to go blame their brother for their plight—and shoot their brother down. 

Why, though, does the Left keep dipping its toe into antisemitic waters as well? 

I fear it may be for all-too similar reasons. 

As I suggested in an earlier post, campaigns against an abstract "plutocracy" or "oligarchy" have been historically difficult to get off the ground. In the past, class struggles of this sort have only really tended to amount to anything—as Ernest Gellner observes in Nations and Nationalism, when they can be given some "nationalistic" valence. 

And I fear that our current populist left—which has so far conspicuously failed to interest the working class itself in their brand of working class politics—is succumbing to the temptation to pick up the one piece of "nationalistic" lumber they have lying close to hand—a wave of left-antisemitism among Gen Z, which may have started with justified outrage over Israel's war crimes and apartheid policies in the occupied territories; but which has gradually morphed into something much darker and more obsessive. 

One of the best novels of the Great Depression remains Nathanael West's satire A Cool Million. Like West's other books, it is mordant in the extreme but tells some uncomfortable truths along the way about our society—including on the issue we are discussing today. 

Essentially a parody of a Horatio Alger "rags to riches" tale, the book describes the rise of an archetypical plainspoken American hero who—rather like Henry Ford—at first preaches the bootstrap rhetoric of American self-reliance and capitalism. When these ideals let him down, though, in the face of the massive systemic failing of the Great Depression, he starts preaching a different sermon. Now—like Ford—he blames "the Jewish international bankers." 

We can say—indeed, we should still insist—that this antisemitic hate mongering is not true socialism, but merely "the socialism of fools." But that doesn't mean that the "socialism of fools" cannot ever manage to take over an entire left-wing party or government (See Warsaw Pact–era Poland, e.g.). It does us little good to remind ourselves that no true socialist is an antisemite—if all the false-but-really-existing "socialists" we see around us are the ones who hold increasing power and prestige in our movements. That would be just the "no true Scotsman" fallacy by another name.

As Gellner writes in the book already cited: "'Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid,' the phrase once went,"—but, he adds, this slogan "was not conspicuously echoed in the days of the [...] Polish purges of 1968, when a socialist regime fomented anti-Semitism." In short: Left antisemitism has been a real historical phenomenon—and not in the distant past either. So it is not sufficient to dismiss it as a logical impossibility as soon as it arises that is not even worth our time to denounce.

Logical absurdity it may be—but that does not mean it is not all too recrudescent. We are indeed living in a new age of antisemitism, across both sides of the political spectrum. And history tells us exactly where this leads if we do not stop it now.