The horseshoe politics of America is coming for the Jews

They regard the longstanding conservative temperament of scepticism, caution, and deference to tradition as a gift to a left that wants to cancel, incarcerate or kill them; trans their children; suppress their religion; and change their country irreversibly through mass immigration. They want liberalism gutted in favour of authoritarian nationalism.

Politically, they are poles apart, but there is a common theme to the respective establishments they believe themselves to be ranged against: Jews.

Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist on the cusp of becoming mayor of New York City, is the new face of American progressivism.

He famously called for the defunding of the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a statement he’s walked back somewhat during the election campaign.

But who does he think is behind the NYPD’s supposed brutality? ‘When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,’ he said in 2023.

Mamdani’s commitment to equality means he declines to march in New York City’s annual Israel parade and says he does not ‘recognise any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion’. Yet he does march in the parade for Pakistan, a country that is constitutionally Islamic and elevates the rights of Muslims over non-Muslims.

On the right, former Fox News host and now X-streamer, Tucker Carlson has emerged as the ‘intellectual’ figurehead of the paleo-nationalist right, scathing of Israel, issuing dire warnings of the harms that will befall America unless it spurns the Jewish state, featuring WW2 revisionists in the process. Now, however, he has crossed the Rubicon, inviting the Holocaust-denying white nationalist and open antisemite Nick Fuentes onto his podcast.

Fuentes used the opportunity to tell Carlson’s sizeable audience: ‘As far as the Jews are concerned, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness: ethnicity, religion, identity.’ American Jews, he added, ‘have this international community across borders, extremely organised, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country’.

Carlson has been rebuked by some fellow right-wingers for what they consider to have been a soft-ball approach to interviewing Fuentes. Carlson told Fuentes that Christian Zionists had been ‘seized by this brain virus’ and characterised the Israeli view as ‘everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born’, which he declared to be ‘non-Christian’ and ‘totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilisation’.

Alighting on the Jews as the cause of the world’s iniquities is nothing new, but it is significant that both American leftists and rightists draw on antisemitic and anti-Zionist frames for their scorched-earth approach to contemporary politics. Rejecting the gradual reform of liberalism or conservatism, the progressives and the nationalists are as one in their conviction that the reigning order must be toppled. The systemic flaws or injustices that led them to this conclusion no longer matter as much as the zealous pursuit of political destruction.

This year-zero temperament is bound to put its ideologues, whether leftist or reactionary, on a collision course with Jews. Jewish observance and Jewish culture are bound up with ideas of creation and repair, and in the Torah as in Jewish history, destruction is almost always a source of great sadness and loss.

The Tanakh is a story of building, of establishing a people, forging kingdoms, erecting a temple, and instituting laws and customs. The defeat of the kingdoms and destruction of the temple are not cause for abandoning the commandments but the consequence of not hewing to them.

Burning everything to the ground is a punishment, not a plan of action. Destruction is reserved to God, which is why the Aleinu prays for the Lord to obliterate idols and remove false Gods, while it reserves to mankind the duty of tikkun olam — perfecting the world. But the prayer doesn’t stop there. It adds ‘be-malchut Shaddai’, rendering the full phrase as ‘perfecting the world under the sovereignty [or kingdom] of the Almighty’.

That’s the rub. Jewish text and tradition teach an obligation to repair this earthly realm so that it conforms to the designs of the Almighty, not the passing preferences of man. Obligation is exactly what the revolutionaries of left and right are furiously trying to shake off. Obligation constrains and they want to be free to remake the world in their own image and according to their ideological impulses.

There is an angry messianism spreading across American politics, and perhaps our own soon, too. On left and right, among those of all faiths and the fiercely faithless, a zeal to cleanse, purge, smash and bring down — to destroy to save — is taking hold. The world is too defiled to be conserved or reformed. The only salvation lies in smouldering ruins. The tables of the temple must be overturned, and many a self-appointed saviour is only too keen to volunteer.

For those who yearn to destroy, the people of the book and of the laws are a constant reminder of men’s obligations to creation and its perfection. However strong the will to power, there are limits temporal and divine. Those who demolish in spite will be left with only spite for building blocks.