It is no longer enough to hope that old laws and borrowed liberal wisdom will shield the Jewish community and Western civilisation from rising ill winds. The roots of anti-Semitism, as well as the self-hating malaise so prevalent in our culture, run far too deep: They are ingrained in the West’s very fabric, shaped and transmitted over the course of centuries. To believe that mere legal prohibitions or lawyerly interventions can keep us safe is to misunderstand the nature of this threat entirely. The lesson of history is clear – it was not a lack of laws that doomed Weimar Germany, but the failure of society to believe in them, or to truly defend the values those laws embodied. I discussed this recently with the philosopher Benedict Beckeld, and wanted to share some of my thoughts with you here.
The Problem Runs Deeper Than Law
Let me invoke here, with full acknowledgment of my Austrian heritage, the wisdom of Sigmund Freud. Yes, Freud had his share of eccentric theories—the Oedipal complex and all that—but he understood something profound about human psychology that bears directly on our current predicament. Freud distinguished between the ego, the superego, and the “it”—what in English is often called the “id.” The “it” is crucial: it represents not how we consciously think, but how thinking happens in us, beyond our rational control. It is our instinctive, automatic reactions to the world.
Consider this pattern, one that anyone paying attention has witnessed repeatedly: On September 11, 2001, before the smoke had even cleared from the Twin Towers, voices emerged claiming it must have been the Mossad. On October 7th, within 24 hours of the Hamas attack, similar voices insisted it must have been a Shin Bet operation designed to justify an Israeli invasion of Gaza. Whatever catastrophe befalls the world, someone, somewhere, will immediately blame the Jews—and disturbingly large numbers will nod along. This, as Freud would say, is how “it thinks in them.” The reaction is automatic, unreasoned, deeply embedded in cultural consciousness across fifteen centuries.
This is what the Jewish community confronts: Not merely bad arguments that can be refuted with better facts, but a civilisational instinct, a reflex baked into Western culture. I am reminded of that dark joke from Family Guy, where two Jewish slaves in ancient Egypt console each other: “I know this is terrible, but trust me, if we get all the bad stuff out of the way now, the future is just going to be great!” How did that prediction work out? The uncomfortable truth is that every generation believes the worst is behind them, that surely this time things will simply get better on their own. History offers no such guarantees.
Facts Don’t Change Feelings
There is a tendency, especially among cultured liberals and institutional leaders, to believe that facts alone, presented earnestly and repeatedly, will sway those who hold emotionally driven, even conspiratorial, resentments. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have met people in the Middle East who simultaneously took pride in 9/11 as a great Muslim achievement and insisted it was funded and executed by Jews. These are logically incompatible positions, yet they held both without cognitive discomfort, because facts matter less than emotional needs.
As Ben Shapiro famously says, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” True enough. But here’s the uncomfortable corollary: Our feelings have an enormous impact on which facts we accept and which we reject. If someone believes something because they want to believe it, because it satisfies an emotional need or provides them with identity and purpose, presenting contrary evidence will accomplish nothing. Ours is a fight not just for facts, but for narrative, for meaning, and above all, for belonging.
The Dangerous Appeal of Aesthetics
One of history’s persistent ironies is that the most energetic fringes of both Left and Right—those who profess to hate the West the loudest—converge on one shared conviction: Resentment of the Jews. This tragic consensus is less an aberration than a warning sign. It is anti-Western to the core and bears within it the seeds of profound cultural decline.
Consider the troubling phenomenon we have witnessed recently: Reports suggesting that 35 per cent of young male staffers at Heritage Foundation, and perhaps 40 per cent in the Trump administration, express some sympathy for figures like Nick Fuentes. Why? Not because they have studied history and reached considered conclusions. Rather, because violent right-wing movements today attract not simply through their ideology, but through their mastery of aesthetics, identity, and the promise of belonging. Young men—whether in American basements or disaffected European neighbourhoods—are not drawn to radical politics because they have been persuaded by historical analysis or economic evidence. They look at images of Nuremberg rallies, of order and pageantry and martial discipline, and they are moved. They are drawn because these movements know how to cloak themselves in symbols, rituals, and stories that satisfy a yearning for community and structure. To people like Fuentes, Hitler is no longer a horror, but “really cool.” That’s the point. Young men are attracted to the aesthetic, to the sense of power and belonging it projects.
The same dynamic, incidentally, plays out with young Muslims in Europe. Young Syrians in Austria are not, by and large, Islamic scholars who have studied the Quran verse by verse. They embrace Islam because it gives them structure, community, and a sense of belonging in societies where they otherwise feel adrift. This is precisely what movements like Fuentes’s offer disaffected young Western men. When the mainstream leaves the emotional ground undefended, others move in.
The Failure to Choose Allies Wisely
A key failing—one to which the Jewish community is by no means immune—is the habit of seeking allies among those who offer cordiality or proximity to power, rather than those who truly wish them well. Too often in both Europe and America, Jewish leaders have cast their lot with liberal elites and progressive causes—such as open borders—assuming continued safety in the company of those who loudly profess tolerance.
The result? In Europe, borders were opened to populations importing virulent new strains of anti-Semitism. Traditional European anti-Semitism still exists, but now sits alongside—indeed, is amplified by—imported hatred. The organised Jewish leadership, having aligned itself with liberal parties that championed these policies, now finds itself in an untenable position. Meanwhile, in Europe there exists a growing movement on the Right that is explicitly pro-Jewish and pro-Israel, yet it is shunned by official Jewish representatives.
At some point—and let me be deliberately provocative here—the Jewish community needs to get better at picking its allies and identifying its enemies. Too often they side with those who want the worst for them and ignore those who want the best.
No Law Guarantees Recovery
History teaches an uncompromising lesson: There is no natural law promising an upswing after every civilisational downturn. Lenin once observed that there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. We are living through precisely such a moment. Rome, Constantinople, the Egypt of the Pharaohs—each imagined they would snap back to greatness after a rough patch. I am certain there were Romans in 467 AD saying, “This is just a downturn; we’ll be back on top in a few years.” I am certain that in Constantinople in 1453, people reassured themselves that Byzantine greatness would return. Alas, it never did.
Today, the West’s inability to build—whether literally, like America’s vanished capacity for grand projects, or spiritually, in the sense of forging shared aspirations—marks a dangerous inflection. Consider: America built its iconic skyline during the Great Depression. The Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam—all constructed faster, and often under budget, during the worst economic crisis in modern history. The Hoover Dam came in under time and under budget. Today, it is impossible to build a dam in the United States, much less on time and on budget. You can barely build 100 metres of light rail in California.
I once was with students from Shanghai. I asked them about a trip to New York they had undertaken shortly before. They were polite, of course, but their answer chilled me: “It was very nice. It reminds us of old Shanghai.” Already, parts of the world look at New York as the city of yesterday. A civilization that cannot build, or even imagine doing so, is one that stands on the precipice of decline.
The Emancipation Correlation
Why am I telling you this? Because there is a striking correlation worth noting: The emancipation and flourishing of Jewish communities in Europe has historically tracked with periods of Western ascent—scientific breakthrough, artistic creativity, civic innovation. The 19th century, when Europe reached its apex of power and achievement, was also when Jews experienced their greatest emancipation, highest levels of acceptance, and greatest integration. Monarchs—the Habsburgs, even the Hohenzollerns before the 1930s—were often more pro-Jewish than segments of the general population. Yet their societies flourished not despite but because the monarchs understood better than anybody else what a disease anti-Semitism truly is. In moments like these, one has to wonder whether a monarchical system might be superior to the available alternatives after all.
When countries turn against their Jews, decay quickly follows. Whether this is causation or merely correlation remains debatable, but the pattern is too consistent to ignore. Anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine, signalling deeper civilisational rot.
A prime symptom of this is cultural self-doubt, often masked as excessive cosmopolitanism which has become a kind of default in modern Western institutions. Leaders feel compelled to qualify every affirmation of identity: “I am proud to be an Austrian, but I am not a racist,” “I am proud to be a Catholic, but really all faiths are equal.” It is like running a Yankees fan club and saying, “I’m a Yankees fan, but if you prefer the Red Sox, that’s fine by me.”
True conviction—like that displayed unabashedly by Orthodox Jewish communities—is mistaken for chauvinism, when it is nothing more than natural human loyalty. When I was in Israel in August, I met Orthodox Jews who made very clear they believed their religion was superior. I was glad they did, because it meant they actually believed what they professed. One can love one’s own family, faith, and country above all others without wishing harm on anyone else. I think my mother is the best mother in the world; you likely think the same of yours. We would both nod and understand. It is the person who says, “I think my mother is terrible” who would make us wonder what went wrong in that individual’s life. Patriotism and religious conviction work the same way.
Moderates Don’t Win
Finally, let us abandon our worship of moderates as saviours. I admire David French and Jonah Goldberg—I have read their books, I think they are thoughtful and decent—but moderates, admirable for their civility, do not win battles: They write gracious concession speeches. As Trump said in 2016, he would prefer to be sick of winning (not losing) for a change. If you lose on principle every time, you eventually lose until the death of your civilisation, principled or not.
Sometimes, only those considered “radical” possess the will to implement real change—ironically, to the point of later being called moderate for their victories. Trump in 2016 was not considered moderate, but his positions in 2024 are what many now recognise as moderate. You needed the “radical” to implement what were, in fact, moderate policies. Principle without victory is a lonely virtue, and civilisations are rarely built upon lonely virtues.
The West’s most urgent challenge is to rediscover and defend its own sources of meaning, to cultivate emotional as well as rational loyalty, and never to assume that history’s arc bends automatically toward renewal. If we cannot offer our own citizens, especially the young, a narrative, a structure, a sense of belonging greater than what our adversaries provide, we will watch as our civilisation, rich as it may be in law and etiquette, becomes first a farce, and then a tragedy.
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