Copyright The New York Times
It’s been about seven months since I last wrote about how debates over Israel and antisemitism are dividing the American right, and in some ways the latest cycle of controversy looks like the last round. Once again we’re debating the programming choices of prominent podcasters: In March the instigating event was Joe Rogan giving a platform to Ian Carroll, a propagator of perfervid critiques of Israel; this time it’s Tucker Carlson giving a platform to Nick Fuentes, the Hitler-admiring leader of the so-called groyper right. Because Carlson sits closer than Rogan to the center of the Trumpist G.O.P., his Fuentes episode has set off a more dramatic intra-conservative war. But in each situation there are similar questions at work: How do you gatekeep a tendency — anti-Israel sentiment sliding down the slippery slope to Fuentes’s attacks on “world Jewry” — that’s clearly gaining influence within the populist ecosystem? Are the choices of prominent figures central to the drama? Is the right looking for a new William F. Buckley Jr., who once policed the paranoid and antisemitic boundaries of the conservative movement, to draw a clear anti-antisemitic line? Is it already too late to prevent a groyper future? I think it’s clearly too late to have a future where figures like Fuentes are simply banished or easily marginalized. The digital transformation of politics, the breakdown of post-Cold War consensus and the politics of youthful alienation are all much more powerful than any gatekeeping device, any statement of conservative principles, any attempt to read a set of personalities or ideas out of the debate. That doesn’t mean that the choices of prominent people (podcasters and otherwise) cease to matter. But they are just individual moves in an open-ended chess game, where the goal is to persistently outmaneuver the internal enemy, not to find the one perfect move that checkmates them forever. So let’s consider what successful anti-antisemitic maneuvers might look like. First, while the right’s elites and would-be leaders can’t control the information ecosystem, they can exert real control over conservative institutions — who gets hired and fired, promoted and sidelined and, more generally, what kind of culture obtains inside think tanks and congressional offices and political campaigns. In the late 2010s I watched generational conflict play out in disastrous ways in liberal and left-leaning institutions, where the younger guard was increasingly radicalized and the older guard moved rapidly from patronizing encouragement to besieged submission, from welcoming radical tendencies to being paralyzed by fear of junior employees whom they themselves had elevated and in theory could still discipline or fire. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
