The Demons in Democracy

Jeopardy question: Identify the source of this quote.

“The center-right Democratic Party is controlled by its elite donor class and cannot act as an effective political counter to the nationalist far right. Only a party that fights for working people can win the battle against fascism.”

If you guessed an organization that tactically does not endorse candidates but whose shadow looms over the very party it opposes, congratulations. Few people know about the Program of Democratic Socialists of America, or realize its metastasizing effects.

“We wish we were making this up.” So began the donation request of former Senator Norm Coleman, National Chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), sent on the day after Maine’s Democratic Party had all but anointed a little-known nominee to replace Senator Susan Collins, Graham Platner. He soon made news with his Nazi tattoo, nasty postings, and radical views, which should have buried him politically, but no such chance. The RJC’s membership, of course, knew perfectly well that Coleman wasn’t making it up, many having left the party themselves precisely because of its longstanding leftward and antisemitic trajectory. It is the party’s elders who seem still to be in denial, having bet on the state’s far less controversial 78-year-old governor. What happened, and why?

Among the best informed on the subject, a former analyst with the Center for American Progress, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeira, opts for the simplest answer: it’s the money. He invokes legendary Californian politician Jesse Unruh’s insight that “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” All Platner needed was proper packaging. His campaign knew they had a great product that checked all the right (or left) boxes.

Sold as a fire-breathing, working-class populist (notwithstanding his upper-middle-class background), an oyster farmer who cavalierly brushed off debate about Democrats’ unpopular cultural positions as a “billionaire-funded distraction,” the marketing was super easy. Platner “sought and received national media coverage, national endorsements by progressive figures like Bernie Sanders, and a high profile in the online, generally progressive and anti-establishment Democratic discourse. That was then translated into massive numbers of small online donations through the ActBlue fundraising platform.”

But money was not a factor in a Democratic primary taking place the same day in a Texas Congressional district where sex therapist Maurine Galindo garnered no fewer than one-third of the vote despite a shoestring budget of $2,200, thereby “significantly outperforming expectations,” as Jon Levine reported with ironic understatement. Galindo’s campaign had one obvious thing in common with Platner’s: she “has repeatedly used her social media to promote a raft of conspiracy theories targeting Jews…” Galindo fumed on YouTube: watch out for “all of the Jews who own Hollywood, they use books and movies to create realities,” adding: “[Jesus] was trying to warn us. He was trying to warn us about these exact same people, who worship Satan.” Lest she seem antisemitic, she concedes: “That does NOT AT ALL mean all Jews are bad people!!!! #critical thinking.”

Most sex therapists have probably never heard of the Frankfurt School, any more than have oyster farmers. But they do imbibe the same fetid political culture that has managed to poison American discourse in ways the nation’s Founders could not have imagined in their worst nightmares.

The Democratic establishment was equally surprised, as were its specifically sizeable (and wealthy) Jewish, members in Houston, Texas, when Rep. Al Green earned the coveted endorsement of Nancy Pelosi, who thereby broke her precedent of declining to engage in intra-party races. It seemed not to bother her that Green, in a debate two days earlier, repeated his charge that Israel had committed a genocide, accusing his opponent of refraining from using that term because “AIPAC won’t allow that.”

The lethal narrative of nefarious Jewish power had been a powerful radicalizer in nineteenth century Europe. In America, however, it did not begin to germinate until the aftermath of the Civil War, with the onset of scientism, which in turn inspired eugenics and centralized government control “for the public good.” As elites of various ideological strands adopted these European ideas, the Founders’ vision of individual liberty and limited government began to recede. Called Progressivism by Republican Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and later FDR, who introduced it into the Democratic Party under the guise of democracy and liberalism.

Yet they all knew it for what it was: socialism. In his essay “Socialism and Democracy,” written in 1887 though published only posthumously, Wilson denied any essential difference between the two. Philosopher John Dewey also saw the wisdom of rhetorical discretion: “We are in for some kind of socialism, call it by whatever name we please,” he wrote in 1930. Semantic subterfuge took center stage in political marketing.

As the central government grew, so did the need for coalitions among disparate constituencies and appealing to what unites them. As ever, that meant stoking fear and prejudice. Over the course of nearly a century, a populist wave fueled by sinister bedfellows and shifting tribal alliances exacerbated by a breakdown of language, ignorance, and distrust, bred hate ripe for a target. Enter the Jews who, as everyone knows, make the best scapegoats.  

Subtler antisemites eagerly resorted to a nifty euphemism made in Moscow, most vigorously promoted after the mid-Sixties: anti-Zionism. Deliberately left undefined, the vague label allowed many to claim they merely opposed Israeli occupation. This included Jews who were either unaware of or indifferent to its consequences for their community and, indeed, their new home, the United States.

As progressivism advanced in the Democratic Party, antisemitism became the glue holding together constituencies “intersectionally” (i.e., ideologically aligned across ethnic and other “class” criteria euphemistically called “minorities”) united by their common hostility to the demonic Right. Investigations have since revealed foreign funding and informational support, implicating Hamas and its subcontractors, China (the evidence is vast and exceptionally disturbing), Russia, Iran, the United Nations, transnational drug cartels, terrorist organizations, and psychopaths. But that isn’t the whole story. Republicans who indulge in schadenfreude, merely sitting back and watching the Democratic Party become radicalized, while ignoring their own backyard, become unwittingly complicit in their competitors’ lurid machinations. Blaming Democrats as hate-mongers while a crudely antisemitic member of the administration’s inner circle is perfectly happy helping the longtime leftist New York Times in exchange for a lucrative platform hardly confers credibility. But such a manifestly mercenary, egocentric flip-flopper, whose credibility is at an all-time low as Tucker Carlson, is but one of a handful of cynical know-nothings who give ideology the bad name it deserves.

However marginal and often deranged, conspiracy-mongers who label themselves Republican, conservative, or right-wing, contribute to the breakdown of American society. By continuing to refuse to distance themselves from this ilk, conservative and libertarian organizations, most notably the once highly respected Heritage Foundation, lose invaluable credibility, thereby castrating their educational and political influence.  

Moreover, the impact of what is derisively known as the lunatic fringe may be far less negligible than previously recognized. As Matthias J. Becker and his team at New York University’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism recently discovered, conspiracy narratives centered on, but by no means restricted to, antisemitism are rapidly being normalized by so-called influencers of uncertain pedigree. Labeling them isn’t easy. The Center’s research shows a category-flaunting “anti-establishment positioning that reads as left or right depending on the listener but is coherent only as anti-Jewish-power (anti-Trump, anti-AIPAC, anti-Iraq War, pro-Palestinian).”

After collecting and coding thousands of YouTube videos and comments under several categories, the team detected a pattern:

Anti-Black framings, misogyny, anti-Muslim and anti-trans rhetoric all appear under the videos — but not as parallel categories. They appear under the conspiracy frame, organized by formulations like “the media is run by Jews and pushes X.” Monitoring systems that track hate categories separately measure each layer in isolation and miss the architecture connecting them.

None of us, whatever our philosophical perspective, should succumb to the illusion that danger always comes from the other side. The enemy may not be us alone, Pogo, but we aren’t altogether innocent either.

It is too soon to despair that the nation’s classical liberal vision is about to perish in a quagmire of confusion and hatred. America’s Declaration of Independence enshrined that vision, reached the unprecedented age of 250 this year, and continues to inspire all who abide by its message that applies to everyone.

But there is no guarantee for our Republic’s survival. Not even the Creator will protect the ignorant and the gullible, let alone the suicidally self-deluded. 

Juliana Geran Pilon is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. She is the author of several books, including The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom (2019) and her newest book, An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left (2023).