Antisemitism Without Jews

A characteristic of classic antisemitism is that it assumes a malign conspiracy between both the financial and cultural elite and the alien lumpenproletariat. Thus Jews were presented in Nazi Germany simultaneously as the secret masters of the world and as foreign vermin. In recent decades, there has been a conscious attempt on the far-right to establish a conspiracy between the "liberal elite" and immigrants, the most obvious expression of this being the Great Replacement theory. This has migrated to the political centre, where it is now acceptable for a British Home Secretary to recycle myths about Pakistani grooming gangs while a supportive press hint that they were indulged by "woke" authorities precisely because of their ethnicity. This is in the context of a compact in the media to ignore evidence of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party and the hierarchy of racism operating within the Labour Party. But overt attacks on minorities defined by race or cultural heritage are difficult to pull off without broad pushback, hence the tendency to focus on emblematic bad guys, such as groomers and people-smugglers, where the racial dimension is (usually) unspoken. Not for the first time, Suella Braverman's solecism was to say the quiet part out loud.

This usual delicacy means that there is a vacancy for a broader segment within society that can be targeted as the willing foot soldiers of the nefarious elite, and in the UK this is clearly misguided youth. The emphasis on the supposed fragility of young people is intended to suggest that they lack the true robustness of their island race, while their adoption of foreign concepts ("critical theory", "cultural Marxism" etc) shows how they are undermining the national community. The young are being alienated both in the sense that their membership of the nation is being called into question and in the sense that they are being deliberately offended by performative bigotry, from transphobia to racism. This is quite different to the traditional "war of the generations" in which the young were criticised for deviancy but where the motive of their elders was clearly to encourage their adoption of conventional values. Now the young are held to be a blight. The rhetoric directed at them is less about the need to grow up and join the ranks of society and more about the need for society to shun them if they persist in their perversity. In this they are clearly acting as a proxy for the malign alien.

Matthew Goodwin's "new elite" exhibit many of the characteristics familiar from traditional antisemitic tropes: intrusion into traditional elite institutions (such as Oxbridge), deracination (postcodes in big cities or university towns), financial exploitation (they "hoover up the economic gains of globalisation"), endogamy (they "tend to marry and hang out with other members of the elite graduate class who share the same backgrounds"), a focus on cultural production ("the knowledge, cultural and public sector institutions"), and covert influence ("which give[s] them an immense amount of cultural power over the national conversation"). Significantly, while this echoes late-19th century antisemitism of the sort common around the time of the Dreyfus Affair, with its emphasis on the material and social esteem, Goodwin also highlights the role of alien ideology, which under the Nazis was used to create the hybrid of Judeo-Bolshevism in which the Rothschilds could be yoked together with Leon Trotsky. 

Goodwin offers a foreshortened history in which the last few decades have witnessed a wholesale subsitution of elites. Thus "Whereas the old elite used to display their status to other elites by pointing to their family titles, estates or membership of London’s exclusive clubs, today the New Elite project their status and sense of moral righteousness by demonstrating their allegiance to wokeness". Naturally, he doesn't explain how the shift from one to the other came about, nor does it trouble him that the old elite appear not to have changed one iota in their behaviours or values. As the Conservatives have stuffed ever more paying customers and useful idiots into the House of Lords the number of titles has grown, while there has been no breakup of the great estates or mass closures in London's Clubland. It is surely bizarre to imagine, when the last Prime Minister but one (it's easy to lose count) and his predecessor were both Old Etonians and the current occupier of Number 10 is an Old Wykehamist, that the British ruling class has been comprehensively turned over since Gary Lineker started presenting Match of the Day in 1999.

Ironically, there was a significant change in the composition of one part of the actual elite over the last 50 years, specifically in the City of London where domestic banks, brokerages and exchanges were increasingly taken over by foreign firms, though this was done on the understanding that the traditional elite would retain roles within boardrooms and ancillary services (the law, public relations etc). In some ways Brexit can be seen as a reaction to that trend, with the "nativist" element of the City keen to re-establish greater domestic control. But however that plays out, it doesn't suggest a financial elite so enervated that it will cede political and commercial influence to the massed ranks of the critical race theorists without a fight. Likewise, it is plausible to suggest that the upper echelons of the BBC have shifted politically over the years, but the distance from Greg Dyke to Richard Sharp isn't that far and anyway the direction of travel is clearly to the right.

While it would be easy to dismiss Goodwin as a latterday Julius Streicher, it's important to recognise that his role is not to articulate conventional thinking but to shift its boundary and thus the political centre. A modern-day Enoch Powell would not be expected to resign ministerial office, and would probably defend his comments as "the legitimate concerns of people in the Midlands". Phrases like "Stop the boats" and "Asian grooming gangs" are just more decorous versions of "Let them drown" or "Paki paedos". The equivalent of Powell's "The black man will have the whip hand over the white man" is the suggestion that the police failed to stop those grooming gangs because they feared being accused of racism. Similarly, the young are supposedly dictating social norms and cultural values. Here we see the classic antisemitic trope in which a community that is objectively disempowered and discriminated against, whether Asian Muslims or low-paid graduates, is presented as having an almost magical power to impose its will and compel the acquiescence of others.

Centrist complaints that Gary Lineker's comparison of the Conservative government's rhetoric with Nazi Germany was over-the-top are not just a reflection of the shift promoted by Goodwin and others. They misunderstand that the Nazi's rhetoric was not particularly extreme in the 1930s. It employed the tropes of an existing culture of antisemitism, widespread across Europe, while its practical application was more bureaucratic than emotional (the pogrom of Kristallnacht was very much the exception before 1939). Hitler was careful pre-war to stop short in his speeches of inflaming international (conservative) opinion, while doing his best to inflame domestic opinion through dog-whistles and implication. His most famous speech - on the annihiliation of the Jewish race in Europe - was significantly a prophesy rather than a promise, though everyone surely understood the veiled threat (the Final Solution itself was an ambiguous phrase and remained a largely secret undertaking). Lineker's radicalism (or wokeness, if you prefer) is the result of him apparently standing still since the millennium while the political centre has shifted to the right.

A focus on the antisemitism of Nazi Germany and its terrible conclusion can blind us to the nature of antisemitism more generally. In nineteenth century Western Europe, where foreign immigration was rare and largely focused on urban centres and commerce, the Jew offered a ready target for both resentment towards existing hierarchies (the Court Jew) and contempt for the vicious lower orders. The twentieth century altered this, not so much because of the tragedy of the Holocaust but because democracy broadened the conception of the elite while postwar immigration created a more visible "other" associated with vice and competition in the labour market. The critique of the liberal elite is ultimately a critique of the welfare state and its expanded managerial class, while the critique of "unchecked" immigration reflects status anxiety in a society where "all that is solid melts into air". It is a reactionary plea for old deferences and social certainties. The irony of recent charges of antisemitism against the left is that far from being the marginal obsession of a few, the antisemitic worldview is now conventional wisdom.