When my next-door neighbour told me over dinner that Vladimir Putin had helped fund 9/11 to destabilise the West, I considered him nothing more than a conspiracy theorist. But a few months later he was dead. His name was Alexander Litvinenko and he was murdered to stop him talking.
Over the years I’ve pondered Alexander’s words many times. What he said then – in early 2006 – has certainly come to pass. Wars, terrorism, radicalisation, immigration have all led to a growing distrust in democracy. Whether that would have happened without 9/11 is something we will never know.
The 2008 financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the advent of social media, Covid have all played their part too but what is clear now – with two large-scale wars having an impact on all of us - is that we are on a precipice. And when democracies feel so unstable, voters do what they have always done and turned to the person who seems like they have the easy answers; the mythological ‘strong man’.
There are many reasons why Donald Trump has won power again; I am certainly not discounting the manifest failings of the Democrats. But if the world felt safer, people would not be turning to extremes.
The success of Trump – the lying, leching, barely sentient populist showman – is both a particularly American issue but also part of a wider world movement which speaks of a desperation that democracy is failing to deal with. Orban in Hungary, Modi in India, the popularity of Le Pen in France and, of course, Netanyahu in Israel has shown democracies voting for the strong populist who appeals to base instincts in the hope that they will somehow make things better.
Jews should have learned our lesson from history but, as the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote: ‘What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.’
It is just over 100 years since, following a world war and a pandemic, the first European fascist leader, Benedetto Mussolini was elected in Italy. He was followed by Franco in Spain, Hitler in Germany, Salazar in Portugal, the Fatherland Front in Austria, the 4th of August Regime in Greece and others.
There was no inevitability to fascism – if the Wall Street Crash hadn’t happened in 1929 or even if the Weimer Republic’s last Chancellor hadn’t blindly trusted Hitler there’s a chance the Austrian would be a footnote in history, the other regimes might have quickly fallen. But turning to the extremes was a clue that it was a time of desperation which the centre failed to properly understand.
Today not only has liberalism tried to pretend the issues most concerning voters – immigration and the economy - aren’t real problems, but it has allowed other extremism to take over. If you keep on telling the white working class that they are privileged with your upper middle-class accent don’t be surprised if they rebel. If you keep telling women that any man who says he has girl feelings has to be allowed into your changing rooms or to beat you at sport, don’t be shocked when they say no. If you call people deplorables or Nazis, you can’t expect them to vote for you.
The centre has folded. The talk of Jews being the canary in the coal mine has come to pass. Antisemitism has risen to record levels and has reached that height for some time. The canary is poisoned, flailing, sick. We Jews have noticed but it feels to me like much of the rest of the world hasn’t caught up with us yet. However much we squeak, ‘when antisemitism has risen it’s never good’ we are ignored. There is a poison in the air.
There is no easy answer – if only there was. I am not surprised that thousands of American Jews have voted Republican for the first time – even if the majority remains Democrat. The Democrats let us down by allowing hatred of Jews and democracy to run riot on the university campuses and in the street, by blowing hot and cold on support of Israel, and by refusing to properly address the problem of Iran.
If Jews don’t feel safe in America, there is nowhere in the diaspora for us to feel safe. I blame my fellow liberals for this – we have allowed people who hate us in the West to take advantage of our freedom. We have forgotten that not everyone believes in the #BeKind mantra – there are people who want to kill us and take everything we have.
The warning from history is there but will anyone listen? Fascism is around the corner if we don’t get better at fighting it – we’ve seen elements of it from Netanyahu’s attempts to nobble the judiciary system, firing Gallant to shore up his base to the way Trump, last time around, refused to accept defeat. Strongmen are not our friends. The strongman is never good for democracy, and never good for Jews. But where are the tools we need to defeat him?
