As American Jews headed to vote in last week’s mid-term elections foremost in their minds, exit polls indicate, was the threat to US democracy posed by Donald Trump and his allies.
They were right to be alarmed.
As a pre-election analysis by the Washington Post found, a majority of Republicans standing for the House of Representatives, US Senate and key statewide offices peddled or indulged the former president’s “big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
The danger posed by these “election deniers” – together with other Republican legal and political efforts to restrict voting access and hobble election officials – rested at the heart of Joe Biden’s campaign.
The Democrats’ unexpectedly strong performance and polling suggests that this message resonated widely.
Election deniers were defeated in key races in the six battleground states where Trump attempted to overturn the voters’ verdict two years ago. Prominent among the losing far-right candidates was Doug Mastriano, who was crushed by Pennsylvania’s Jewish attorney general, Josh Shapiro, in the contest to become the state’s governor.
Mastriano’s fellow election deniers – such as Kari Lake in Arizona, Tudor Dixon in Michigan and Tim Michels in Wisconsin – all blew similarly winnable races, leading commentators to breathe a (somewhat caveated) sigh of relief. “We may have just dodged one of the biggest arrows ever aimed at the heart of our democracy,” declared the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman as news broke that the anticipated Republican “red wave” had turned into a trickle.
Nonetheless, as Friedman freely conceded, the threat to democracy may be diminished but it’s hardly disappeared – especially given what a victorious Trump might attempt if he returns to the White House in 2025.
Indeed, at least 150 election deniers are projected to have won seats in the House of Representatives – a figure which is somewhat higher than the 139 Republicans who refused to certify Biden’s election in the wake of the 6 January assault on the US Capitol – and a further 20 were victorious in Senate and closely watched statewide races.
More widely, multiple analyses indicate American democracy is hardly in rude health. The Economist Intelligence Unit, for instance, rates the United States a “flawed democracy”, while the University of Gothenburg’s Varieties of Democracy Index notes a growing “autocratisation” in the country. It also suggests that the Republican party is becoming increasingly illiberal and aping the likes of Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary.
This matters to all Americans – but it matters especially to Jews in the US.
“For American Jews, the disappearance of liberal democracy would be a disaster,” argues Jewish scholar Michael Holzman. “We have flourished under the shelter of the principles behind the First Amendment, and we have been protected by the absolute belief in the rule of law. Without these, Jews, start packing suitcases.”
In a pre-election column, the Washington Post’s Dana Millbank expanded on Holzman’s fears. “The fear of exile has become common as Jews see the unraveling rule of law, ascendant Christian nationalists and anti-Israel sentiments turning antisemitic on the far left,” he wrote. Alongside its allies on the Supreme Court, Millbank added, the Trumpified Republican party is attacking minority and civil rights, endangering the separation of church and state, and threatening violence.
All this, of course, is set against a bleak backdrop of rising Jew-hate, which historian Deborah Lipstadt, now the US special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, terms “the canary in the coal mine” for a wider set of threats to democracy.
Indeed, as the ADL charted prior to the election, a plethora of “right-wing extremists” seeking office this year spouted a toxic brew of antisemitism and white supremacy, support for conspiracy theories like QAnon, and election denial.
And these candidates reflect a paranoid mindset and a willingness to entertain political violence which has embedded itself in the Republican party.
The most graphic illustration of the fusion of these poisonous currents occurred with the 6 January attack on the Capitol which saw disturbing parallels with events described in The Turner Diaries, a fictional novel published in the late 1970s which, experts say, has become “required reading” on the far right. The book’s author, William Luther Pierce, the founder of the white supremacist, Jew-hating National Alliance, died two decades ago. But his pernicious legacy lives on: The Turner Diaries has been tied to the perpetrators of a string of violent acts from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 to more recent incidents, including the 2019 Poway synagogue shooting and antisemitic threats against Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer the following year.
Given this threat, the Democrats’ decision to meddle in Republican primaries to boost far-right, supposedly less electable candidates represented a huge risk. The party’s strategy amounted to “wagering our country’s future to marginally improve their own electoral chances,” argued columnist Megan McArdle. “It was a feckless and unconscionable gamble.”
However, there are some laudable figures – a number of them Jewish – in this sorry tale.
Elaine Luria, one of the few House Democrat incumbents to be defeated, chose to serve on the committee investigating the 6 January attacks in the full knowledge that she might end up paying a heavy political price in her Republican-leaning Virginia district.
On the other side of the political aisle, a phalanx of prominent Jewish conservatives have proved steadfast, outspoken and clear-eyed about the threat posed by Trump and his allies. Among their ranks are Bill Kristol, a former Reagan and Bush administration official and one of the Republicans’ foremost intellectuals and operatives; George W. Bush’s former White House speechwriter David Frum; Max Boot, a foreign policy specialist who advised multiple Republican presidential campaigns; and top Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg.
If November 8 2022 does indeed prove to be a turning point in the battle to preserve American democracy, history will surely credit and record their courageous and, at times, lonely stand.
