J. D. Vance is being ambiguous about anti-Semitism and his (former) friends are giving him a telling-off

Rome. Rod Dreher, an American conservative writer who has returned home after spending time in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, is about to release "Weimar America" in bookshops. In its pages, he will describe everything that leads him to view today’s United States as akin to the decrepit German republic born out of the pile of sanctions imposed at Versailles after the First World War, which paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. With all that ensued. There is something wrong with America today; totalitarian impulses are not confined to those in power: it is something deeper, widespread throughout society. This is also why, he said in an interview on the Jeremy Boreing Show, he does not know whether sooner or later we will see a Hitler 2.0 or a Stalin 2.0. We will, however, see something totalitarian. Everything is just like the 1930s, starting with the growing hatred of Jews. Dreher had already reported on this in a lengthy feature for Free Press. In colleges across the American heartland, in the small towns of the Rust Belt, from one end of the country to the other: young people immersing themselves in virulently anti-Semitic podcasts and then, quite openly, describing themselves as anti-Semites in front of their lecturers at university. And those very same lecturers could not come to terms with it: what have we got wrong? How is it possible that this is happening in America? And here we come to the failings of the ruling elites, even the younger ones. The interviewer mentions one name above all others, someone on whom Dreher had staked a great deal and in whom he believed unshakably: J. D. Vance.

It was he who, knowing that deep America, could have stemmed the rise of the far right – the movement that blends ideology and Christianity into a deadly cocktail which leads, in its most iconic moments, to the brandishing of rosaries and the raising of crosses at Charlie Kirk’s funeral-cum-show in Arizona, but which, in the murky undercurrents barely covered by the media, boils down to pure anti-Semitism. “I was hoping that J. D. might stem” the phenomenon, said Dreher: “People like Vance, perhaps even Marco Rubio, will think they can win these radicals over to their side. They are making the same mistake as Franz von Papen”, the German politician who was convinced he could contain Hitler by giving him a little power. “Anti-Semitism in the world will be the fundamental issue facing our civilisation for the rest of our lives,” emphasises the writer, who says he no longer knows whether he and J. D. Vance are still friends: last October, he had suggested that Vance give up his flirtations with that section of the right, but the vice-president did not heed his advice: “I don’t think he’s a bad person, but I need to see him take a clear stand against those who hate Jews. Let’s be clear: I don’t believe that criticising the Israeli government makes you an anti-Semite. And I say this even though I consider myself a supporter of Israel. But this distinction, in the American debate, does not exist.” Vance appeared on Joe Rogan’s show and, in what many observers saw as a nod to the anti-Semitic ‘groyper’ wing of the American right, blamed Israel for causing the peace talks to collapse: “I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that there were people within the Israeli government who sought, shall we say, to effectively steer us away from the negotiations because they want to continue the military campaign.” This line of reasoning “is a contemporary version of the ‘stab-in-the-back myth’ that German generals devised and spread in 1918 to blame Jews and socialists for Germany’s defeat in the First World War and for their own failures of leadership”, wrote Dreher in an article, seeing the vice-president’s stance as yet another factor accelerating the Weimar spiral in America. Everything has changed so quickly; five years ago, anti-Semitism was something confined to left-wing campuses, the writer observed, so much so that he did not even mention it in his 2020 book Live Not by Lies. Were he to revisit the book, he would certainly address the issue.

Vance, however, has had several opportunities to dispel any doubts about whether he is, to a greater or lesser extent, a friend of Israel. In December, however, he declared himself ‘neutral’ regarding the debate on anti-Semitism organised by his friend Tucker Carlson. As his interview with Rogan subsequently demonstrated, this was no misjudgement: he even played into certain theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s links with Israeli intelligence. The vice-president, who has his sights set on the 2028 election, does not wish to distance himself from those more extreme factions that Dreher had advised him to steer clear of. The vast ‘MAGA’ tent – that enormous umbrella (riddled with internal contradictions) that carried Trump to the White House twice – also encompasses those ideological fringes that are not exactly commendable. And Vance wants to hold on to them tightly. Above all because, by studying what is happening within the Democratic Party, he sees that a significant proportion of the younger generation – who, it is assumed, will turn out to vote in the presidential election in two years’ time – is rallying around the anti-Israel cause. Whether this is a sound or flawed calculation, only time and the ballot box will tell. In any case, if there is one man in the current administration who is certainly not wholly and unquestionably pro-Israel, it is none other than J. D. Vance, Rod Dreher’s old friend.