Rod Dreher: “I fear a Weimar for America. Vance is using the Jews as scapegoats; he’ll come to regret it.”

US Vice-President J. D. Vance has stated that the “US relationship with Israel” is one of the factors responsible for the Republicans’ defeat in the mid-term elections. A major party donor, Clifford Asness, accused the Vice-President of “blaming the Jews”. The former Israeli ambassador to Washington, the historian Michael Oren, was particularly scathing: “This marks the end of a half-century era in US-Israel relations as we have known them. What lies ahead is completely shrouded in fog.”

“In his lengthy post-election tweet, Vance cited figures on Trump voters who chose not to vote in the 2026 election,” explains Rod Dreher, a successful American writer and essayist who has been a long-standing friend of the vice-president. “He argued that one of the reasons was their anger at America’s close relationship with Israel. There is no doubt that there is a great deal of hostility towards Israel amongst American voters, but this is concentrated on the left and amongst young right-wing men. However, no other poll – not a single one – has shown that the issue of Israel was significant for voters as a whole in this catastrophic Republican defeat. Instead, it was about the war with Iran, the cost of living and Trump’s spectacular corruption, which makes Berlusconi look like a monk. Vance spends too much time online, probably too much for his own good. He seems to confuse the priorities of the online right with those of Republican voters.”

In fact, this week’s polls have shown that the majority of Republican voters remain strongly in favour of Israel, explains Rod Dreher. “Vance may not like it, but if he runs for president in 2028, his hostility towards Israel might make him a hero to podcasters, but it won’t help him with voters in the Republican primaries. Similarly, his close friendship with Tucker Carlson – who has become America’s most effective anti-Semite – will be a huge liability. Vance refuses to distance himself from Carlson when the media ask him to. And it is true that just because one man is friends with another does not mean he shares his political views. However, the things Carlson says are so extreme – and not just about Jews – that Vance will be grilled about the ‘Tucker problem’ time and time again in a presidential campaign. I believe Vance thinks this won’t be a serious problem for him, but he’s wrong.”

At Charlie Kirk’s funeral, Carlson attacked the ‘hummus-eaters’ (a thinly veiled reference to Jews). A month ago, Vance reiterated that he is friends with Carlson (“I know, yeah, Tucker is a friend of mine”). Not only was Carlson instrumental in his political rise in 2022, but when Vance arrived at the White House as Vice-President, he also brought his son, Buckley Carlson, onto the White House communications team. There is no doubt that America’s close relationship with Israel will change. “Because, on the whole, the love that Americans have long had for the Jewish state is fading,” Dreher tells us. “But it will be a slow process, at least on the right, and Vance is on the wrong side of the issue for a candidate who wants to lead the party. Personally, I don’t believe Vance is an anti-Semite, but I’m not sure. The Jews, as usual, are being used as scapegoats. Did Netanyahu work to persuade Trump to go to war with Iran? Yes, of course. But who made that decision? Trump, the Commander-in-Chief. Even more influential than Netanyahu were Senator Lindsey Graham, a neocon Christian, and Marc Thiessen, a hawk who served as an adviser on Iraq in the Bush administration. So does Vance want to blame the Jews? Absurd and sinister.”

We’ve seen this before. “In 1919, to conceal their own culpability for the defeat in the war, the German generals invented the so-called ‘Dolchstoßlegende’ – the myth that Germany had lost solely because Jews and socialists at home had stabbed the army in the back. I fear we will see a 2026 version of this myth emerge amongst some of Trump’s supporters, concerning Iran.”

Dreher is set to publish a new book this spring, Weimar America. “There will be a civil war amongst the Republicans,” he explains. “The scale of the defeat has been so massive, and the blame for it so hard to deny, that I don’t think the Republicans will fight amongst themselves over the cause of the catastrophe. The battle will be over who succeeds Trump as party leader. Vance, and perhaps Marco Rubio, will make their moves, but it is hard to imagine that anyone who was part of the Trump administration will be able to shake off this responsibility in the eyes of the electorate. This presents a great opportunity for a candidate like Ron DeSantis, the outgoing governor of Florida. DeSantis has a reputation as a successful and competent conservative governor. But he lacks charisma and was easily beaten by Trump in the first presidential primaries of 2024. Yet now that we have seen where Trump’s flamboyant charisma has led the country and the party, perhaps voters will be ready for someone who is not flashy, but who is undeniably good at governing. And DeSantis is very fortunate not to be tainted by the war or by any of Trump’s failures.”

The problem will be Trump’s cult of personality. “It should have been destroyed by this week’s election, but there will always be a hard core of believers who refuse to face reality. We do not yet know how many there are, but Trump will undoubtedly spend the next two years causing trouble and trying to keep these believers on his side. This will be a problem for any candidate seeking to succeed Trump. The Democrats could impeach and convict Trump if they wanted to, but it is in their interest – in a Machiavellian sense – to keep Trump in the White House, to let him run his big mouth. It is the Democrats’ secret weapon for regaining the White House in 2028. I expect that Trump’s behaviour between now and 2028 will force any Republican who wants to become president to condemn him. But this will make things more difficult for that candidate in the Republican primaries, because there will undoubtedly be a certain number of zealots who refuse to believe that Trump has failed.”

Let’s turn to ‘Weimar America’. ‘The psychosocial parallels in today’s America are strikingly similar to those of 1920s Germany. Social atomisation runs deep; fewer and fewer people trust institutions; thanks to AI and the digital world, no one can be sure what is true or false, so they make decisions based on emotions and instinct. Americans in their twenties and thirties are living in economic precariousness. Despite the country’s great wealth, there is a pervasive sense that everything is fragile and chaotic, and that the social fabric has been torn apart. This situation closely resembles conditions in Weimar Germany. In 1946, a Swiss Catholic philosopher, Max Picard, wrote a book analysing why Germany had fallen into Nazism. The main cause, he said, was that the German people were living in a psychosocial state of chaos and unpredictability, and that they had lost the ‘logos’. He was referring, in part, to the Logos – Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh – but more philosophically to the fact that the Germans had lost faith that the material world was underpinned by a rational metaphysical order. This is America. Despite everything, democracy and order held out in Germany until 1928; in that year’s elections, the Nazi Party secured 2.6 per cent of the vote. And then, at the end of 1929, the Great Depression struck. The centrist parties collapsed; the Germans rushed into the arms of the Nazis and the Communists. The group that rushed first and fastest towards Hitler was that of educated middle-class men in their twenties and thirties, men who had been shaped by the chaos of the Weimar Republic and who had lost hope in the future. We know what happened next. I am not predicting that a new Hitler, or a new Stalin, is on the way in America, although I suppose it is possible. If we are to face a severe economic collapse – one of our own making (for example, Dario Amodei of Anthropic predicted earlier this year that AI will destroy half of all white-collar professional jobs within five years) – then 1920s Germany provides us with a historical model of what might happen. I suspect that, if the worst were to happen, the new Caesar would bear less resemblance to Hitler and Stalin and more to some charismatic technocrat who has mastered AI and the mechanisms of digital control. My book is a warning to a decadent democratic America about what could easily happen here. If we understand history, then we can act to avoid repeating the past. I wrote this book about my own country, but the lessons are applicable to Europe too – it saddens me to say so.’ It remains to be seen whether the fog Michael Oren speaks of conceals the return of terrible old shadows.