The resurgence of antisemitism on the American right has of late often been reduced to a matter of strategy. Is JD Vance doing what he needs to do to win the 2028 Republican presidential nomination? Is Donald Trump a hypocrite? Has the Heritage Foundation lost support on the non-MAGA right, following the think tank’s president defending a podcast interview with a white nationalist and antisemite?
Focusing on these questions can easily lead to bad political strategy. But superficial political analysis also allows critics of the U.S. right to be complacent about their own failings. As the Jewish population continues to face violence in the United States and around the world, the G.O.P. needs to get its house in order, but the rest of Americans do too.
Mr. Vance illustrates these dynamics well, because he has played an elusive game with antisemitism recently. While he said in an interview with the conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari that antisemitism has “no place in the conservative moment,” he has also rejected efforts to remove antisemites from the G.O.P. (saying, “We have far more important work to do than canceling each other”) and has downplayed the problem of antisemitism within his own political party.
A widespread interpretation of this equivocation is that it is a strategy: Mr. Vance is trying to keep the 2024 Trump coalition together for his own 2028 presidential campaign. And it is a divided coalition. As recently released data from the Manhattan Institute illustrates, the G.O.P. under Mr. Trump “is broader than any Republican coalition in recent memory, but also more internally contradictory and harder to manage.” It includes not only a substantial percentage (65 percent) who have consistently voted Republican since 2016 or before (many of whom would identify with the party of Reagan), but also a newer cohort (29 percent) who have only recently voted Republican for the first time under Mr. Trump—leaving about 6 percent of self-identified Republicans who have not been voting for Mr. Trump. These newer voters skew younger than the longtime voters and are low-propensity voters. They are also more progressive than Republican stalwarts, write the authors of the Manhattan Institute report: “more supportive of left-leaning economic policies, more favorable toward China, more critical of Israel, and more liberal on issues ranging from migration to DEI initiatives.”
If it is true that Mr. Vance is trying to have it both ways on Israel and antisemitism, this is a perilous strategy. First, there is little hope of the Trump coalition enduring in 2028. Held together in large part by grievances against the left as articulated by Mr. Trump and shaped by his personality, a substantial portion of the new G.O.P. came in with Mr. Trump, and many will leave with Mr. Trump. Some will vote Democratic, but many others will simply drop out of political life again. This is in line with recent U.S. politics: the Bush 43 coalition did not save John McCain in 2008; the Obama coalition did not save Hillary Clinton in 2016; and the Biden coalition did not prevail for Kamala Harris in 2024. The 2028 Republican candidate for president cannot assume he will win with the 2024 Trump coalition but rather must work hard to form his own, doubtless different, coalition.
Second, while Mr. Vance has thus far rejected the idea of expelling antisemitic elements of MAGA from the movement, drawing bright red lines is just what successful political coalitions occasionally must do. Coalitions can tolerate many contradictions, but some are a bridge too far. Antisemitism is a dangerous ideology that is fundamentally wrong, evil and a betrayal of Christianity. It undercuts the basic liberties of U.S. society and denies their foundation in a fundamental Jewish and Christian principle: “the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family,” as the Catholic natural law and Princeton University professor Robert P. George argued before resigning from the Heritage Foundation board in November 2025. Antisemitism is a death cult, leading to violence and the deaths of many people. In other words, it works against much that the G.O.P. claims to value. This is why William F. Buckley, a leading figure in the post-war conservative movement, famously endeavored to keep antisemitism out of his magazine, the National Review, and the G.O.P. coalition.
In fact, Mr. Vance and others are already on the record in agreeing that coalitions have their limits. Many current leaders in the G.O.P. have argued for the Trump-era changes in the G.O.P. on the grounds that certain policies, including free trade and neoconservatism, are disconsonant with the aims of the MAGA right. If they can rule supply-side economics out of bounds, they can certainly do the same with antisemitism.
Third, and this reason is specific to Mr. Vance, surrendering to young antisemites undermines one of Mr. Vance’s main self-reported strengths: that he can be a leader for young men disillusioned by modernity and left out of the economy.
Right-wing antisemitism is particularly visible in online spaces and among younger people. Its resurgence stems from several converging factors at work among Gen Z, including skepticism regarding Israel’s place in U.S. foreign policy, economic discontent that encourages scapegoating and the internet’s amplification of conspiratorial ideas that easily slide into antisemitic patterns. These dynamics were at play, for example, in the interview that caused so much turmoil at the Heritage Foundation: Tucker Carlson’s sympathetic sit-down with Nick Fuentes, a young provocateur with a huge online following, in which Mr. Fuentes repeated many of his antisemitic talking points without challenge from Mr. Carlson.
As the political commentator Rod Dreher points out, antisemitism among young men cannot be addressed effectively with lofty appeals to authority or values: “while it’s important to take a clear stand against anti-Semitism in the ranks, there is no way to gatekeep our way out of this. You cannot simply point at the Zoomers and say, ‘Thou shalt not,’ and expect it to work. The problems are too deep and complex, and anyway, they have learned to have no respect for authority.”
Whomever would exorcise antisemitism on the right, then, must have real credibility and an ability to lead. Mr. Vance has claimed that ability many times among the young, very online men at stake in this conversation. But will he lead them or follow them? Much will hinge upon whether he, a Catholic social conservative and economical populist, can educate and lead the postmodern, post-religious right.
Again, these challenges are not peculiar to Mr. Vance. Whoever wins the mantle of Mr. Trump’s successor in 2028 will not be able to avoid the basic tasks of coalitional politics. Mr. Trump has not made it easy to establish bright red lines about what is acceptable in the party, and no candidate will want to alienate new G.O.P. voters, who, being younger, are already less likely to go to the polls than other citizens. But the work of such coalitional “hygiene” cannot be avoided indefinitely if the G.O.P. wants to build that most elusive of unicorns in contemporary U.S. politics: a stable party coalition that wins successive elections.
A time of decision
Tolerating antisemitism is bad politics, but it is also something far worse. Antisemitism is a modern expression of a long history of anti-Judaism, in which many Christians played a role. At stake have been profoundly wrong and dangerous ideas about “supersessionism,” the claim that Christ abolished the law and the covenant between God and Israel; the “deicide” charge of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Christ; and anti-Jewish discourses and practices that have accrued throughout history, often for the political and economic benefit of powerful elites. This history means that antisemitism is an ever-ready weapon when political and social elites want to manipulate angry, disaffected people by channeling their energies toward a scapegoat. The Shoah was far and away the worst such instance, but far from the only one.
Any movement that tolerates antisemitism cannot claim to represent Christians. For this reason, Pope Leo XIV recently restated the “Catholic Church’s firm condemnation of all forms of antisemitism, which, throughout the world, continues to sow fear in Jewish communities and in society as a whole.”
Perhaps the key word here for Catholics, including Mr. Vance, is firm. Choosing not to resist evil is just that: a choice. As the Wall Street Journal columnist William Galston writes, recent events have been “a textbook case of how this ancient hatred spreads when those who are in a position to resist it choose not to do so.”
A G.O.P. that got tough on antisemitism would help stem the tide of violence and save lives. It would remind the millions of Christians in its party that antisemitism is anti-Christian. It would also be good for Democrats. The American left also has a tremendous antisemitism problem, and G.O.P. backsliding gives others permission not to tend their own garden.
And, yes, taking a firm stand against antisemitism would be good for Israel, even if “good for Israel” is not a universally popular phrase at the moment. There is no question that U.S. public opinion toward Israel is changing, particularly on the left and among younger Americans. In response, many on the right are searching for a new way to talk about the relationship between Israel and the United States, one in which, as the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat argues, allows “normal criticism” of Israel in ways that can “clearly distinguish those normal debates from paranoid and antisemitic criticism.”
Ironically, it might be Mr. Vance’s tepidity toward Israel that gives him the credibility on the right to initiate such a move for the greater good of the United States, Israel and the Middle East more generally. But it will only be salutary if he can pair it with a forthright rejection of antisemitism.
As with so much else, Christians cannot put their trust in princes when it comes to resisting antisemitism. The most important work will happen in families, parishes, schools and other formative sites of everyday interactions. But we can still pray that those princes will occasionally find politically advantageous reasons to do the right thing.
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