Conversations about the political mechanics of antisemitism often default to horseshoe theory. Observers track antisemitism’s prevalence at the political fringes to see where on each end things go sour, and notice ostensible opposites producing near-identical narratives fixated on Jews.
This approach captures part of the picture, but it assumes a stable small-“l” liberal center to retreat toward—and that no longer exists. The center’s core assumptions have stopped working, and political disagreement has been reoriented away from policy optimization and toward explaining who is responsible for the gap between expectation and reality.
Antisemitism, of all things, emerges at these moments because modernity inherited a symbolic archive of “the Jew” as the figure who refuses the world’s truth. Centuries of religious hostility toward Jews allowed this archive to accumulate conceptual inertia. When transcendence receded as a source of meaning, modernity stripped the archive of God and refilled it with race, psychology and metaphysics, transforming Jews from heretics obstructing salvation into obstacles to political progress, national coherence or universal liberation.
The theological accusation was not abandoned; it was secularized into political theory and absorbed into the Enlightenment’s intellectual DNA. This is how the Enlightenment carried centuries of anti-Jewish blame forward into the very structure of modern reasoning—and why any system built from that inheritance would retain the same ready-made culprit when its assumptions give way.
For the illiberal far right, Jewish belonging threatens the idea of an immutable nation. For the illiberal far left, Jewish continuity is seen as a betrayal of global progress toward a homogenized universal collective.
Small-“l” liberal worldviews managed to distinguish themselves from such currents by advocating pluralism, minority rights and religious freedom—principles that made Jewish particularism easier to accommodate. But these internal commitments did not make liberalism immune to antisemitism. They merely held off its emergence as long as liberalism believed in itself.
Now that liberalism no longer believes in itself, it is stirred by temptations it resisted until recently. In this state, the distinction between left and right within the liberal segment of the political spectrum becomes negligible in terms of susceptibility to antisemitism.
Liberals on the left are animated by the belief that people should blend, moving freely across geographic and cultural boundaries. While they don’t believe in forcibly stripping away particularist loyalties, as illiberal elements further to their left do, they do tend to interpret such loyalties and the borders that sustain them as obstacles to a future of global cooperation and equality.
When that ideal fails to materialize, these liberals don’t concede that they have misread human nature. Instead, they ask: “What corrupting power is preventing our dream of global cooperation from manifesting?”
Meanwhile, liberals on the right believe that their in-group should limit such movement and maintain its composition, with events beyond its boundaries affecting neither what it does nor how it looks. While they don’t believe in enforcing hierarchy by law or denying equal civic standing to citizens, as illiberal elements further to their right do, they are nonetheless intent on preserving their identity and autonomy, and thus tend to prefer insulation from the turbulence of global affairs.
When reality dashes this hope, these liberals don’t concede that the vision of national self-containment was too simplistic. Instead, they ask: “Who is dragging us into wars we never wanted? Who is preventing us from keeping to ourselves and preserving who we are?”
While these hopes and accompanying questions differ, the logic of collapse is the same. This is why two men as divergent in their politics as left-wing journalist Peter Beinart and right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson can converge (with notable intensity) on the idea that “Zionism” and “Zionists” are blocking the realization of their respective moral projects.
That the language is “Zionists” rather than “Jews” can appear, on the surface, to mark a moral or intellectual distinction that insulates liberal actors from participating in antisemitism. History suggests otherwise. Across the 20th century, illiberal movements hostile to Jewish continuity relied on this framing. In the name of “anti-Zionism,” Jewish identity was repressed in the Soviet Union and Jewish communities were eradicated across North Africa and the Middle East.
That the same illiberal currents now mark Jews and their supporters—“Zionists”—as acceptable targets of shaming and abuse in Western capitals is disturbing, but not surprising. When figures like Beinart and Carlson employ the same framing, however, it is especially unsettling, precisely because they have not suddenly become illiberal.
Beinart is not a Third-Worldist, and Carlson is not a neo-Nazi. They have not shifted horizontally to extremes, but have instead collapsed into antisemitism from within the liberal tradition. Far from abandoning their liberal assumptions, they cling to them with idealist fury long after reality has stopped cooperating.
