The last five years in Western politics has seen a repeated failure of the barriers that political establishments have tried to throw up against both radical ideas and xenophobic sentiments.
The rise of populism and the return of socialism have breached these cordons, and racism and Judeophobia have come through the breach – to the point where it’s entirely plausible that Britain will soon find itself with a prime minister, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has an anti-Semitism problem, even as the United States has already elected a birther to the presidency.
This week we’re watching two attempts to re-establish or shore up those old barriers. On the right, there’s the Republican effort to isolate Steve King, the Iowa congressman whose racist comments have become, at long last, an embarrassment to his colleagues. On the left, there’s the mass exodus of corporate and political sponsors from this weekend’s Women’s March, which has fallen into controversy because of some of its leaders’ ties to Louis Farrakhan.
The two efforts are similar but not parallel. The push against King is an attempt to redraw a line effaced by Donald Trump’s race-baiting, and since Trump is still the president, it matters only as a possible marker for a post-Trump Republican future, not a defining statement for the GOP today.
The exodus from the Women’s March, on the other hand, is an attempt to get ahead of a problem before it becomes worse – before anti-Semitism migrates from the left-wing fringe to the center, before the party starts getting its own versions of Jeremy Corbyn in positions of real influence.
This is not to say that anti-Semitism or other paranoid worldviews are a new problem on the left, or that the Democratic Party has always handled them effectively. The permanent prominence of Al Sharpton and the eternal return of Michael Moore testify to certain unsuccessful reckonings, and the grassroots left can be as amenable to conspiracy theories as the grassroots right. But the fact that Trump is in the White House while the Democratic National Committee bails on the Women’s March illustrates a difference; if the Democrats struggle with the tiger, the Republicans have let it leap the cage.
But it’s possible that this is changing, with the Women’s March’s eccentric leadership as a leading indicator, and that a more left-wing, populist, anti-establishment Democratic Party will become increasingly influenced by paranoias and bigotries that bubble up on the far left.
For liberals pondering how to sustain a quarantine, the right’s experience with Trump offers several lessons. The first is obvious: For a quarantine to work, you have to be willing to commit to it even when it has electoral costs. That’s emphatically not what Republicans working to sideline King are doing; they’ve turned on him only after a hard-fought midterm election in which they didn’t want to lose his seat.
The second lesson is that you can’t make your quarantine too broad or you’ll end up repressing ideas that need to be debated, and empowering demagogues when they’re the only ones who will talk about them.
For Democrats, this quandary is likely to play out over foreign policy, and especially policy toward Israel. Anti-Zionism isn’t necessarily anti-Semitism, but the difference can get blurry quick, and the Israel debate is the place where rhetorical poison seems most likely to infect left-wing politics. Most establishment Democrats would prefer not to have debates about Israel at all, just as most establishment Republicans circa 2013 hoped to stop debating immigration.
But for a party whose base is clearly less sympathetic toward Israel than Democratic elders in D.C., repressing the debate would be a mistake because anti-Zionism is more likely to percolate below the party’s surface and then bubble up as bigotry. The challenge is to figure out how to quarantine those kinds of hatreds and also represent your voters – because if you fail at the second task, the quarantine won’t hold.
Why have the Democrats managed to keep the cranks at bay more successfully than the GOP? Because the party’s elite has mostly kept the trust of the party’s base. The defeat of Hillary Clinton did create a power vacuum in which more crankish figures, from Resistance grifters to the Women’s March’s organizers, have gained prominence. But still nothing like the prominence now enjoyed by grifters on the right.
For the Democratic Party’s cordon sanitaire to really fail, you would need something that Bush delivered, that Barack Obama avoided, and that Democrats should hope their next president avoids as well – a failed presidency, in which the bonds of trust between voters and party leaders are decisively severed.
I hope it doesn’t come to that.
Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.
