The Republican Party as a School That Only Teaches Bad Things About Jews

It's pretty simple: they just hate foreigners.

Right-wing nationalists seem to believe that immigration is the root of all evil. If, as

Michael Huemer

puts it, “critical race theory” is like a school that only teaches true bad things about Jews — “murders that Jews committed, times when Jews started wars, times when Jews robbed or exploited people” — while omitting anything good about Jews or bad about gentiles, then the right-wing nationalist movement is a lot like a school that only teaches bad things about foreigners, regardless of whether they’re true or not. During the 2024 election, Donald Trump said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and Trump and J.D. Vance blamed them for unemployment, housing costs, drug overdoses, hospital wait times, Social Security and Medicare shortfalls, hurricanes, gun violence, and missing pets in Ohio. When Vivek Ramaswamy dared to suggest that immigrants aren’t the sole source of evil in the world, and native-born Americans might be partly responsible for their own lot in life, he was promptly expelled from the administration.

If there actually was a school that only taught bad things about Jews, it would be obvious that such a school was primarily motivated by antisemitism.¹ Likewise, if there is a political movement that disproportionately or exclusively says bad things about foreigners, it should be obvious that such a movement is primarily motivated by hating foreigners.

The alternative explanation here is that right-wing nationalists just really care about their own people, and even though they don’t imagine themselves owing any particular obligations to foreigners, they don’t harbor any sort of contempt for them, either. If you wouldn’t say that someone hates strangers just because they don’t think strangers’ interests matter as much as their own family, then you shouldn’t say that right-wing nationalists hate foreigners just because they prioritize the interests of their co-nationals over people from other countries.

But this analogy is totally misplaced. It would be a plausible explanation for why some people oppose giving immigrants welfare or extending them certain civic privileges like the franchise. But it doesn’t have anything to do with restrictions on free trade and immigration, which are the overriding priorities of the right-wing nationalist movement. In fact, we could say that because you typically wouldn’t go out of your way to hurt strangers by obstructing their freedom of movement and their right to form work contracts unless you hated them for some reason, there must be a similar motivation for hurting foreigners by forcing them to live in crime-ridden hellholes like Guatemala and infringing on their right to take a job from people who want to hire them.

Say that a guy named

Bentham's Bulldog

moved into my neighborhood and opened a top-notch philosophy think tank that put my schlubby uncle — a defender of the self-sampling assumption — out of business. I would probably feel compelled to help out my uncle in some way that I wouldn’t ever help out Bentham. But I certainly wouldn’t try to shut down Bentham’s think tank and force him out of the neighborhood. And if I would, it would be fair for you to conclude that I harbor some sort of animosity toward him.

Now swap out Bentham for

Amos Wollen

, who is Br- (🤢) Br- (🤢) British (🤮), and my uncle for a few tens of thousands of blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania whose shift got cut at the Pollution Factory. Say also that approximately 50% of my neighbors were perpetually on the brink of committing a pogrom against Amos because they thought he ate their pet oysters. This is nationalist economic policy in a nutshell.

The analogy breaks down further when you try to figure out what it is that right-wing nationalists are actually doing to promote the interests of their co-nationals. If they didn’t just hate foreigners, you’d expect them to have plenty of non-zero-sum solutions on offer for the most pressing ailments of “Real Americans.” But such solutions are never forthcoming. As Richard Hanania recently put it, the function of the term “America First” is not to indicate that someone is particularly committed to doing things that would improve most Americans’ lives (in fact, most people who embrace the term are less interested in making life better for Americans than followers of other political tendencies) but to indicate that they support protectionism, restrictions on immigration, and belligerence toward other countries.

Even the traditional putative ideological goals and policy aims of the conservative movement have all been abandoned or subsumed to the principle of hating foreigners. It is difficult to explain why else the supposed “budget-cutting” arm of the Trump administration has been let loose on the agency that saves millions of people’s lives in other countries (1% of the budget) while the president vows not to touch the largest welfare programs for middle-class white people — Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits (42% of the budget) — and Republicans in Congress gear up to pass hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for deportations and talk about increasing military spending by as much as 90% over the next decade.

Hanania tries to give right-wing nationalists the benefit of the doubt and says you can ascribe these tendencies to their simply wanting to signal commitment to tribalism as a moral principle. But that just adds another causal arrow between “hating foreigners” and “doing exactly what you would do if you hated foreigners.” You could equally say that the teachers at a school that only teaches bad things about Jews only follow an antisemitic curriculum because they want to fit in with everybody else at the school who teaches bad things about Jews. But that ignores why the school teaches bad things about Jews in the first place. It’s not as if Jew hatred is the only way to form a collective identity (although it is historically a startlingly common one) or even an easier way to form a collective identity than, say, having a school football team or a healthy rivalry against a neighboring town. If there’s a school that acts exactly the way it would act if it hated Jews, it’s probably because it hates Jews.

Similarly, if a political movement behaves like it hates foreigners, it’s probably because it hates foreigners. You can signal tribalism in either of two ways: You can celebrate the shared values and interests of the in-group, or you can stoke resentment and antagonism toward the out-group. If a movement only ever does the latter, it’s not enough to stop your analysis there and say that people only want to fit in. You need to come up with an explanation for why the only way to fit in is to talk about how bad foreigners are and not how great Americans are. And eventually, that just brings you back to the conclusion that they hate foreigners.

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1. Actually, there probably are many schools like this in the Islamic world. But that doesn’t have any bearing on the argument.