Note To JD Vance: Catering To Extremism Is A Losing Political Strategy
By Jonathan S. Tobin
Recent events have been an object lesson in the basic truth of the “horseshoe theory” of politics. The theory argues that the far left and the far right are almost always closer to each other in their ideas and even their tactics than either is to the political center and the people who are presumably on the same side of the great issues of the day. Rather than a linear continuum, the political alignment is, in effect, a horseshoe-shaped diagram.
Nothing better illustrates this than the way antisemites on the left and the right have been working from the same playbook. Both Democratic Socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson share a hatred for Israel and its Jewish supporters. Each not only taps into anti-Jewish sentiments latent in society. They also speak to growing constituencies within the Democratic and Republican parties that share this point of view and such prejudices.
Mainstreaming antisemitism
At this point, there are two questions to ask about both sides.
One is whether their ideas, which might have been dismissed as inherently marginal only a few years ago, have been mainstreamed in public discourse. The other is whether or not, once that has been accomplished, their toxic views about Israel and the Jews will come to dominate America’s two main political parties, and thus eventually be transformed from ideological obsessions to policy.
With respect to the Democrats, the answer to both questions appears to be “yes.”
When it comes to the Republicans, the answer is far from conclusive. President Donald Trump and most conservatives, as well as members of the GOP, are pro-Israel and philo-semitic. But as we saw last week with the shocking decision of the Heritage Foundation, a highly influential think tank in Washington, D.C., to come to the defense of Carlson after he aired a podcast when he gave a friendly platform to neo-Nazi hatemonger Nick Fuentes, it’s now indisputable that the right has its own very serious antisemitism problem.
Still, unlike the acquiescence and support that Mamdani’s candidacy has generated from within his party, the pushback against Heritage president Kevin Roberts among Republicans has been as loud as it was encouraging. Indeed, most of the conservative ecosphere seemed to react with outrage against Roberts’ shocking video in which he cast those opposed to Carlson’s stands as a “venomous coalition” as well as seemed to indicate that there was something sinister about supporters of Israel, both Jewish and evangelical Christians, who believed the podcaster and his prejudiced views had no place in the GOP mainstream. The outrage among employees and donors at Heritage, which has devoted considerable resources to support for Israel and targeting antisemitism via its “Project Esther,” was also considerable.
As Commentary magazine executive editor Abe Greenwald aptly noted: “The right responded to half a dozen Jew-hating podcasters and one think tank president with overwhelming and immediate condemnation. The left encouraged two years of abject pro-jihad support and terrorism to thrive without ever putting its foot down.”
Is JD Vance Trump’s successor?
The key to the future of the GOP, however, may lie with someone who was conspicuously silent about the controversies over the Carlson-Fuentes podcast and the situation at Heritage. By that, I don’t refer to Trump but to the person who is the current favorite to succeed him as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee: Vice President JD Vance.
Though three years is a lifetime in politics, Vance has not only been anointed by Trump, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as the only viable GOP candidates in 2028, but his rapid rise to popularity on the right should not be underestimated. His embrace of populist national conservative positions on a host of issues has earned him the special contempt of the liberal media, but it has further endeared him to his party’s voters, as the very early 2028 polls have indicated.
And that is why Vance’s continued embrace of Carlson is deeply troubling. It raises questions about his political judgment and his moral compass.
Vance and Carlson have been friends for years. Carlson actively promoted Vance’s successful run for the Senate in 2022, especially in a difficult multi-candidate GOP primary, which he wound up winning easily, though with less than a third of all votes cast, on his prime-time Fox News show. In 2024, he played an active and reportedly decisive role in persuading Trump to tap Vance for the vice presidential nomination.
So, aside from any feelings of friendship, Vance owes Carlson. That’s part of the reason why he refused to disassociate himself from him even after Carlson hosted a Holocaust denier on his podcast in September 2024 and continued to make joint appearances with him during the campaign.
And when given the honor of hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast on the first episode after the activist’s assassination in September, Vance invited Carlson to join him, among other prominent guests, in a program broadcast from the White House.
That’s astonishing when you consider that Carlson has smeared Christian supporters of Israel like Kirk as guilty of “heresy” and suffering from a “brain virus” in his friendly interview with the antisemitic “groyper” Fuentes.
It also stands in strong contrast to Vance’s strongly articulated views about the importance of the U.S.-Israel alliance. But, as Vance made clear in a disturbing exchange with a student voicing antisemitic smears of Israel at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi, he also is acting as if he is concerned about keeping Carlson-style Israel-haters or even Fuentes’ groypers inside the GOP tent.
In comments that brought to mind then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ response to a left-wing student who voiced blood libels against Israel, Vance chose not to chide or even disagree with his questioner, but instead to signal his solidarity with their concerns that Israel is manipulating Washington.
All of which raises the question as to whether Vance really thinks the path to winning the presidency or even a successful rest of Trump’s term lies in retaining the support of the small but vocal far-right extremist wing of the GOP.
Democrats’ costly tilt to the left
If so, he may be making the same sort of mistaken calculation that many Democrats have made.
Over the past decade, the Democratic Party’s intersectional left-wing has become a dominant factor in its politics as it went from skepticism about the U.S.-Israel alliance to one of hostility, and now, apparent comfort with open antisemitism. That was made obvious during the 2024 presidential campaign when President Joe Biden and Harris demonstrated that they were far more fearful of losing the votes of the anti-Israel left than they were of fending them off.
Any doubt about the direction of Democratic Party discourse has been removed by the current New York City mayoral campaign in which Mamdani has been largely embraced by the Democratic establishment, despite his vocal antisemitic stands, not to mention his Marxist economic program. While some Jewish Democrats have sounded the alarm about him, they are clearly in the minority. Party leaders have either reluctantly made their peace with him or, like former President Barack Obama, have become his enthusiastic backers and mentors.
The liberal media, including its leading outlets like The New York Times, has gone down a similar path. That’s hardly surprising given the fact that publications like the Times have mainstreamed anti-Zionist views that negate Jewish rights, while published Hamas propaganda and blood libels against Israel and the Jews. In such an environment, Mamdani’s extremist views are made to appear legitimate, if not reasonable.
The notion that a “no-enemies-on-the-left” policy—in which the anti-Israel and Jew-hating faction of the Democrats is embraced, rather than expelled—is politically wise ignores everything we know about American politics, both historically and in the present day.
Democrats lost in 2024 for a number of reasons, not the least of which was their denial of Biden’s mental incapacity until it was late in the campaign, and then his replacement by an incompetent and unpopular candidate in Harris. A more important explanation for their troubles was a matter of the broad center of the electorate’s dislike for the way Democrats had embraced the concerns of woke progressives and credentialed elites. Their obsessions with race via the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) woke catechism, gender ideology, open borders, restricting gun rights and climate change doomed them with the working-class voters of all races who cared far more about stopping illegal immigration, crime and the opioid epidemic.
In the same way, the Democrats’ more hostile attitude toward Israel and their failure to take a strong stand against pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses, at the very least, didn’t help and may well have contributed to their problems.
That’s the context for the choice that rests before Republicans, and most particularly, Vance, as they ponder the same question about how to deal with their own extremists.
Some might argue that the broad turn against Israel in American public opinion since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on the Jewish state on Oct. 7, 2023, should lead Republicans to do as the Democrats have done. In stark contrast to their opponents, Republicans remain overwhelmingly supportive of Israel. The margin on this issue, however, is far smaller when it comes to younger GOP voters, who, like their counterparts on the left, also get much of their information about the world from TikTok and other dubious sources.
Extremists are political poison
Still, Vance and any other Republican who might think there are more votes to be gotten by clinging to Carlson than by behaving responsibly, and having nothing to do with him and his even more extreme and hateful friends and podcast guests, is likely wrong. A “no-enemies-on-the-right” strategy would be a blunder.
U.S. elections are largely won by candidates who show that they are not beholden to crackpots, let alone willing to embrace vile hate-mongers like those that Carlson thinks deserve a platform. That was the lesson learned by Biden and Harris, whose inability to distance themselves from woke progressives with extreme views was out of touch with most Americans. The way the media has published Hamas propaganda about “genocide” and “famine” as facts rather than fiction has hurt Israel’s image and bolstered an international backlash against Jews and Israel. Still, the notion that the kind of Jew-hatred Carlson is enabling and promoting is popular remains detached from reality.
Many Americans, and especially Jews, are alarmed about the prospect of Mamdani using his power to harm Israel and its supporters, as well as to negatively impact the lives of Jewish New Yorkers. A great many national Republicans, however, have appeared gleeful about the prospect of Mamdani becoming the poster child for a left-leaning Democratic Party. Should the Democrats continue their drift to the left, with perhaps fellow Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) running for president in 2028, the expectation among political observers is that this is a prescription for a colossal defeat. Extremism has always been political poison, and there’s no reason to think that’s changing.
With that in mind, if Vance wants to claim the political center and succeed Trump in the White House, he’d do well to keep his distance from Carlson and his groyper pals in the next three years. Despite the way primary and base politics exerts a centrifugal pull of leaders to the margins where left and right-wing extremists have so much in common, that’s also the way to lose touch with ordinary voters, as both Democrats and Republicans should have learned by now.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.
{Matzav.com}
