Populist nationalism and Jews, an incompatible mix

GAVIN ROME

In 2004, Roth wrote The Plot Against America. The novel is about a family of American Jews in Newark, New Jersey, who are strong supporters of President Franklin D Roosevelt. In the novel, FDR loses a bid for a third term to Republican presidential candidate and world-famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, who is (and was) an isolationist, nationalist, populist politician.

The book describes how the fictional President Lindbergh uses his office to unleash and direct populist anger at Jewish immigrants. In a fictitious news report of that time, Roth depicts the president rallying his political base with the following cunningly crafted populist invective.

“September – December 1941. [President Lindbergh] delivers his ‘Who are the war agitators?’ radio speech to an America First rally in Des Moines on September 11. [An] audience of 8 000 cheer when he names ‘the Jewish race’ as among those most powerful and effective in pushing the US — ‘for reasons which are not American’ — toward involvement in the war.”

The nightmarish world described in the novel seems sadly all too real. A self-described political nationalist is the actual, non-fictitious occupant of the White House. President Donald Trump’s populist rants are directed not at Jews, but at alien “non-white” refugees.

So, is Trump nonetheless good for the Jews? After all, he supports the agenda of the Israeli government, moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and is by all accounts Prime Minister Netanyahu’s best friend. To those who have embraced Trumpism for these sorts of reasons, I nonetheless plead, “Wake up!” 

The history of Jewish survival and renewal is a clear renunciation of a core Trumpian doctrine, namely that “might is right”. As former United Kingdom Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks so often reminds us, the most repeated command in the Torah is the following: be kind to the stranger, because we too were once immigrants and strangers in a foreign land.

There is thus a moral argument against the tactic of aligning ourselves with the now powerful anti-immigrant populists. Welcoming strangers is a fundamental Jewish ethic. Abraham welcomed strangers; Pharaoh enslaved them.

There is also a practical argument against doing so. American columnist Peter Beinart has persuasively argued that “hate them, not us” is a losing strategy because once empowered, bigots widen their targets. For those who define America (or for that matter Poland or Hungary) as a white Christian nation, Jews will never be white enough.

The murderer whose corrosive hate fatally targeted the Jews of Pittsburgh imbibed freely of the poison directed at refugees, and was enraged by the fact that members of the Pittsburgh community are part of an organisation that still seeks to assist refugees and immigrants. Trump’s adoption of an anti-immigrant “America First” ideology is violently incompatible with Jewish ethics and Jewish interests.

I am saddened when I encounter the support for Trump that seems so prevalent among many in our community. How do we forget that Nazi sympathisers (such as Lindbergh in America and Hendrik Verwoerd in South Africa) shouted their “my country first” slogans, while railing against the “threat” of mass Jewish immigration?

In The Plot Against America, a few members of the protagonist’s family, for reasons of narrow self-interest, attempt to align themselves with Lindbergh’s movement. Their efforts to do so prove to be futile and tragic. The novel contains a powerful warning that attempts to align ourselves with ultra-nationalist movements do not end well.

Gavin Rome is a senior counsel at the Johannesburg Bar. He has acted as a Judge of the High Court on several occasions.