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The center-left coalition in the United States needs to offer its own vision to counter what the right is proposing.
Part of what makes the right appealing is that it offers a vision. Making Project 2025 famous and attacking its reactionary vision for the country is one thing, but the Democrats have not offered anything comparable in scale in response. Other prominent center-left coalitions around the world have a similar problem. What is the party’s overarching platform and strategy, beyond talking points and piecemeal policy proposals that each will only be heard by select groups of people? There’s no unifying message, and that’s a failure of imagination on the left — and most people on the left who do offer that kind of imagination or vision are considered radicals and beyond the pale. Because of the lack of imagination or plan, the Democrats set themselves two seemingly contradictory goals that failed to win over voters: firstly, to defend democracy, which played out as simply defending an unpopular status quo; and secondly, to cede to a Republican narrative by tacking on to what their political opponents are doing and trying to pull people away from the right by being slightly less odious. On both counts, the party neglected to offer something new, exciting, and better.
To that end, the left should be painting a more coherent picture of the kind of world we want to live in, because without that there’s uncertainty, and people don’t like uncertainty. And for DA, especially as a multiracial far right continues to emerge, we need to concretely articulate what diasporism is, what we mean by it, and how it can be an umbrella, inclusive term that can open the door for everyone on the left to see themselves as part of this project.
The much-discussed, much-predicted exodus of Jews from the Democratic Party failed, once again, to emerge.
Indeed, American Jews — along with Black women — were mostly an exception to the nationwide trend that saw Trump gain vote share among almost every single demographic group. The Republican Party’s recent instrumentalization of Jews has never really been about moving Jewish votes, but rather about using Jewish identity and fear to poison the discourse, ramp up attacks on higher education, and attempt to divide the center-left coalition.
The fact that the GOP yet again failed to make these inroads shows that American Jews remain committed to fundamental democratic values in the United States, which is an encouraging starting point from which to organize. It also shows that, as per recent polling, Israel is a “top-two” issue for only 14 percent of American Jews (compared with 53 percent who cite democracy as a “top-two” issue), despite the Republicans’ — and especially Trump’s — insistence that it is, or at least should be, American-Jewish voters’ number-one issue. At the same time, however, even as democracy motivates U.S. Jews, Israel — under the material reality created by Zionism — is profoundly undemocratic. Our task, then, is to figure out how we invite the Jewish anti-Trump coalition to confront this seemingly paradoxical reality — while challenging ourselves to take risks and seek new institutions and new ways of Jewish belonging, including through diasporism.
In Europe, meanwhile, there is much work to be done in building up the Jewish center-left/left coalition.
At the heart of this are differing visions over what is needed for Jewish communities across the continent to feel safe. As the “kneejerk” reactions to the events in Amsterdam in mid-November show, as does the ongoing post-October 7 fallout, many diaspora Jews seem invested in the idea that they will never be truly safe — an idea heavily promoted by the state of Israel — which is then used to attack other minority communities, in particular Muslims. At the same time, Israel’s hubris around its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon contributes to the conditions for conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism, even as actual antisemitism continues to rise — both because of blowback from the Middle East and the continued march of the far right across Europe. These trends, both interlocking and in tension with one another, were at play during the incident in Amsterdam earlier this month, when violent provocations from Israeli soccer fans were met with a violent response from Amsterdam locals, some of which — in its planning and execution — crossed the line into explicit antisemitism.
This hubris from the Israeli government — whose representatives and allies rapidly and inaccurately diagnosed the events in Amsterdam as a “pogrom” — endangers Jewish and Muslim diaspora communities. Moreover, this incident — along with the wider narrative that mass solidarity with Gaza poses an existential threat to diaspora Jewry — is likely to reverberate in next year’s German election, which, as is increasingly becoming a feature of centrist and right-wing politics across the globe, is likely to turn into a philosemitic arms race over who is better at “protecting” Jews. Per polling, the most likely scenario is that Germany will end up with a center-right government, and if recent trends continue, it will be further cannibalized by the far right. This will continue the ongoing destabilization of the EU, meaning that we will need to prioritize damage control over the next few years.
The political role of “the Jew” is not what it was in previous right-wing authoritarian eras.
Two things will be true at once when Trump returns to the White House: far-right antisemitism will spike as it did in his first term, from harassment and doxing to vandalism and potentially lethal violence; and American Jews are not currently being hit with a storm of the nature that European Jews were during the interwar period last century. Yet those forces are still very much at work in the United States, targeting above all immigrants — chiefly those who are undocumented but also those with legal status, as we saw with the Republican presidential campaign’s race-baiting of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — and trans people. Both these groups have been assigned the role of a threatening “other” that is undermining the “nation” — i.e. white Christian Americans — from within.
As with the attack on immigrants under the previous Trump administration, antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as the “Great Replacement” theory, will be deployed to demonize immigrants and trans people while also blaming Jews for the social and economic ills that are being pinned on these groups. Identifying how various vulnerable groups, depending on the political conditions, are cast under 21st-century fascism and authoritarianism is crucial to organizing against these trends.
We need to grapple with both the shortcomings of international institutions such as the UN, and the right’s assaults on such institutions as part of a wider authoritarian and isolationist turn.
The pro-democracy coalition is operating within a number of tangled webs. We appeal to international institutions formed to reflect a supposed liberal-democratic world order, both from the post-World War 2 and post-Soviet collapse periods — whether the UN, international tribunals, or international legal instruments — even as these institutions are being undermined by hypocrisy from within, and battered from without by anti-institutional sentiment stoked primarily by the right. We write and sign open letters because we believe in speaking up for truth and democratic values, but those letters are used by the state and other actors to target the signers — thereby silencing them and us further. We speak the words and values of multiracial coalition, while the populist and nationalist right gains multiracial support. We speak of building mass-membership organizations, but live in an extractive and destructive capitalist reality that exhausts so many of us, preventing full and consistent political engagement. Our collective work ahead requires imagination and experimentation, so that we can move beyond a defensive posture and fight to protect a world order that seems in danger of crumbling — even as we demand greater justice and accountability from that order.
In solidarity,
The Diaspora Alliance staff
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