Israel First?

Last week the noisiest populist in the House Republican caucus posed for a photo with some new friends.

The spectacle of a grassroots right-wing firebrand saying “cheese” with Code Pink is destined to hit conservatives of a certain age hard, but at this point it shouldn’t. How many more illustrations do we need in year eight of the Trump era that “horseshoe theory” is real?

How many times does Glenn Greenwald need to turn up on Fox News primetime, yakking away about how Russia’s extermination campaign in Ukraine is somehow Washington’s fault, before the implications of “America First” foreign policy fully sink in?

“Code Pink is not an anti-war group. It is an anti-Western group—specifically, an anti-American group,” Noah Rothman wrote of Greene’s photo op. “Indeed, it’s hard to find an anti-American regime for which the organization won’t go to bat, irrespective of that regime’s commitment to nonaggression.” All of that is correct: Code Pink treats the Western liberal order as a malevolent force. But so do MAGA Republicans. The two ends of the horseshoe are post-liberal. Why should it surprise us when their members find each other?

But it does surprise us, or it surprises me at least. Three days after her publicity stunt with the dregs of the American left, Greene turned around and posted this:

That doesn’t sound post-liberal. It sure doesn’t sound like Code Pink.

Greene wasn’t an outlier among populist Republicans. For instance, the same proto-fascist senator who said “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other” days before Russia invaded in 2022 suddenly sounded like George W. Bush after Hamas laid waste to southern Israel on Saturday.

The most ardent America-First-er in the upper chamber may be Josh Hawley, who’s complained about U.S. aid to Ukraine since the early months of the war. You might assume he’d be similarly quick to oppose aid to Israel in its coming offensive against Hamas. You would be mistaken.

Populist presidential candidates are foursquare behind Israel as well. On Tuesday morning, Ron “Territorial Dispute” DeSantis took to MSNBC’s airwaves to make clear that he’s not neutral in the country’s territorial dispute with Hamas.

Even the most peacenik Republican in Washington, Rand Paul, is calling for the White House to “let Israel do what they need to do, which is to have a punishing response to the people in Gaza to say no more, we are not going to let this happen.” So solidly is the GOP behind Benjamin Netanyahu and his army that some Russia hawks in Congress are looking to slip a new round of aid to Ukraine into an aid package for Israel, expecting that the anti-anti-Putinists in the House and Senate GOP will feel obliged to grit their teeth and vote yes.

Yesterday we concerned ourselves with the disunity the new war will cause on the left. Today we concern ourselves with the uncharacteristic unity it’s causing on the right. The “America First” wing of the Republican Party has discovered a far-flung conflict—the ultimate “forever war,” really—in which it’s politically and emotionally invested, and it’s not even making a pretense of feeling ideologically conflicted about it.

Why?

Deciphering why populist Republicans apply one standard to Israel and another to Ukraine is challenging because it requires taking their policy views seriously, which they themselves seem not to do.

A serious America-First-er who holds the same position as Greene et al. would feel some intellectual obligation to preempt obvious questions about why the U.S. should assist one nation but not the other. Thus far that contradiction has been ignored. There’s been no explanation for why the same people who often wonder aloud why American tax dollars are being spent on Ukraine instead of on baby formula or East Palestine or Hawaii’s recovery or whatever the domestic crisis du jour at a given moment happens to be sound comfortable spending tax dollars on Israel instead.

The contradiction can’t be explained by the relative magnitude of the threats. Russia is at least as menacing to Ukraine as Hamas is to Israel. The Russians enjoy an advantage in firepower, conventional and nuclear, over their opponent; Hamas is at a disadvantage in both respects to Israel. Hamas’ ambitions are nakedly eliminationist—but increasingly so are Russia’s. Unless the war in Gaza widens regionally to draw in Iran, there’s no prospect of terrorists ending the Jewish state. If Western military support for Kyiv were to collapse, there’s a chance of Russia swallowing Ukraine.

So why is Josh Hawley, whom Mitt Romney described as possibly the smartest man in the Senate, drawing a contrast between the two conflicts based on which one is “existential”? They’re both existential, as Vladimir Putin will tell you. Why aren’t Hawley and other MAGA Republicans criticizing the Israeli government for refusing to negotiate with Hamas to avert further loss of life, as they do incessantly with Ukraine? Or screaming for “no blank checks!” before Congress reaches for its wallet to help the IDF?

How seriously can we take a movement whose alleged ideological luminaries don’t even pretend to reckon with the implications of their own arguments?

Ultimately there are banal and less banal explanations for the populist double standard between Israel and Ukraine, I think. Most banal is this: If you’re an elected official whose constituents line up solidly on one side of a particular dispute, you’re going to find ways to take that side whether or not it makes ideological sense for you to do so.

Those who read yesterday’s newsletter will recognize this graph from a Gallup poll published in March. 

For more than 20 years, Republican voters overwhelmingly have felt more sympathy for Israelis than for Palestinians. However natcons like Hawley or Vance might feel privately about the U.S. being entangled anew in Middle Eastern politics, they know how to read a poll. The sinister trend in post-liberal thinking on the American right may yet catch up to views of Israel—I think it’s inevitable, as Jews always end up on the menu for blood-and-soil nationalists—but it hasn’t caught up yet, thankfully. When your job requires you to win a statewide popularity contest every six years, that may be all you need to know.

Presumably that’s also why so many America-First-ers in Congress are ardent hawks about defending Taiwan. If you’re indignant about spending American tax dollars to defend Ukraine, you should be really indignant about spending American lives potentially to stop Beijing from overrunning a comparatively minor U.S. ally in its own backyard. But American voters despise China for righteous reasons, and they correctly perceive Chinese expansionism as a greater risk to national security than the Russian variety. And the natcons know it. They can electorally survive being soft on Moscow, but being soft on Beijing is another matter.

There’s another banal reason why MAGA Republicans might have responded so much more strongly to Hamas’ attack on Israel than to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The horrendous videos circulating this weekend of women and children being slaughtered may have sincerely shocked their conscience.

“But there have been loads of horrendous videos from Ukraine!” you say. “It’s been going on for more than a year and a half!” Right, but remember that the highest priority of right-wing media is to filter out information that might complicate the audience’s priors about the just and unjust parties in a dispute. You and I have seen evidence of many terrible atrocities in Ukraine, but how much has the average devotee of MAGA propaganda websites seen?

Asking populist Republicans to be shocked by Putin’s war is a bit like asking the domestic audience in Russia to be shocked by it. Given what sort of information is and isn’t being shared by the media they consume, they might honestly have no idea how bad things are.

Which brings us one of the most embarrassing things ever published on The Site Formerly Known as Twitter:

I’m not sure what Junior meant to imply there—presumably that Hamas did more damage in a day than Russia has in 18 months, which is preposterous. But in practice, his tweet is a dimwitted confession that he exists in an information bubble so dense that not even light can escape from it. Lots of MAGA voters do too, no doubt. If you’re the sort of person who considers, say, Jack Posobiec a “trusted news source,” you might well find what Hamas did on Saturday to be a quantum leap in depravity beyond what you thought Russia has been doing since February 2022.

Ignorance is bliss, and right-wing media strives tirelessly to keep its consumers happy.

But we’re begging the question here. Why would right-wing media share videos of atrocities committed against Israelis but not against Ukrainians? What is it that makes the right so sympathetic to Israel but comparatively ambivalent about Ukraine?

Populist politics is tribal. The tribal interests in Israel’s war with Hamas are clearer than they are in Ukraine’s war with Russia.

Some of it is a straightforward matter of partisan polarization. For instance, here’s how Tim Scott reacted to news of hundreds of Israelis being murdered.

Other Republicans also scrambled to turn the attack into a story about Biden’s weakness. The stereotype about Democrats being wimps in confronting foreign malefactors is less true than it used to be now that the presumptive Democratic nominee is leading the international effort against Russia while the presumptive Republican nominee allegedly wants to ditch NATO. But it’s still relatively true with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian war. The Democratic leadership may sympathize with Israel, but the Democratic base does not. Of the two major parties, only one has spent years trying to reach some sort of detente with the terrorist state that evidently sponsored Hamas’ pogrom.

Democrats are weak, Republicans are strong: In an age when no one feels very sure what right-wing voters want, including right-wing influencers, even MAGA types may understandably default to that old conceptual framework in the absence of any guidance from the cult leader. And while Trump might have the political juice to issue a “war is peace, freedom is slavery” diktat on Israel and Hamas that instantly upends Republican orthodoxy (right, pro-lifers?), there’s no reason to think he’ll do so. He’s justly proud of his achievements in brokering the Abraham Accords and loves to boast of all he’s done for Israel in his inimitable philo-Semitic anti-Semitic way.

The day may come when he turns against Israel, probably for impossibly petty reasons. But until he does, there’s nothing pushing MAGA Republicans to follow the logic of their own “America First” ideology by abandoning Israel.

The tribal logic goes deeper than red and blue, though. The nature of the enemy in Israel’s conflict makes it easier for Republicans to take sides than it does in Ukraine.

Parts of the American right insist on viewing Putin’s Russia as a bulwark of “Christian values” against the godless West. That too may be a function of living in a thick information bubble, as one can’t appreciate the absurdity of a “Christian nation” wantonly committing war crimes if those crimes are forever being hidden or dismissed as Ukrainian propaganda by the media one consumes. But it’s surely the case that some right-wingers grasp the extent of Putin’s evil and are willing to excuse it anyway on enemy-of-my-enemy grounds. If you’re the sort of goblin who views overcoming Western liberalism as America’s supreme challenge, you may find yourself sympathizing with one of the liberal order’s great global authoritarian antagonists in a hot proxy war.

Say what you want about Putin, at least he “knows what time it is.”

In a conflict between a Jewish power and an Islamist insurgency, the tribal interests shift. For some evangelicals, they shift as a matter of religious duty: If scripture commands that God’s chosen people inherit the promised land, American policy should facilitate that outcome. The Old Testament says nothing about Ukrainians’ right to Ukraine by comparison. But even for less religious Republicans, the conceptual frame for Israel’s wars will be less a matter of authoritarianism versus Western liberalism than of Arab-Islamic irredentism encroaching on a Judeo-Christian outpost.

To put that differently, some Republicans may side with Israel for the same reason that some Democrats side with Hamas. Both blocs view the conflict (incorrectly) through the lens of colonialism. It’s just that one bloc opposes it—and is willing to excuse all manner of war crimes in the name of resisting it, as we’re seeing this week—while the other, on “clash of civilizations” grounds, condones it. MAGA doubtless sees many “sh–hole countries” in the Middle East; Israel is a notable exception.

And of course, the spectacle of a nation having its border overrun by hordes of impoverished, dangerous minorities folds easily into domestic right-wing policy narratives.

All of which is a long way of saying that “America First” doesn’t literally mean America first. It’s better read as “Tribe First.” If your side of a conflict aligns with the tribe’s needs, as Israel’s does, you can expect populist Republicans to relax about sending U.S. taxpayer dollars abroad. If your side doesn’t align with the tribe’s needs so neatly, as Ukraine’s does not, expect a much harder go of it.

But you know, tribes are messy concepts. They can be redefined over time. And Trump may not be the only person on the American right capable of redefining what the relevant tribe is in this case and what its needs require in a way that shifts populist sympathies against Israel.

On Monday night, Tucker Carlson released a video in which he mocked Nikki Haley and “childless” Lindsey Graham for their belligerence toward Hamas’ patron, Iran. (Credit for consistency: Tucker has been an outspoken Iran dove since Trump’s presidency at least.) Vivek Ramaswamy jabbed Haley too for her demands that Israel “finish them.” And Rand Paul, in calling for Israel to crack down on Hamas and Gaza, warned against trying to hold Iran responsible for the attack. Maybe they’re each sincerely worried about a regional war breaking out—who can blame them?—or maybe this is a nudge to populists to remember that the supreme enemy is the neocon “uniparty” in Washington that’s forever mucking about in the Middle East.

With Joe Biden suddenly sounding like Israel’s best friend, Republican hawks blasting the White House for being Iranian simps, MAGA sycophants like J.D. Vance sounding a lot like Republican hawks, and other post-liberals like Tucker blasting Republican hawks as warmongers, things are about to get very confusing for America-First-ers. Thoughts and prayers in this trying time.

Click here for more coverage of the war in Israel.