The New Right and The Lie We're Telling Ourselves

Some diaspora Jews are fleeing from one ideological fire straight into another, convinced that the extremism they’ve stumbled into is a necessary antidote to the extremism they’ve rejected.

The rise of the New Right presents a paradox that seems to have slipped past some Jewish commentators, activists, and intellectuals. On the one hand, the excesses of the progressive Left—its fixation on identity politics, its moral confusion over issues like Hamas, and its erosion of Enlightenment values—have driven many disillusioned individuals to seek refuge elsewhere. On the other hand, however, the alternative to which some are turning is often just as irrational, just as dogmatic, and, in many cases, just as dangerous.

Alongside the rise of the New Right has been a quiet popularization of Christian nationalist ideas into the mainstream—an influence that should not be mistaken for a benign cultural force. This is a reactionary movement that seeks to reshape liberal democracy by replacing secular governance with a quasi-religious moral order.

Broadly speaking, the New Right I am referring to is a coalition of contradictions. Some members of the movement are not religious at all; in fact, some are as nihilistic in their worldview as the New Atheists. Yet they believe they have found an answer to the world’s problems within the framework and promises of Christian nationalism.

The movement also includes individuals who are rightly concerned about issues arising from globalization, mass migration, and the collapse of traditional social structures. However, it also harbors elements that are barely distinguishable from the totalitarian forces it claims to oppose on the far Left.

The first thing to recognize is that this is not a battle between reason and unreason—the rise of the New right is not merely a case of the Left’s abandonment of rationality being corrected by another political force. Rather, we are witnessing a collision between two competing brands of irrationality. Each side is convinced of its own moral superiority and remains blind to the ways in which it mirrors the very excesses it claims to oppose.

What remains is a false binary: on one side, a Left that has succombed to postmodernist grievance hierarchies and moral relativism; on the other, a Right that increasingly embraces a brand of nationalism that mistakes strength for wisdom. The fact that so many believe they must choose between these extremes is itself a symptom of our collective failure to think clearly—a failure only exacerbated by the outrage algorithms of social media.

Christian nationalism, in particular, serves as a case study in selective amnesia. Its proponents claim to defend Western civilization, yet they seem to forget that its greatest achievements—the scientific revolution, the modern state, and the expansion of human rights—did not emerge from Cristian authority but from the Church’s gradual erosion.

For all its appeals to tradition—and like most religious revivalist movements—Christian nationalism is not a return to the past; rather, it is a reaction to the present. Like all fundamentalist movements, it thrives on nostalgia, selling a seductive lie: that there was once a golden age. This is, of course, fiction. The past was not a utopia. The belief that returning to “Christian values” will somehow resolve the crises of modernity is as delusional as the Left’s fantasy that dismantling “the prison system that is the West” will create a just world.

But here’s where the illusion becomes even more dangerous, especially for Jews: the New Right is not trying to revive religion—it is trying to revive a quasi religious authority. The history of religious revival—whether Christian or Islamic—has always followed the same trajectory: first, the establishment of a moral in-group; then, the identification of threats to that moral order; and finally, the eventual targeting of those who do not belong. The fact that some Jews find themselves temporarily aligned with right-wing elements against the excesses of the Left does not change the reality that, in the long run, movements of this nature have never ended well for religious minorities.

This danger is compounded by the illusion that some members of the New Right express unwavering support for Israel, the mistake is to think this constitutes a lasting alliance. There are two groups worth pointing out for different reasons.

First, Christian Zionists do not, as a rule, support Israel out of a commitment to Jewish self-determination. Many do so because they believe its existence fulfills a biblical prophecy—one that ultimately leads to mass Jewish conversion or worse. Few things resemble such a Faustian bargain.

If the definition of allyship depends on a belief that Jesus will return to sort the righteous from the damned (with us Israeli Jews cast among the damned) and hurl sinners into a lake of fire, then this is not a sustainable partnership. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with Zionism—it is, in fact, the antithesis of the movement that restored Jewish sovereignty. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that every Christian Zionist holds this belief, nor even every Evangelical and one could even argue that such eschatological fantasies are, in practice, harmless. So for argument’s sake, let’s concede this point.

It’s one thing to strike a Faustian bargain with religious fundamentalists who, at least for now, believe that supporting Israel serves their theological ends. It’s quite another to ignore the open surge of antisemitism within the broader movement—whether in the form of outright hate groups like the Proud Boys or the bankrupt ecosystem of social media “pundits” like professional head-trauma recipient and cage fighter Jake Shields, or Ian Carrol, who was just given a platform by Joe Rogan to spew his nonsense about Jews to millions of people.

Then, of course, there are the actual psychopaths—the Steve Bannons and Tucker Carlsons of the world—who mix just enough ideological posturing with pure, unfiltered opportunism to give their followers the illusion of a coherent worldview. And if this intellectual trajectory on the Right continues, as it seems it will, we will see far fewer conservatives like Ben Shapiro and far more Candace “Christ is King” Owens types, replacing policy discussions with theological crusades.

If we, Jews, are to navigate this moment without succumbing to the same contradictions and intellectual traps that the Jewish Left fell into two decades ago, we need to reject both extremes, the progressive Left and far Right—not as some cheap attempt at false equivalence, but because both pose a real and escalating threat to the future of Jewish life. The problem is not merely that one side is worse than the other; it’s that both are engaged in a race to the bottom, dragging public discourse and our collective sanity down with them.

The most obvious aspect of this descent is the illusion that one must choose a side—as if the only alternatives available for Jews are competing brands of collective madness. The Left, in its rejection of objective truth, its elevation of victimhood to the highest moral currency, and its romance with nearly every Islamist group the Middle East has to offer and the Right, in its reactionary attempt to reimpose a rigid, authoritarian order.

And yet, as we become more frustrated, alienated, and desperate for meaning—some diaspora Jews are fleeing from one ideological fire straight into another, convinced that the extremism they’ve stumbled into is a necessary antidote to the extremism they’ve rejected. But this is a false choice. If Jewish history has taught us anything, it’s that opposing insanity with more insanity does not produce sanity.

For years, political commentary on “the rise of the Right” has been all too shallow. These movements are not simply responding to economic conditions or political failures—they are filling a void. The collapse of organized religion in the West has not led to a more rational, evidence-based society as secularists believed; it has simply created a vacuum that is being filled by new forms of fundamentalism. Modern progressivism functions as a kind of secular Christianity, a religion without a God, complete with original sin (privilege), heretics (the privileged), and a doctrine of perpetual moral purification. Meanwhile, Christian nationalism offers a return to divine order and a sense of certainty in an age of disorientation. Both are desperate attempts to impose order onto a world that feels increasingly chaotic. 

And this is where we find ourselves—trapped between two competing dogmas, not of our own making, each convinced of their own righteousness, each convinced that the other is the ultimate evil. I’d argue Jews find themselves in the perfect position to lead an independent intellectual charge - we are isolated from the progressive Left and never to be fully accepted among the New Right. That is if we accept reality.

The first step is to refuse the false choice. We do not have to accept the New Right just because the modern Left has lost its mind. We must resist the temptation to seek ideological refuge in movements that offer certainty at the expense of freedom.  And perhaps most importantly, we must remember that the only thing more dangerous than a bad idea is an alternative bad idea masquerading as the solution.

The rise of the New Right is not simply because other people are “irrational”, “racist” or “backward.” Those who continue to treat this as an adequate explanation will be responsible for enabling these very forces to march forward in greater numbers. The problem is that human beings need structure, meaning, and purpose. Religion provided all of these things for thousands of years. It gave people a framework, a sense of community, and a coherent story about their place in the universe. It explained suffering. It provided rituals for the milestones of life—birth, marriage and death. And it created an enduring sense of belonging.  

One of the fundamental failures of Western secularists is that they have defined themselves primarily by what they oppose. They stand against religion, against supernaturalism, against dogma—but they rarely articulate a compelling vision for what should replace these things. And so, as traditional religious faith has receded over the past few decades, it has not left behind a society of enlightened rationalists, but rather a vacuum—one increasingly filled by aggressive, politicized expressions of reactionary religious identity. The question was never whether people would abandon religion altogether, but what they would replace it with. The answer, in too many cases, has been tribalism, authoritarianism, and the very forms of irrationality that secularism once set out to defeat.

For Jews in the diaspora, there is a response to the crisis that deserves serious consideration. In my column for The Jerusalem Report, Embracing the Jewish Heritage of Israeli Secularism, I argued that the Jewish Enlightenment was not merely a subset of the broader European Enlightenment—it was something distinct, something rooted in a cultural and intellectual tradition that predates modern secularism itself.

When people talk about the descendants of this movement, Israeli secularists, they often reduce us to a set of universalist ideals—globalism, individualism, modern capitalism—ideas that align neatly with contemporary 21st-century values. But this framing of who we are is incomplete. These aspirations, while valuable, fail to explain the deeper structure of Israeli secularism. Secular Israelis are not adrift in a sea of abstract principles; they are anchored in a cultural-historical experience that provides continuity, meaning, and resilience. Our secularism is not a rejection of Judaism, but an extension of it—one that carries forward the intellectual rigor, moral inquiry, and communal cohesion that have defined Jewish life for centuries. If anything, it is precisely this rootedness that has made Israeli secularism durable, allowing it to thrive where Western secularism, in many cases, has collapsed into relativism or nihilism.

How?

The followers of the Jewish Enlightenment were not simply striving to become citizens of the world. They embraced the principle of “Be a Jew at home and a human being in the street”—a formulation that rejected religious dogma but not Jewish identity. They did not seek to dissolve their Jewishness into a vague cosmopolitanism. Crucially, for meaning, the Jewish Enlightenment placed the Bible at the center of Jewish identity—not as a sacred text in the traditional sense, but as a foundational expression of the Jewish people’s historical, moral, and literary legacy. Judaism’s Iliad and Odyssey. This perspective elevated the prophetic tradition, seeing it not only as a product of Jewish history but as a source of universal ethical principles.

While they reframed Judaism as a cultural revolution—one that ultimately paved the way for Zionism and Jewish nationalism—European secularists convinced themselves of a post-nationalist world free from the blemishes of particularism and ethnicity.

This is why secular Israelis, despite rejecting Orthodoxy, rarely experience the existential confusion that afflicts so many of their atheist counterparts in Europe and America. They do not drift as detached individuals in a meaningless void; they see themselves as part of something larger—a people with a past, a purpose, and a future.

If there is any doubt, consider a recent study by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), which found that “a large majority of secular Israeli Jews attach importance to their Jewish identity, and most express a strong sense of Jewishness.” When asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, the degree to which they “feel Jewish,” secular Israelis averaged 8.5 out of 10.

Of course, in Israel, national identity, statehood, and a shared cultural framework provide a stabilizing force, grounding Jewish secularism in something real. In the diaspora, however, Jewish identity— even for Zionists—is far more precarious, pulled apart by assimilation, ideological fragmentation, and external pressures that often seem impossible to reconcile.

But if you are searching for belonging after October 7, you will not find it in the ruins of your former political affiliations, nor in the circles you once sought acceptance from. Zionism has never truly belonged to any of them. As Hussein Aboubakr Mansour argued: “The liberal order that once sheltered it is crumbling into self-doubt and decadence, the right that saw it as a natural nationalist project has been fractured beyond recognition, and the left that once flirted with it as a liberation struggle has long since turned against it.”

Your isolation, then, is many things. It is overwhelming, painful, and perhaps filled with despair. But, Zionism never found its ethos in any of the ideological homes now left in ruins. And that is precisely why your isolation might also be an opportunity—to reconnect with what Zionism actually offers the Jewish people: not the approval of others, but freedom and independence. That is where the case for Zionism and by extension the Jewish people, now lies. Tragic as it may be. Inspiring as it is.