Even when a problem exists on both sides of our political spectrum, it can manifest itself differently, because the two sides are not composed of the same types of people and do not attract people or organize themselves in the same ways. That is frequently the case with antisemitism. The topic of antisemitism, its history, and its appearance in distinct political movements is of course a large one — for example, the tendency of conspiratorial thinking to either lead to or result from antisemitism — but I’m thinking here of the current and recent American political scene. The difference is that the antisemitism on the left (especially among politically vocal people) is much more commonly ideological, whereas the antisemitism on the right tends to look more like traditional bigotry. The distinction isn’t universal, of course: There are still periodic outbursts of old bigotries on the left, and there are people on the right for whom antisemitism is part of a larger anti-globalist or isolationist worldview. But this divide has been exactly why a lot of people on the center-left have talked themselves into thinking that their antisemites weren’t a problem, because they sounded like faculty-lounge ideologues rather than like bigoted jerks. What is becoming apparent to many of them just now is that they have this backward: The ideological antisemites are much more dangerous because they’re the ones likely to align with governments and terror organizations committed to the massacre of Jews on a large scale.
Erick Erickson has a strong piece on this, and he names names on the right and notes that the orgy of insanity from the hard left should make us look more skeptically at voices on the right who give off the odor of antisemitism:
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