The inestimable dignity of each and every person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God — of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The much-discussed Tucker Carlson interview of the Holocaust-denying, Hitler-admiring, white-nationalist, anti-liberal MAGA influencer Nick Fuentes has brought some of the online cesspool into mainstream discussion, exposing a potential fault line in the project to build the political right’s post-Trump future.
For the right, the only way out of the awful ugliness in some of its corners is through it.
Conservatives, who should think of themselves as a faction on the right and not as coincident with the right, should engage with the antisemites, racists, and bigots on the right and with those who play footsie with them. Conservatives should defend their right to freedom of speech and expression, as dangerous and appalling as their speech and expression are. But there is no place for them in the conservative movement. Conservatives cannot ally with them. And more broadly, they must not be accepted or welcomed as allies by the leaders or institutions of the right.
The tent on the political right should be very big. But not big enough for them. The only way out is through.
The time for choosing has arrived. I ask in my latest Project Syndicate column: “Will the Carlsons of the right gain greater influence when President Trump leaves the stage?”
This matters for many reasons. Here are two: antisemitism, racism, and bigotry are anti-conservative and anti-Christian.
Conservativism (properly understood) has placed the inherent dignity of each and every human being at the center of its understanding of politics and public policy. In the realm of economic policy, for example, I have always understood conservatism’s traditional commitments to rewarding risk-taking, work over welfare, enthusiasm for innovation and dynamism, and emphasis on limited government and self-sufficiency to be manifestations of its high regard for typical American workers and households. Conservatism insists on the importance of personal responsibility in part because it believes people are up to the challenge.
A political movement that places the inherent and inestimable dignity of each and every person at its center cannot enter into any alliance with bigots, racists, or antisemites. To embrace the latter is to decisively renounce the former.
As I Catholic, I have been troubled by the fact that many of the advocates of this darkness on the right — including Mr. Fuentes — are my co-religionists.
Bigotry, racism, and antisemitism are incompatible with Catholicism in part because of the Church’s insistence on the inestimable dignity of each person. At his first Mass as pope, Benedict XVI reminded: “Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”
Each of us: Jew, Christian, atheist, agnostic; male, female; young, old; black or white. “Each of us is the result of a thought of God.” To those who embrace the darkness: God created the people you hate. Each person you hate, as Pope Benedict taught us, “is loved,” “is necessary.”
To be antisemitic is to be anti-Christian. Benedict XVI made this point directly in 2008 when meeting with representatives of the Jewish community at the Élysée Palace:
By her very nature the Catholic Church feels obliged to respect the Covenant made by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Indeed, the Church herself is situated within the eternal Covenant of the Almighty, whose plans are immutable, and she respects the children of the Promise, the children of the Covenant, as her beloved brothers and sisters in the faith. She compellingly repeats, through my voice, the words of the great Pope Pius XI, my beloved predecessor: Spiritually, we are Semites. The Church therefore is opposed to every form of anti-Semitism, which can never be theologically justified. The theologian Henri de Lubac, in a time of darkness, as Pius XII described it, added that to be anti-Semitic also signifies being anti-Christian.
Pope John Paul II argued in 1986 that “the Jewish religion is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain way is ‘intrinsic’ to our own religion. With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion.”
The inestimable dignity of each and every person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God — of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Catholics call upon Saint Michael the Archangel to defend us in spiritual battle — the same Michael who was promised to the prophet Daniel as a protector of his people. When we offer Lauds and Vespers each day, we pray over the Psalms — written by David, the ancient Jewish king, and recited by Jesus Himself, including on the Holy Cross. Our God is the same being whom Moses met on Mount Horeb, whose power transformed the bush but did not consume it. The Blessed Mother, Saint Joseph, and Saints Peter and Paul were Jews. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew.
Antisemites who wrap themselves in the papal flag are a disgrace.