The Loser’s Alibi: Antisemitism as a Politics of Failure

Winners don't need scapegoats.

Antisemitism reveals far more about the people who wield it than about Jews themselves. It is a politics of failure that arrives when confidence runs thin and leaders cannot persuade on the merits. Strong states and serious movements do not need a conspiracy to keep coalitions intact or to explain inevitable tradeoffs. They can point to results, to order, to competence that is visible in daily life. When legitimacy begins to wobble, the incentives shift. A single villain suddenly carries the burden of every disappointment, and frustration is refashioned into social glue.

This is a narrower claim than it sounds. I am not saying only weak people harbor prejudice, or that private bias disappears in good times. I am saying that public, programmatic antisemitism becomes central to a regime’s story or a brand’s identity when those actors feel insecure about their staying power. Those who can deliver do not need it. Those who cannot, reach for it because it is cheap, legible, and fast.

Losing, in this sense, is larger than battlefield defeat or a crash in GDP. It includes status loss, stalled reforms, humiliations that make a community feel smaller than it remembers being, and elite fracture that turns governance into a knife fight. A government can expand its borders and still feel brittle at the center. A celebrity can add followers and still sense that relevance has started to drain away. The operative variable is perceived insecurity. Once leaders doubt their ability to hold what they have, old stories become useful again because old stories travel without effort.

The mechanism is familiar. First, blame moves from complex causes to a conscious enemy. If outcomes are bad, someone must have arranged them. Second, resentment is converted into cohesion. Factions that will never agree on policy can agree on a target. Third, repression receives a moral frame. Confiscations, purges, and exclusions are rebranded as defense. Finally, spectacle substitutes for competence. It is easier to fill a square with anger than to balance a budget or win a war.

History supplies variations that fit the pattern without requiring a single ideology. England’s expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and Spain’s decree in 1492 were not mere spasms of hatred; they rode alongside fiscal strain, identity anxiety, and the grinding work of state building. Scapegoating financed the crown and simplified fractured politics into a single explanation the public could hold in its hands. After the First World War, Germany’s humiliation and hyperinflation demanded a totalizing culprit that could hold together a project otherwise riven by fear of internal rot. The grievance was not garnish. It was the engine. Late Stalinism shows a victorious superpower insisting on internal enemies to manage paranoia and keep a brittle elite aligned. Campaigns against so-called cosmopolitans and the Doctors’ Plot were theater designed to buy time. In the modern Middle East, after 1948 and 1967, regimes that could not deliver prosperity or freedom poured resources into propaganda that redirected attention from domestic capacity to the supposed omnipotence of Jews. Ideologies differ. Insecurity rhymes.

This brings us to the American puzzle. The United States is not in freefall by any normal measure. So why is antisemitism louder in public talk and more available in the feed. The answer is that the argument tracks legitimacy insecurity rather than material collapse. A country can post decent top line numbers while trust in institutions, experts, media, higher education, and elections erodes. That gap between capacity and confidence is fertile ground for scapegoats because it invites simple stories that appear to resolve a complicated mood.

Relative status loss matters even when aggregates look fine. Legacy media has watched independents take audience and cultural authority. Tenured faculty has met donors and legislators who no longer defer. Party establishments face insurgents who do not wait their turn. People who feel themselves slipping reach for grand theories that explain the slide and recruit others to feel it with them. Realignment creates entrepreneurs who need glue that costs nothing and moves quickly. Scapegoats provide exactly that.

External conflict accelerates the dynamic. A war elsewhere can be imported into domestic culture with remarkable speed because the attention economy rewards maximal outrage and favors tropes that are already legible. Old lies become new content. The result is not a referendum on national prosperity. It is a referendum on whether leaders and would-be leaders believe they can persuade without a conspiracy.

There is also a micro version that now scales. Watch public figures when their graphs flatten. When bookings slow, when search interest drifts down, when brand deals get quiet, some creators discover that old conspiracies produce new engagement. They pivot from general anti-elite talk to Jewish-coded claims about finance, media, and loyalty. In the short run the numbers jump because a narrower, angrier slice of the audience is highly active and highly online. In the long run the brand corrodes. Invitations shrink. Partnerships dry up. Mainstream legitimacy goes soft. You can test this rather than intuit it. Time-stamp the stall. Quote the inflection point. Track the audience shift and how other platforms respond. Then compare to peers who faced the same headwinds without reaching for the oldest story in politics. The difference is not fate. It is choice.

Obvious objections deserve clear answers. Powerful empires have used antisemitism, which seems to cut against the thesis. Power on paper is not the same as confidence in practice; expansion can conceal weak coalitions and fiscal stress that make scapegoats attractive. Nazi Germany looked like a winner for a time. The grievance narrative preceded victory and never relaxed; early successes were monetized into a project that required an existential enemy and used theft as policy. Democracies have antisemites. The question is whether institutions marginalize them or launder them into the mainstream. When laundering occurs, it usually tracks decay, shock, or elite fracture rather than healthy confidence.

Set the boundaries clearly. This is an argument about instrumental, public antisemitism used to manufacture cohesion or attention when legitimacy is fragile. It is not a claim about every prejudice in every heart. It is not a purely economic thesis, because status loss and humiliation often do the work that prices and wages cannot. It is not confined to one ideology. The extremes recognize a bargain when they see one, and insecure actors will always reach for low-cost tools.

If the frame is right, it makes predictions that can be checked. After national shocks, you should expect an uptick in mainstream antisemitic rhetoric and not only on fringe forums. Regimes that struggle to deliver growth and social peace will push more of it through schools and state media. When institutions recover performance legitimacy, conspiracy talk retreats to the margins even if private bias remains. The signal tracks confidence more reliably than it tracks party labels.

The practical payoff is simple. Treat public antisemitism as an early warning siren. When it moves to center stage in a country’s politics or begins to recur in the output of voices that once kept it at a distance, it is time to lower your estimate of the competence and staying power of the people sounding it. They are telling you they cannot explain or fix the world on the merits. They are telling you that theater is doing work that policy should be doing.

So watch for it. In institutions, listen for leaders who trade difficult tradeoffs for villains that arrive on cue. In media, notice whether gatekeepers reward accountability or nourish conspiracy for the clicks. In your own circles, decide when someone has stopped doing the hard work and started selling the easy lie.

The remedy is not a new speech code. The remedy is results, responsibility, and a public that insists on real explanations for real problems. Winners solve. Losers scapegoat.