We will never be entirely free of antisemitic people. But conservatives must conserve the Right’s rejection of antisemitic ideas.

It has become increasingly clear over the past several years that the Democrats and the political left-of-center in the United States (and by no means only in the United States) have a serious antisemitism problem. That problem has increasingly created hostile conditions on campuses and dangerous situations for American Jews in many other settings; it has become a political liability, a divisive force within the Democratic coalition, and a threat to the credibility, moral authority, and power of long-standing institutions such as Columbia University.

The right-of-center and the Republican Party have not had such a problem. But this is not due to an absence of antisemites on the right. Antisemitism tends to flare up into view in ways that are more episodic than persistent, so it can appear to go away for times, but there have always been individual antisemites on the right. William F. Buckley Jr. spent a good deal of energy, especially in the 1990s, rooting out antisemitism from the conservative movement (even to the point of closing the pages of this magazine to some former writers and contributors), and those voices never entirely went away.

Republicans may not be the party of choice for most American Jews, but that is driven much more by differences over social and other issues, and the party has done increasingly well among Orthodox Jews in recent years. The image of the party and the movement has been aided by Republicans’ steadfast support for Israel against its many enemies. Moreover, as much as he occasionally veers into uncomfortable language about Jews (as he does about so many people and groups), Donald Trump seems to have a New Yorker’s genuine and lifelong affection for Jews in general and in particular, from Roy Cohn to Jared Kushner. Even during the 2017 Charlottesville controversy, which involved antisemitic protesters that Joe Biden tried to tie to Trump, the political damage Trump incurred had more to do with his general appearance of racial insensitivity — not very many people are likely to have bought the idea that he agreed with the tiki torch marchers. Ditto how Trump managed to make everybody forget when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner.

Still, the main reason why the left’s antisemites (including those who are very much not progressives but beneficiaries of progressive tolerance and protection) have caused more harm to American Jews and done more damage to themselves is that they are organized. They have ideologies, which have gained a significant foothold in American academia in particular. They have a lexicon, full of “settler colonialism” and “Zionism is racism” and “from the river to the sea” slogans and blood libels. They have an agenda. They have money and groups. And their behavior repeatedly demonstrates that any movement that is built on anti-Israeli animus will inevitably flow freely into a more generalized hatred of Jews.

That is what we do not see, thus far, on the right. But we should be growing more concerned about it. The signs keep popping up in the podcast world in particular, in what we hear from the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, in what gets mainstreamed by other big platforms — whether it be various flavors of Holocaust denial or Hitler-excusing — or in how factions of the isolationist Right revive the old arguments for an Arabist, anti-Israel turn in our foreign policy, framed as realpolitik. Just as some on the anti-war right blamed our alliance with Israel for the Iraq War, one can hear the low thrum of blaming the war in Ukraine on its Jewish president — even with the usual incoherence of the same voices who call the Ukrainians Nazis.

This is bad, and it needs to be fought. Random cranks can still be dangerous and at times violent, but they remain random cranks unless and until somebody gives them a common cause around which to organize. The populist Right remains organized largely around Trump, who ardently wishes to be known as a great friend of Jews, but that virtue of Trump’s will not always be with us. The eternal attraction of conspiracy theories and their enduring tendency to devolve into Jew-hating is enough by itself to ensure that the Right will never be entirely free of antisemitic people. But it will be important, going forward, for conservatives to conserve the Right’s rejection of antisemitic ideas. Once those take root, their poisonous fruit will spread.