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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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Israel had its first general election since 2022 on Tuesday. Israel is an experiment in ethnonationalism, but it is also an experiment in proportional representation. Every conceivable minority group or special interest has their own political party. There is a party for Russian immigrants, a party for Ashkenazi Haredim, and a separate party for Mizrahi Haredim. Arabs of course vote for entirely separate parties from Jews (by custom, not law).

Israel is the most right-wing democracy in the world. In Israel, you can vote for the racist party (Likud), the extremely racist party (Religious Zionism), or the racism über alles party (Otzma Yehudit, literally "Jewish Power"). You can even vote for the pro-racism but anti-Netanyahu party (Together), or the pretending-not-to-be-racist party (Yashar). If you feel like sticking it to the man, there is at least one viable actually-not-racist party (The Democrats). Some would argue the Arab parties (Joint List and Ra'am) are non-racist, but others would say that they are just as racist but in the opposite direction.

The Knesset has 120 seats, so 61 seats are needed for a majority to form a government. Most of the results are in, and it's looking like deadlock.

Estimated seats by bloc

  • Netanyahu Bloc - 53

  • "Change" Bloc - 48

  • Arab Bloc - 19

In European legislatures, is is customary to have a cordon sanitaire against parties perceived as far-right. In Israel, there is a cordon sanitaire against the Arab parties. The Netanyahu bloc has lost its majority, but there is no clear opposition bloc large enough to form a government. Israeli Arab turnout was through the roof.* Bedouin nomads rode into town on camels to vote. The conventional wisdom seems to be that forming a coalition with any of the Arab parties post-October 7th is political suicide. If no one can form a majority, there could be another election as soon as next year.

*Netanyahu is accusing the Arabs of voter fraud. I have no idea if this means anything.

I thought about posting this as a top level comment, but this seems like as good a place.

What do people think the consequences of Jews leaving the Democratic party will be? Prior to like 5 minutes ago, Jews were up there with blacks as the most left-wing group in America, with something like 80-90% supporting Democrats over Republicans. However as Third Worldism has become the dominant ideology within the Democrat party, Jews are being shown the door. Jewish politicians and operatives who refuse to bend the knee on Palestine are being made to feel very uncomfortable. And the party is starting to nominate anti-Semitic politicians like Abdul El-Sayed to major positions. It's become common knowledge that, regardless of their position on Israel, a Jewish politician could never win the Democratic nomination for President. The Josh Shapiro fantasy lasted all of 2 minutes.

And, contra their reputation for self-loathing, Jews are actually starting to flip parties. According to one recent poll, 64% of Jewish voters will support the Republicans over Democrats this cycle.

Personally, despite being a Gentile, I've always felt a degree of connectedness to Jews to the point where many of my best friends are Jews. I also believe that Ashkenazi Jews are easily the most intelligent ethnic group on the planet. This is reflected in their vast contributions in the scientific and creative fields. Something like 40% of all Nobel Prizes in the sciences have been awarded to Jews. But I also believe that the political influence of Jews over time has been so incredibly negative overall that it undoes all the good things. (Communism is doing a lot of work here).

So for 100 years, you had this small but incredibly smart, creative, rich, and politically active group has pointed like a gun at the Republican party. And now.. it's not. I don't think we'll see the gun turned around and used in the other direction, but this feels big.

  1. A huge decline in Democratic Party organizational ability as ideologically-motivated Jews are replaced with corruption-motivated Third Worlders

  2. A possible easing of the extreme pro-left bias in the legal profession

  3. Less fundraising for Democrats

Of course, this is also not a great place to be for Jews. They paid the Danegeld to the Democratic Party and have been repaid with contempt. But any anti-semitism they feel now will be trivial compared to what they experience when President AOC leads a Democratic trifecta.

Whoever thought the Republicans would be the best best for Jews? We're only 10 years away from this Tweet by Matt Yglesias (often called the worst tweet of all time).

My guess is that in a Trump administration angry mobs will beat and murder Jews and people of color with impunity

However as Third Worldism has become the dominant ideology within the Democrat party, Jews are being shown the door.

Jews were fully supportive of Third Worldism, they arguably invented it, motivated by their opposition to "White Supremacy". They only turned against it when it turned against Israel. What did they expect? That everyone would perpetually and forever accept this blatant hypocrisy?

Third worldism was largely invented by merging ideas held by Indian nationalists, later Maoists, Fanon, indigenous rights activists in erstwhile Western European colonies and so on together in opposition, primarily, to both the ‘West’ and Soviet communism which was seen as too imperial and, eventually as the racial angle developed, essentially a white empire ruling over an ethnically diverse working class. The contribution of Jews to third worldism is and was substantially less than their contribution to ur-Marxism, to anarchism, or indeed to Leninism / state communist ideas.

When OP says that Third Worldism is pushing Jews out of the Democrat party, he's not referring to the Cold War concept. He's referring to the fact that hegemonic anti-racist ideology has turned against Israel. And that ideology emerged from 20th century political and cultural movements in the United States. A core motivation of those intellectual developments in anthropology, sociology, Tolerance Education, HBD denial and blank-slatism, activism on behalf of allegedly "repressed" minorities in the United States, equal rights, etc. was opposition to racism and White Supremacy, and in particular the aspects of the "authoritarian personality" that Jews associated with antisemitism and the Holocaust. Jews complaining about "third worldism" are just complaining about the ideology they created to suppress White Supremacy being targeted towards the Zionist project.

If you apply the same Tolerance Doctrine/ant-racist standard imposed on Whites to Jews then the left-wing reaction to Israel is perfectly consistent. Jews just want to forever retain the order which states that garbage is only supposed to be imposed on Whites and Jews are exempt from it. That order is now untenable.