On the evidence of the present trends towards withdrawal of the Western state from direct management of many areas of previously controlled social life, and towards a pluralism-generating, market-led structure of social life, it seems unlikely that a racist form of antisemitism may be again used by a Western state as an instrument of a large-scale social-engineering project. For a foreseeable future, to be more precise; the post-modern, consumer-oriented and market-centred condition of most Western societies seems to be founded on a brittle basis of an exceptional economic superiority, which for the time being secures an inordinately large share of world resources but which is not bound to last forever. One can assume that situations calling for a direct take-over of social management by the state may well happen in some not too distant future – and then the well-entrenched and well-tested racist perspective may again come handy.

…

With the Jews moving today massively towards the upper-middle classes, and hence out of reach of the direct experience of the masses, group antagonisms arising from freshly fomented concerns with boundary-drawing and boundary-maintenance tend to focus today in most Western countries on immigrant workers. There are political forces eager to capitalize on such concerns. They often use a language developed by modern racism to argue in favour of segregation and physical separation: a slogan successfully used by the Nazis on their road to power as a means of gaining the support of the combative enmity of the masses for their own racist intentions.

…

However abominable they are, and however spacious is the reservoir of potential violence they contain, heterophobia and boundary-contest anxieties do not result – directly or indirectly – in genocide. Confusing heterophobia with racism and the Holocaust-like organized crime is misleading and also potentially harmful, as it diverts scrutiny from the genuine causes of the disaster, which are rooted in some aspects of modern mentality and modern social organization, rather than in timeless reactions to the strangers or even in less universal, yet fairly ubiquitous identity conflicts. In the initiation and perpetuation of the Holocaust, traditional heterophobia played but an auxiliary role.

—Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 80-81.

In recent weeks I’ve been struck several times by how profound and at the same time broadly unrecognized the schism of the End of History really was. There is a similar failure, in the US at least, to recognize the extent of discontinuity wrought by the aftermath of 9/11. Two years ago in San Francisco I attended a World Affairs Council panel discussion on resistance to Trump Administration policies. One of the half dozen panelists was John Yoo.