Every Utopia Needs an Enemy

Every utopia needs an enemy. History has been remarkably consistent about who that enemy turns out to be.

I've spent the last several years writing a dystopian novel set in 2063 — a book in which a classical liberal narrator and his Jewish partner are persecuted, first by an authoritarian progressive state, then by an authoritarian conservative one. The specific ideologies differ. The machinery is identical. And the people who end up in the machinery are, as they have always been, the same people.

This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern.

Jews have functioned as the canary in the coal mine for civilizational collapse across centuries and across ideologies. They are useful to every rising order until they are not, and we are watching this happen in real time.

Since October 7th, American Jews have had the disorienting experience of discovering which of their supposed allies were conditional. Progressive spaces that had welcomed them suddenly required a particular position on Israel as the price of membership. Those who wouldn't pay it were shown the door — or worse, shown what their allies actually thought of them when the calculus shifted.

This is not to say the threat from the right has diminished. It hasn't. The same period that produced campus protests celebrating Hamas also produced an epidemic of right-wing antisemitic violence that predates October 7th and continues after it. Both threats are real. Both are accelerating. And the people caught between them are learning something that Jewish history has always known: the specific ideology doing the persecuting is less important than the fact of the persecution.

The horseshoe theory — the idea that the far left and the far right, bent far enough, curve toward each other and meet — gets dismissed sometimes as a bothsidesing rhetorical device. I understand the skepticism. But what American Jews have experienced since October 7th is not a rhetorical device. It is the lived confirmation of something the 20th century already proved: that dehumanization is ideologically malleable. That once you begin sorting people into categories of who counts as fully human, the machinery of cruelty inevitably follows, regardless of which side of the political aisle you're standing on.

The political conversation in this country treats antisemitism as two separate problems — a left problem and a right problem — to be addressed by their respective tribes. The left is asked to police its own. The right is asked to police its own. And Jews are asked to pick a side and trust that their chosen tribe will protect them.

History suggests this is not a reliable strategy.

What is missing from the conversation is the recognition that both threats share a common structure. Both require the dehumanization of an other to sustain themselves. Both find, eventually, that Jews make a convenient other — too successful to be victims, too particular to be universal, too attached to their own history to dissolve cleanly into whatever new order is being constructed. The progressive dystopia calls this privilege. The conservative dystopia calls this disloyalty. Different words for the same verdict.

If your political vision requires a category of people who don't deserve full humanity, you are building cruelty into the foundation. The name you give that category doesn't change what you're building.

This is the argument I've spent years making in fiction because fiction can go places that op-eds can't — into the logic of extremism from the inside, into the texture of what it feels like to be processed by a system that has decided you don't count. But the argument itself is not complicated. It does not require a novel to state it.

Every utopia needs an enemy. Watch who gets nominated. That will tell you everything you need to know about what is actually being built.