When Elon Musk marked Donald Trump’s inauguration with what seemed very much like a Nazi salute and was defended by a lobby that claimed to fight anti-Jewish racism, he and his defenders confirmed the death of two illusions. The first illusion is the belief that Zionism, the ideology that prompted the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza, is about protecting Jews from racists.

The organization that rushed to Musk’s defense is the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded to fight racism against Jews but has become a strident enforcer for the Israeli state. It claimed that he had simply made “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.”

No one can, of course, prove that Musk meant to give a Nazi salute. But US Nazis seemed to recognize the gesture immediately, and it was close enough to one to convince many people that this was what he was doing. Organizations that fight anti-Jewish racism do not usually give the benefit of the doubt to gestures that appear to be Nazi salutes. Nor was it outlandish to see it as a Nazi salute, given the views he has expressed of late.

Not only is Musk loudly cheering the German AfD, which is teeming with Nazi sympathizers, and endorsing the British Muslim-baiter Tommy Robinson, whose racism is so extreme Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform Party will not have anything to do with him, but Musk has also endorsed the racist claim that Jews encourage people outside the West to immigrate to white-run countries in order to supplant whites. 

So, an organization that is meant to be fighting prejudice against Jews has no problem with a man who echoes anti-Jewish racism. The reason is not obscure: Like just about all white supremacists today, he is a firm supporter of the Israeli state.

The ADL’s response may seem bizarre, but it is not new. Nor is it an outlier—the Israeli state and its allies have been cozying up to right-wing white supremacists who make excuses for Nazism for years. One way in which the state cements the relationship is to invite them to Yad Vashem, the official Israeli memorial to the victims of the Nazi genocide. They spend a while there very publicly pretending to be horrified. Musk has partly maintained the tradition: After agreeing that Jews were white-anting the white race, he went off to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where he expressed the required dismay. 

Why do a state and an ideology which claim to protect Jews, and white supremacists with a soft spot for Nazism, find each other so appealing? Because Zionism and the state it created have never been about protecting Jews—their purpose is to make Jews white and Western.

The Jews who founded the ideology and the state were all European. They were reacting to a centuries-old reality: Jews were in Europe but not were not European in the eyes of its elites. As my book Good Jew, Bad Jew shows, they desperately wanted to be European. Since the nation-state was then all the rage in Europe, they believed that the best way to become European was to establish a state.

This worked—but not because Europe’s elites believed that founding a state made Jews better at being white. The attraction of the state they founded was that it was outside Europe, and so an outpost of Europeanness in the Orient: West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, described the Israeli state as the “fortress of the West.”

As bigotry directed at Muslims became a more pronounced feature of European prejudice, the state became even more appealing to white supremacists, because most of the people of the Orient it has dispossessed and is dominating are Muslim. It is, therefore, on the front line of white supremacy’s war on everyone else. 

This explains the role that anti-Semitism now plays in Europe and North America (whose elite is of Europe even if it has not lived there for centuries). Anti-Semitism used to mean anti-Jewish racism. Today, it means hostility to or criticism of the power of the West. Because “anti-Semitic” now means “not Western enough,” Jews are anti-Semites if they believe Palestinians are people entitled to safety and rights. Racists who believe the Jews are plotting to destroy the white race or who say the Nazis are really not as bad as we are told are not anti-Semites, because they endorse the Israeli state, their role model for white supremacy.

Musk has declared sarcastically that he is accused of being both a Zionist and a Nazi as if it was impossible to be both. But Nazis—or at least the politicians and parties who endorse their racism—are today the most enthusiastic Zionists in the world. Whatever they think of Jews, a militarized ethnic state that beats up on Muslims ticks all their boxes.

The second illusion whose death Musk and Trump are burying is the brand of democracy that has reigned since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

No longer fixated on defeating communism, Western elites set about remaking the world—and their own countries—in their image. They did this by avidly promoting a view of what democracy is and how it should function, which was virtually unchallenged for two decades but is now collapsing.

It has two features. The first feature is Western cultural arrogance, which assumes that the form of democracy practiced in the West is the only authentic brand on offer. To be “really” democratic is, therefore, to be Western.

Western academics invented an entire cottage industry that tracked “democratic consolidation” across the globe. Stripped of its academic finery, its task was to figure out whether new democracies outside the West were becoming Western. Governments and donor agencies quickly joined the quest and baked it into their strategies.

The second feature insists—often as much in what it does not say as what it does—that democracy is a system in which everyone can vote and speak and associate as long as no one challenges the elites who hold power in the economy and society. 

Democracy, it was assumed, was a system in which citizens limited the power of governments. Because corporations, or powerful professional associations, were run by citizens, their power was no problem, even if it decided the fate of millions of people. The rich and powerful outside government were victims, not perpetrators.

In one sense, the elites who framed democracy in this way had no double standards: They expected the democracies of the West to accept this version as well as those everywhere else. And it is against this that Western countries who are now electing illiberal right-wing governments are reacting.

Because Western democracies were meant to be Western (and white), the presence of growing numbers of people from other parts of the world in the West worried the elites. Academics fretted that “social cohesion” would be threatened unless Africans, Asians, and Arabs spoke and acted—and thought—as Western power holders do. 

Since this assumed that people who were not Western were a problem, it is no surprise that public debates in these countries began framing immigrants as a threat, triggering a wave of bigotry that fuels the Western right.

Because democracies were supposed to leave private power alone, parties that once reined in the rich and powerful on behalf of the vast majority now concentrated on trying to be friendlier to businesses than their traditional opponents were. And so the power of the few grew, and that of the many shrank. Millions now believe that democracy offers them nothing, because in this version, that is what it offers them. 

This is why Western liberal democracy is now in crisis. But while it is fashionable to insist that the crisis is that millions are turning to the right because they reject democracy, reality is more complicated. The West’s flight from liberalism is a story of the collapse of its supposed center, not of the people’s shift to the right.

After Musk gave his salute, Trump was inaugurated. Although he was responsible for an insurrection against the US Constitution and did not attempt during the campaign to hide his plan to shred what remains of liberal democracy in that country, Democratic former presidents and elected representatives attended in large numbers and the media treated the event—and everything else to do with Trump—as though he was a centrist committed to constitutional government.

This highlighted the key feature of the rise of the illiberal right—the degree to which it has been helped along by the elites who run Western societies. Not that long ago, any Western public figure who gave anything vaguely resembling a Nazi salute would be shunned across the spectrum. Now, the man who did it will take up a job in the new government. The media will treat this as entirely normal, and the Democratic Party will restrict itself to grumbling.

Ironically, the only aspect of Trump’s inauguration that showed the old model was not entirely dead was the presence of the unaccountable heads of the biggest tech companies, who were no doubt there to exercise the citizenship rights this view of democracy gives them.

The normalization of the right, which Musk’s gesture underlines, has been evident for years in the embrace by mainstream parties of racist immigration policies and their willingness to absorb the hard right into the political center. The hard right is acceptable in Europe and North America largely because the politicians and the media of the supposedly liberal mainstream made it acceptable. 

This is not surprising if we recall the two core principles of liberal democracy over the past few decades. First, being Western is more important than being democratic. And, second, because protecting private power is vital, the hard right is more acceptable than those who want private power to recognize the needs and views of the majority.

The two illusions are linked. Both show the dangers of confusing Westernness with democracy, a system in which every adult has a share in the decisions that affect them, not one in which some people are always assumed to be better than others and power can do as it pleases to people as long as governments do not wield it.

Right now, the twin illusions’ collapse has empowered a right-wing view of democracy that values freedom for a few, bondage for the rest. For real democrats, the core question is whether and how a version of democracy that really values equality may begin to emerge.