The Rise of Right-Wing Nihilism

Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.

Excerpt: "That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing.

What would you do in such circumstances?

In 2018, I happened to watch the Super Bowl at a sports bar in West Virginia. President Trump was about a year into his first term, and the corporate advertising world was churning out ads with vaguely progressive messages. I watched the guys in the bar sort of hunch over, grim-faced, their body language saying: This is the crap we have to put up with to watch a football game.

The next year I helped organize a conference of people building local communities. We made sure that at least 30 percent of the participants were from red states. But during our discussions, the progressives in the room seemed to assume that everybody there thought like them. They dominated the conversation and left almost no space for other opinions. I watched the red-state folks just hunch over. For three days they barely spoke.

....This progressive/conservative disconnect — which is also, frequently, an elite/non-elite disconnect — is a problem across the West. For reasons I don’t fully understand, educated elites are more socially progressive than non-elites.

The German economist Laurenz Guenther studied survey data across 27 European countries. He found that members of parliament were not more progressive than the general public on economic issues, but they tended to be significantly more progressive on social issues.

This was true across nearly all countries, on nearly all cultural issues, among nearly all establishment parties. Guenther writes that populist parties are rising because they fill the gaps that the establishment parties are not representing.

Most of us, when you put us in an environment with a stifling political orthodoxy, just learn to cope. Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman are psychology researchers at Northwestern University. They conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergrads at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan."