Have the Right and the Left Switched Places?

I just stumbled on this Ross Douthat piece from last year:

One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.

These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.

Actually he is writing about the man who attacked Paul Pelosi while on a mission to assassinate his wife. That man, it seems, was once a cranky leftist, but somewhere along his crazy path he switched over to the cranky right. And it was on the right that the police account of the event was questioned and an alternative narrative about a "gay assassination" somehow took root and spread.

By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.

In fact those documents, published by The Intercept, revealed that the DHS was trying to censor content related to “the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Some of this has to do with what were once leftist positions becoming official government policy, for example environmental causes. Fifty years ago solar power and electric cars were a fringe left-wing concerns, but now they are big business backed by big government. Attitudes toward the FBI have much to do with whom the FBI is targeting; leftists were angry when they spied on civil rights protesters but are very happy to see them chase neo-Nazis. 

The populist right – the people who support Trump, guns, coal mining, gas-guzzling trucks, exploding gender reveal parties, and rural life – feel that they are losing the long-term battle, and that turns them into a cranky opposition movement. Conservative Christians have lived through the era of gay rights.

But if would of course be wrong to take this too far. Leftists have no trouble opposing authority when they think it is being used to defend racism; it was leftists who burned down a police station in Portland a few years ago. We are still seeing a struggle for control of the government and its vast powers, and both sides regularly find themselves opposing the government on particular issues. Nor is it new for conservative populists to oppose the goverment, as they did during the busing blow-up of the 70s.

But I do have a sense that in America a basic instinct to trust authority – corporations, Wall Street, the Defense Department, the police – might have shifted from being a generally conservative thing to something much more situational and complex.

I appreciated Douthat's closing comment, that the Right

might benefit from recalling the thing that conservatives — or this conservative, at least — used to find most insufferable about the anti-establishment left, which was not its skepticism but its credulity, not the eagerness to question official narratives but the speed with which implausible alternatives took root. (If parts of Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.” make you understand where conspiracy theories come from, the part where the conspiracy gets “explained” should make you a Nixon Republican.)

This is the key problem with the right today, whether the issue is the 2020 election or the Covid-vaccine debate or the attack on Paul Pelosi. Not the baseline of skepticism, not being attuned to weaknesses and inconsistencies in official narratives, not being open to scenarios of elite self-dealing and conspiracy and cover-up, all of which emphatically exist. It’s the swift replacement of skepticism with certainty, the shopping around for any narrative to vindicate your initial theory, the refusal to accept that even institutions you reasonably mistrust sometimes get things right.