Young Conservatives and the Far Right

As David French notes in the NY Times, we have been treated lately to a string of apparently mainstream young conservaties – a speechwriter for DeSantis, an editor at the Daily Caller, a writer for Tucker Carlson, etc. – being outed for writing horrificly racist and antisemitic rants online.

To understand the cultural dynamic, I want to introduce you to an obscure online concept, no enemies to the right. A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness. Attack the left in the most searing terms, and you’ll enjoy the thunderous applause of your peers. Criticize the new right, and you can experience a vicious backlash. The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.

I agree that this is a serious problem. I think it stems partly from all those Republican politicians (Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Trump) who talk in apocalyptic terms about the nation "falling off a cliff." If you took that seriously, if you really believed that liberals were destroying civilization, wouldn't you rather ally with neo-Nazis or Vladimir Putin than Democrats? Extreme rhetoric has consequences.

The sense that attempts at compromise have not held back the left drives some of this:

One of their prime reproofs of what they might call the zombie right, the Reagan right of their parents’ generation, is that it was simply too accommodating. As they see it, classical liberal politics, which preserve free speech and robust debate as a priority, emboldened and empowered the left. Compromise, in their view, ran only one way, and conservatism conserved nothing. The left, in their mind, is winning the culture war in a rout.

Note that for young conservative, as for many young leftists, the key issues are cultural, not economic. Talk of low taxes and economic growth does not move them. They want to fight over race, gender, sexuality, and the tone of public discourse, especially as it relates to white men. Here is French on the connection to masculinity:  

And here’s where masculine insecurity enters the equation. To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise. To fight on the right — mainly by trolling on social media or embracing authoritarianism as the based alternative to weak-kneed classical liberalism — is seen as strong, courageous and cool. It’s a sign of a fierce and independent mind. Thus, the troll isn’t just a troll he’s a man. He’s a warrior.

I see some of that. But I also see a reaction against the left-wing obsession with trauma and safe spaces and protecting everybody from "harm." That cuts against a lot of old-style masculinity; frankly I would be suspicious of any young man who didn't at least roll his eyes about college students retreating to safe rooms to watch puppy videos when a right-wing speaker comes to campus. There are a lot of young men out there looking for political spaces where they can pose as tough, and this has driven several recent political movements besides Bronze Age Pervert-style rightism: the Bernie Sanders campaign, the rise of neo-Stalinist "tankies," the Putin fanboys.

I also wonder about the very common insistence that supporters of the left or center are "grifting." I suspect the belief that all their opponents are on the take helps explain why right-wing regimes seem to always end up so corrupt. Some right wingers believe that when they were out of power they were excluded from corrupt networks that were enriching their opponents, so when they get the chance they help themselves. I don't know how else to explain the grotesque corruption that we have seen in Latin American and Balkan Fascism, the White Russians, contemporary Hungary, Putin's Russia, and so on. Can anyone name a 20th- or 21st-century right wing regime that was not terribly corrupt?

One should also note the widespread sense among young people that trying on extreme ideas is just part of online culture, in which everything is at least half a joke and you never know who is being really serious. French thinks that is dangerous:

Worse still, even when one initially embraces bigotry “only” as a form of social transgression, marinating in that environment soon turns trolling into conviction. In contrite comments to The Washington Free Beacon in response to additional revelations from his private messages, Gonzalez said, “What starts off as joking can very quickly become unironically internalized as an actual belief.”

I know, because I read them, that some old-school American conservatives are as alarmed by this as liberals. This includes not just NY Times writers like Brett Stephens and David Brooks but some very conservative Catholics (the kind who cite papal pronouncements as evidence) and a lot of Wall Street and other pro-business types.

Any political movement needs youthful energy to thrive. It seems that the youthful energy on the American right often moves in directions that older conservatives find alarming, and that ranting online about blacks and Jews is common behavior on the youthful right. What this means or portends I do not know, but it doesn't seem like a good sign.