These are troubled times for self-described liberals in both of America’s major political parties. They are without heirs: the future of the Democratic party belongs not to liberals but to the Democratic Socialists of America. The Republican party already belongs to Trump voters, and the GOP’s next generation appears to be, if anything, even less liberal: it’s socially conservative, economically populist and skeptical of more wars for the “liberal international order.”
The DSA speaks for itself, but the young right has no institutional voice. Charlie Kirk was the closest thing there was to a spokesman for his generation of Republicans, and younger ones, but he was silenced by an assassin’s bullet and since then the young right has been defined by its enemies, who have even invented a new literary genre for the purpose. Journalists who want to portray the young right in an ugly light simply give anonymity to sources from the older, liberal right who also have an interest in making younger Republicans look bad. This produces stories in outlets such as the New York Times and Politico that brand the young right as radicals or “groypers,” a label that in a strict sense denotes admirers of the anti-Semitic influencer Nick Fuentes, but which gets loosely applied to any young person to the right of David French.
Freedom can lead to worlds utterly alien to what conservatives want to conserve
There are, of course, young anti-Semites and racists, just as there are old ones. The liberal Republican party of the 1990s – which favored free trade and didn’t make immigration restriction a priority – was a party whose elected officials and staff often had more than a passing acquaintance with the Council of Conservative Citizens, a successor group to the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils. Left-liberals of that era insisted this meant the GOP was scheming to bring about a return to Jim Crow, when in fact the party of George W. Bush wasn’t even interested in stopping anti-white affirmative action. There’s no shortage of bigotry among Democrats, either, including bigotry toward the groups the party claims to champion. Any black, gay or Jewish Republican can tell you just how tolerant the liberal left really is, to say nothing of liberal bigotry toward Christians in general and Catholics in particular. It’s also telling when anonymous old-guard liberal Republicans given anonymity by the mainstream media refer disparagingly to Americans from “Pennsyltucky.” If hate is the story, older liberals of both parties must be included in it.
The story isn’t a new wave of right-wing extremism – though obviously, for left-leaning media, right-wing extremism is the perennial story. Rather, what’s new here is the abandonment of liberal orthodoxies among young people on the left and right alike. But whom do liberals have to blame for this development, if not themselves? Liberalism was the “end of history” 30 years ago, and young Americans have been brought up in a thoroughly liberal America, with liberal schools and universities, a liberal economic order and liberals in charge of the Democratic party the Clintons had remade and the Republican party of the Bush dynasty. Every institutional incentive and every channel of education and instrument of propaganda was in the hands of liberals. Yet still they couldn’t reproduce their values in the next generation.
It’s not hard to see why. Left-liberalism promised that the racial wrongs of the past would be righted by enlightened leaders today, who would use the state to redistribute the market’s wealth and opportunities to the disadvantaged. But what price can be placed on justice? No amount of affirmative action or welfare payments or any other government policy can balance the scales for slavery or colonialism or patriarchy or other sins laid at the feet of America and Europe. Liberal solutions were nowhere near adequate to meeting the problems left-liberals themselves identified. And whereas, for historical reasons, left-liberals looked upon Jews as the original victim group, their children see Jews as oppressors of darker-hued and culturally less western peoples. The demographic changes to the Democratic party brought about by liberals’ own policies cemented this change. White Christians might feel a special affinity for Jews, but newer immigrant populations do not – certainly Muslims don’t.
For the right, the triumph of liberal economics came coupled with the triumph of cultural liberalism. Older conservatives were prepared to accept this: they were, and are, content to live in gated communities and divorce themselves from the plight of the country, so long as their own upper-middle-class families are intact. Of course, over time those intact families and gated communities are invaded by the conditions afflicting America as a whole, but the liberal right clings to the idea that tranquil Dutch Protestant towns in the Midwest will continue to have the same character if the churches are replaced by data centers and the population is augmented by tens of thousands of Somalis. The underlying assumption of the liberal right is that freedom can only lead to the way of life conservatives cherish. It’s an article of faith. Yet the reality is that freedom, for all the good it does, can lead to worlds utterly alien to what conservatives want to conserve.
That’s not hypothetical for the young right, which has grown up in an increasingly strange and often hostile America, a country that for many of them is already post-Christian and majority-minority. While the young left is inflamed by the dream of a Palestinian homeland, the young right is driven by a desire for a homeland of its own. The older right is leaving nothing to inherit but the words of the Declaration of Independence. That’s not enough.
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