A strange thing happened to me a few years ago.
I was eating dinner with my family when I got a message from a friend that there was a Clubhouse discussion happening about me. Clubhouse is a social media app that enjoyed a brief period of prominence during the pandemic. It allows people to host online conversations, and I’ve described it before as a cross between a conference call and a panel discussion. A person would create a virtual “room,” designate panelists who were permitted to speak, and then others could listen.
That night someone had created a room called “David French: Based or cringe?” In the language of the new right, “based” is a high compliment. It describes someone who doesn’t just stick to his convictions — he doubles down, regardless of social convention. In practice, it usually means that the more extreme you become, the more based you are.
Cringe, on the other hand, is self-explanatory. No one wants to be cringe.
I made an impulsive decision to join the room, to hear the verdict and, I hoped, to offer a word or two in my defense. Was I based or cringe? Well, according to the people in the room, I was not just cringe but supremely cringe. As I joined in, a panelist was mid-rant about my many, many deficiencies, as a writer and also as a person.
But I decided to stay and talk, and for the next three hours I was bombarded with questions. The people in the room were mainly young members of the new right, many of whom seemed to be less than half my age, MAGA to varying degrees, and they nursed deep grievances against me and any other conservative who resisted the ascension of President Trump.
The conversation was enlightening. While we talked about a number of issues, one theme was dominant — I refused to recognize that America was in a death spiral. The country was in crisis, and I needed to open my eyes, steel my spine and take the necessary, sometimes authoritarian, steps to pull it from the brink.
The core of their complaint was embodied by a quote from a novelist named G. Michael Hopf who wrote in his book “Those Who Remain”: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
In this telling, the “strong men” of the American past had created a glorious and powerful nation. Our peace and prosperity had spawned a weak and feckless generation that had squandered America’s strength and cultural identity, and now it was time for hard men to arise to reclaim what was lost.
This view of America’s glorious past is indispensable to understanding MAGA’s appeal — and the extremism of MAGA youth. After all, the slogan, “Make America Great Again” implies the loss of greatness. This sense of loss provides the intellectual and — crucially — emotional foundation of the right’s authoritarian turn.
It’s hard to overstate how much the new right idealizes America’s past. Online spaces are full of memes and images, for example, of families from the 1950s in idyllic settings, often with the caption, “This is what they took from you.” The memes don’t define who “they” are, but I quickly learned in the Clubhouse conversation that “they” very much included me. My support for free speech, for example, opened the door for depravity, and my defense of due process hindered the rough justice necessary to reclaim America.
The new right contrasts its vision of a glorious past with a miserable present. Earlier this month, Matt Walsh, a popular right-wing podcaster with millions of social media followers wrote: “It’s an empirical fact that basically everything in our day to day lives has gotten worse over the years. The quality of everything — food, clothing, entertainment, air travel, roads, traffic, infrastructure, housing, etc. — has declined in observable ways.”
This is, incidentally, where MAGA meets MAHA (Make America Healthy Again). Parts of MAHA are rooted in the conviction that American health care is fundamentally broken to the point of being dangerous. That is the root of the belief — held by 31 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans — that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they’re designed to prevent.
Walsh’s statement, however, is the opposite of an “empirical fact.” In reality, it’s empirically wrong on many, many counts.
Americans live longer, enjoy higher median wages, live in larger and more luxurious homes, and enjoy more civil liberties and greater access to justice than even the recent past. The starter homes of the 1950s — tiny places that often lacked central air and other modern utilities — would be considered poverty-level accommodations now.
Violent crime is much lower than in decades past, the divorce rate has decreased from its highs in the early 1980s, and the abortion rate (despite recent increases) is far below its early 1980s peaks.
But even as I type these words, I realize their inadequacy. You cannot fact-check a person out of a feeling, and without question, the people I talked to felt — deep in their bones — that something had gone fundamentally wrong in the United States of America and in their lives. And a dry recitation of contrary facts not only did nothing to assuage this feeling of fear and loss, it was positively enraging — cringe, in a word.
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To use an example wielded against me time and again, “How can you possibly say that America is better than it’s been when drag queens are reading to kids in public libraries?”
Well, to that I say, as my friend Kevin Williamson put it in a recent piece addressing the new right’s nostalgia, “More drag queens, sure, but fewer slaves — the moral trajectory of Western civilization is not entirely in the direction of failure, you know.”
One disadvantage of your teenage and early adult years is that you tend to experience adversity without perspective. It’s hard to place your own experience in a larger context when you haven’t yet experienced that context.
And that’s exactly where we — the older generations — have failed. When I see young people radicalizing on the left and right, including through their greater tolerance for political violence, I see the fruit of our own intolerance and polarization.
Consider this — in 2014, one year before Trump began his first presidential campaign, a Pew Research Center poll found that 82 percent of Republicans viewed the Democratic Party unfavorably or very unfavorably. The same poll found that 79 percent of Democrats had unfavorable or very unfavorable views of the Republican Party. Ominously, the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who viewed the opposing party very unfavorably had more than doubled in the previous 20 years.
Animosity breeds hyperbole and vice versa. I know full well that politics ain’t beanbag, but we’ve all seen a steady escalation in political rhetoric. Every election is the most important of our lifetime. The fate of the nation hinges on every trip to the ballot box.
Why does the young right think “they” stole the glorious past? Well, because that’s the effect of teaching them that the other side makes everything worse. I can think of times when I lost perspective, when my words went too far. Partisanship was corrosive to my soul.
Now, combine that hyperbole with smartphones and social media, and you’ve got a recipe for a nonstop sense of alarm. I can open my Twitter feed and see video after video of outrageous conduct, and no amount of telling myself that these are isolated incidents in a nation of over 340 million people can blunt their emotional impact.
Even worse, parents and kids learned together to use their phones. We all experienced these new technologies at the same time, and we often behaved no better than our teenage sons and daughters. Our kids were taking notes as social media broke our brains and hardened our hearts. We made them vulnerable to charlatans, conspiracists and conflict entrepreneurs, because we proved to be vulnerable to others like them.
Now this false sense of emergency is creating a real crisis. In 2016, the writer Michael Anton (who later worked for both Trump administrations) wrote under a pseudonym an essay that soon became both notorious and famous called “The Flight 93 Election.”
He acknowledged that voting for Trump was a risk, but, he argued, electing Hillary Clinton would result in certain national disaster. There was only one option: “Charge the cockpit or you die.”
But what happens (as I’ve argued before) if you charge the cockpit, incapacitate the pilot, take the controls and realize the plane wasn’t being hijacked; it was only experiencing turbulence? Well then you’re now flying a plane you don’t know how to fly, and you’ve created your own emergency.
As a Cold War kid, I grew up in tense times. The threat of open war with the Soviet Union — and possible nuclear extinction — haunted our daily lives. In the midst of crises and controversies, I took my emotional cues from my parents and from the adults around me in my small Kentucky hometown.
They were never Pollyannas — how could you be? — but they also never panicked. I definitely experienced anxiety, but they provided the context so that I could understand that we’d endured similar crises and survived before. The times were dangerous, but there was also more stability than I could perceive. The result is that I learned to approach the problems of the moment with determination, not despair. Problems are real, but hope endures.
If I were to have that Clubhouse conversation again, I think I’d start it differently. Rather than walking in and offering a polite challenge to debate. I’d start with an apology.
I’m sorry that we turned against our own friends and neighbors and allowed political animosity to corrupt our hearts. I’m sorry that you grew up awash in images and rhetoric that we couldn’t handle ourselves. I’m sorry that you were told that the fate of the nation — even of Christianity itself — hangs in the balance every single election.
I know the group I was talking to would find this cringe, but I’ll say it anyway: What I am sorriest about is that we taught you to despair.
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