What The Hard Left And The Hard Right Have In Common

Yes, we are polarized. And yet, both poles are thinking in exactly the same way.

That thought occurred to me while reading Michael Doran, in the Free Press:

For two decades, progressive institutions racialized every public discourse, taught an entire generation of boys that their skin color made them inherently suspect, and demonized the traditional markers of male identity—strength, duty, family, faith, nation—as forms of toxic oppression. The result was not a political movement but a widespread, inchoate mood of distrust:

1. Nothing works anymore.
2. The system is rigged.
3. The people in charge hate us and always will.
4. Everything they tell us to care about—democracy abroad, allies, global leadership—is just another way to bleed the country dry.

That mood is real. It is raw. But it is also politically malleable.

It could, in principle, be channeled toward Trump’s renewal project—toward a restoration of American vitality sustained by a broad, multi-faith coalition and a repurposed alliance structure aimed at containing China. Instead, an entire pyramid of online influencers—podcasters, meme lords, streamers, and anonymous posters—has spent Trump’s first year pushing it in the most destructive possible direction.

Doran is worried about the young conservatives who are flirting with Nazism and anti-semitism. His point is that these alienated, cynical, nihilistic right-wingers learned it from the left! This is what they were taught in school, in their lessons on Critical Race Theory. Now they are simply applying that sense of victimhood at the hands of hidden oppressors to themselves.

Here is another example: Postmodern “critical theorists” teach that moral values, laws, religions, and pretty much every cultural institution are nothing more than masks for power. That is, the groups in charge hide their oppression behind nice-sounding words, so that their victims will co-operate in their own victimhood. But it’s all about power. And the only path towards liberation is seizing power for your group, so that you can oppress your oppressors.

Such power reductionism is a left-wing, post-Marxist analysis. Now listen to President Trump’s key advisor, Stephen Miller:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said.

It’s the same worldview! Leftists complain about it, while Miller embraces it, but they are actually in agreement about what they call the “real world.”

Let me add a couple of other odd commonalities.

Both sides hate the “establishment.” Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the counter-culture was constantly rebelling against the establishment. But the cultural conservatives of that day defended the establishment. The family, the military, the business world, America–these may be the establishment, but these are good things. Young people should go to school, enlist in the military, get a job, get married, have kids, and join the establishment. As opposed to the hippy life plan of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.

Today leftists still scorn the establishment, but I am hearing that sentiment especially from the right. Conservatives who question President Trump are dismissed as “establishment Republicans” or as “establishment politicians.”

Here is an example of how entrenched this anti-establishment strain is on the right. Politico organized a focus group of Generation Z conservatives, trying to assess who they would support in the next presidential election. To the evident surprise of the journalist interviewing them, only one of the nine expressed support for J. D. Vance, Trump’s vice-president and the MAGA heir apparent.

One of the young men explained: “I don’t think Vance can win, because I think he’s too connected to the current political establishment in Washington“!

MAGA was once insurgent, defining itself against the political establishment. But now, after two Trump administrations, the young are describing MAGA as establishment!

A related commonality is both side’s hatred of institutions. The Left is skeptical of institutions like marriage, parenthood, laws, institutional religion, corporations, the government. The Right is skeptical of institutions like schools, science, medicine, and denominations, agreeing with the Left on corporations and government.

It is one thing to be anti-institution, but there are also God-ordained institutions! According to Luther’s doctrine of the Estates, God established (there’s that word again) certain institutions for human flourishing: namely, the family (marriage, parenthood), the church, and the state (with its government, laws, and criminal justice system).

One could make a good case that many of today’s institutions are corrupt and that aggressive secularism has been “established” through them all. And that, in many ways, “nothing works any more,” “the system is rigged,” etc.

But Christians, at least, need to remember that the “real world” is far more than power–God and His judgments are real–and that God is providentially governing His creation through human vocations in the three estates. So we mustn’t rebel against all institutions and all establishments, depending of course on who instituted and who established them.

Photo: J. D. Vance by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – JD Vance, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104074853