Columnist David French laments how today's conservatives seem to have evolved from the hope and freedom of the William F. Buckley/Ronald Reagan years to the power and anger era of the Donald Trump/Marjorie Taylor Green era.
He doesn't put it in quite those terms, but he's correct that there's a lot of anger on the right today than there once was. It might be worthwhile, however, to spend a little time exploring precisely why this is. What has happened over the past five or six decades that animates those who believe that dialogue and compromise are no longer efficacious and must be shelved in favor of the pursuit of political power and the exercise of political partisanship?
Quite clearly, it seems to me, many on the right have come to recognize both how the left has been waging the cultural/political war for at least a century, and they've come to believe that the left's goal is not merely to make the U.S. a better country but to tear it down altogether.
If this seems too strong consider that theoreticians of the left like Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) and Herbert Marcuse (Repressive Tolerance), as well as many lesser figures, have openly acknowledged this as their goal.
The left wages the struggle by capturing the nation's cultural institutions, particularly the media, the academy, the bureaucracy and the courts, turning the latter two into legislatures which the people are largely powerless to influence.
The right sees the decline of our culture as the result of a purposeful effort by the left to create atomized individuals, moral chaos, and to realize the supremacy of their own power. The pattern is similar to that followed by almost every tyrant and totalitarian since the latter half of the 19th century. In fact, the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote presciently about it in his novel The Demons (1871).
In any case, conservatives see all this as profoundly unjust. The left's ideas are being forced upon the people, and the people feel helpless against that imposition. This impotence breeds fear and frustration, and fear and frustration breed anger and a desire for power to offset the perceived threats to the culture, traditions and moral health of the nation.
So, French is correct that the right seems to be angrier than it was in the Reagan years (when the left was mocking Reagan as an "amiable dunce" and "war-monger").
He's correct that the right is angrier today after a highly qualified Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork, was humiliated and rejected by Democrats in the early nineties, and other nominees since, e.g. Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, have had their reputations sullied in the left's all-out attempt to destroy them and their nominations because they were perceived as threats to the left's arrogation of power.
He's correct that the right is angrier today than it was sixty years ago when they could send their children to school without having them indoctrinated into the left's sexual, racial and climatological agenda.
He's correct that the right gets angry today when they're told, on pain of being labelled bigots, that they have to believe that men can get pregnant, that males and females should share private spaces like lavatories and locker rooms and that their daughters should be compelled to compete in sports against physically superior males. They're angry, too, that their children are being taught that they're racists by virtue of being white and that they're headed for a climate Armageddon in their lifetimes.
He's correct that it makes many on the right angry when they see a president sworn to uphold the law do nothing about the flood of illegal migrants across our southern border, when they see leftist prosecutors sworn to enforce the law releasing criminals back on to the streets, when they see January 6th rioters given years-long sentences for trespassing while rioters in 2021 who destroyed millions of dollars worth of property and murdered over thirty people have not even been prosecuted, and were even allowed to take over substantial chunks of a couple of major cities.
He's correct that the right is angrier today as they witness our country spending trillions of dollars we don't have, much of it on pork, and saddling our grandchildren with a debt that'll seriously undermine their future standard of living.
He's correct that the right is angry when they see peoples' livelihoods destroyed by arbitrary, capricious and foolish regulations such as school closures, vaccine mandates and pipeline cancellations.
He's correct that the right is angrier today than it was decades ago when one had the freedom to voice one's opinions without fear of losing one's employment, or being "doxxed" or having one's children harassed and vilified at school.
He's correct that the right is angrier today than a few decades ago when folks on the left weren't demanding unjust reparations and racial and gender preferences, when no one was demanding that they forfeit their 2nd amendment right to defend themselves and their families, and when hostility toward Christianity and Judaism (but, strangely, not toward Islam) was not a fact of everyday experience.
The left has all but completed their "long march through the institutions" and their century long program to "fundamentally transform" the country, as Barack Obama once put it, so, I agree with French that the right today is angrier than it used to be.
The anger may be regrettable, but it's certainly understandable. Noting that it exists is important, I suppose, but more important is understanding why it exists.