If things in American life were good, if Americans were happy about their economy and hopeful for the future, then Donald Trump would not have won the 2024 election.
Trump’s decade of political dominance is a searing indictment of our ruling class. For 10 years, Trump has been teaching the same lesson over and over again: the American people are not happy.
Few of those in power have learned this lesson, however, even some of those on the right. Since Christmas, two roiling political gunbattles have erupted on social media between different factions on the right-of-center. The first, which occurred over Christmas, involved a fight over supposed “high-skilled” immigration to America, with major figures in the tech industry like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy arguing that America needed as much of the “best and brightest” living here as the world has to offer.
In the second, another set of older conservative influencers argued that young men on the right needed to stop complaining about economic conditions and should instead work on elevating themselves through hard work.
In both cases, these mainstream institutional factions received massive pushback from the anonymous and populist right-wing. Big names like Matt Walsh found themselves getting ratioed by accounts with anime profile photos, or, in one amusing case, David Koresh wearing a photoshopped MAGA hat.
The populist response to both increased legal immigration and pulling themselves up by the bootstraps was the same: the American leadership class is out of touch with ordinary Americans and their problems. How can anyone suggest bringing in more foreigners when young, talented Americans are locked out of good-paying jobs by DEI, wokeness, HR gatekeeping, and institutional bias against conservatives? Moreover, it seems ridiculous to young people to be told they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when household income has grown only 4% in the last five years but the median mortgage has doubled.
These divisions reveal a more fundamental shift. Americans, especially young white men, are angry. Their faith in institutions, in the economy, and in their prospects for the future has been deeply shaken. The Iraq War, COVID, inflation, and the stolen 2020 election, among many other things, have radicalized these younger Americans.
They cannot even hope for the material success of their parents. A deep cynicism has set in. The corrupt ruling class robs the public treasury while allowing foreigners to pick the rest of the country clean. Our wars mean nothing. Doctors are liars and “government official” is just another way to say “liar.”
It is not enough to offer these young men and women individual life lessons or lectures on how to network their way into better-paying jobs. Even those who do have good prospects see the way many of their peers live. They feel alienated in their own communities. Under Biden, every state is now a border state. The sense that America is losing herself is pervasive.
For the youth on the right, the issues of national identity and sovereignty are not merely academic. The problem isn’t just “wokeness” but a sense that they don’t have a country, that their rulers hate them, and that things are not going to improve any time soon.
The restoration of free speech on Twitter has allowed these concerns to surface in a new and powerful way. The expectations for the second Trump administration are higher than ever before. There has been a sea change in American public life in the last four years.
After the depressing, crushing weight of Biden’s interregnum, a hard edge has developed on the right. It is time for meaningful political change. Slogans and lectures will not be enough. The old ossified dogmas that America is a “nation of immigrants” and that “politics ends at the water’s edge” are done.
Conservative institutions that hope to survive and thrive in this new era must understand that the era of decisive political action is upon us. Bootstraps are not enough.