I watched Trump’s Tylenol press conference and thought “I remember when dumbass anti-empiricist paranoia was a left-wing thing.” At EPA, I would frequently field calls from “independent filmmakers” (that is: trust fund kids who got a camcorder for Christmas) pursuing some crackpot theory built on a combination of anecdote, suspicion, and one lonely paper in the Journal of Publishing Any Ol’ Shit For $200. It’s no accident that RFK Jr. started out as an environmental lawyer; he’s a buoy bobbing in a sea of conspiratorial nonsense, and as those currents shifted to the right, he went with them.
Of course, medicine is far from the only area where Trump agrees with lefty know-nothings. Trump has gotten the government so involved in the economy that Adam Smith is probably spinning in his grave while Karl Marx is totally erect in his. Trump’s post-Charlie Kirk attacks on speech mirror what parts of the left did after George Floyd, and Trump parrots the radical leftist view that any talk of principles in foreign policy is a smokescreen for self-interest. The cross-pollination of bad, extremist ideas goes the other way, too: The far left is dabbling in anti-semitism and extolling the virtues of political violence, and left-wing race essentialists use language that would be at home in a 19th century book about the cranial capacity of the various races.
We’ve developed new words to describe the re-shaping of the political spectrum. “MAGA” and “woke” basically mean “cult members”. “Conservative” has faded from the lexicon as The Dispatch types continue to be a Republican Party In Exile that will probably never re-conquer the GOP and hoist the banner of the House of Reagan. “Liberal” used to mean basically any Democrat, but now “progressive” replaces “liberal” once the amount of BlueSky/MSNBC poisoning in the subject’s bloodstream surpasses a certain level. And then there are “leftists” and the “alt-right”, i.e. weirdos who would have channeled their antisocialism into Ren Fests and Civil War reenactments in years past, but who now cosplay in the political sphere instead of in the woods.
The American political spectrum is evolving. None of us chose this; this is happening because of technology, a changing world, and people in the West being so fucking bored that we pick fights just to feel something like Ed Norton in Fight Club. But it’s increasingly clear that the notions of left and right, liberal and conservative that worked pretty well from basically the New Deal until the advent of social media are breaking down. The fringes are in the mix now; extremists who were suppressed in the era of consolidated media and threats from honest-to-God communists and fascists have gained influence. And the often-observed phenomenon of the far left and far right resembling each other seems highly relevant now that Hippie Freaktown and Nutso Rightyville appear to be connected by a bullet train. It seems like a coalition of people who don’t share the worldview of the woke left or MAGA right could theoretically emerge. But what values, exactly, would that coalition have?