It pisses me off tremendously that a significant portion of rightists see the institutional right as weak and feckless and unable to stop the general trend of universal leftward political movement, AND a significant portion of leftists see the institutional left as weak and feckless and unable to stop the general trend of universal rightward political movement. Like I can accept and understand that different people have different opinions of what is good and what would be right for society and so on, and that these people have different needs and ideologies and life experiences and also that some of these people are variously evil or delusional. But how can it be that a significant proportion of opposing factions take it as a clear objective given that the opposing faction is winning, without even the slightest bit of reflection that should be brought about by noticing their enemies saying the same thing.
As much fun as it is to make jabs that amount to “everyone on both sides is stupid,” in fact both sides are basically apprehending the truth. They’re measuring, and being alarmed by, different things.
(NOTE: The following is meant to apply only to America. I have much less sense of what the cultural situation on the ground is like in other places.)
The right has noted, correctly, that the country as a whole is becoming more and more…let’s say left-aligned…in its thinking and its allegiances. The favored memes of the left are accelerating in popularity at a tremendous rate. Anything in the pro-diversity anti-racism/sexism/whatever memeplex has gone from “controversial” to “mainstream” to “enforced dogma that will get you fired for disagreeing” at lightning speed; once-unthinkable proposals like UBI, open borders, drug legalization, etc. now have both substantial popular support and substantial elite support. This is partly because of changing demographics, partly because the major cultural institutions are mostly left-aligned themselves, partly because of economic factors like “ever-increasing urbanization” and “it’s really not as easy to make your living from a small business as it used to be.” Conservatives observe this with panic; they feel that their own home is being made alien to them and that there are ever-fewer contexts where they can feel like they’re not being suppressed by a hostile foreign regime.
People on the left will own up to all of this, most of the time. Occasionally someone will make noises about how we’re going to become Gilead or something, but…that’s a rhetorical gambit designed to evoke outrage and sympathy, not a serious claim, and I think everyone pretty much knows it. “Blue Tribe” Americans know what the “right side of history” is (their side), they expect the future to agree with them, they expect the culture to line up with their ideals ever-more-closely, and they’re way more surprised by cultural defeats than by cultural victories.
The left has noted, correctly, that the right has a stranglehold on the country’s political mechanisms that is vastly disproportionate to its numbers or its cultural traction. At the very least, despite the substantial and ever-increasing popularity of left-aligned ideas – and they are popular, especially if you can avoid couching them in obnoxious polarizing jargon – the federal government swings back and forth in a very regular way, and for the last long while Republicans seem to have had a major advantage on the state and local levels. Something something Senate makeup Electoral College rural over-representation. And the veto-point-heavy structure of American government means that it’s a lot harder to do things than to not do things, which favors conservative ideologies yet further on a practical level.
The 2016 election was kind of a watershed moment for this. The Republican candidacies for major national office were farcically bad, the whole thing was a nightmare comedy of incompetence and lack-of-coordination, it looked as though the GOP was actively trying to throw all the races and tear itself apart…and the result was that it took full control of every branch of government.
So all that cultural success hasn’t translated to pretty much anything (or at least anything worth crowing about) in terms of major left-side concerns like climate change, health care, redistribution, criminal justice reform, etc. Leftists observe this with panic; they think that a tiny coterie of evil capitalist elites, plus some deplorable stooges, are going to keep the country submerged in misery and poverty for the indefinite future.