There are many ways to measure the ascendance of rightwing antiliberalism across the democratic world since the middle of the 2010s. In several countries, right-populists have displaced neoliberal politicians and center-right parties. In some of these places, they’ve won power. Even where they haven’t, their critiques of party establishments on immigration, free trade, crime, foreign policy, and social issues have shifted the terms of debate away from the consensus that prevailed over the past several decades. And then there’s what might be called the migration of utopian energies from the Left to the Right in recent years.
I wasn’t a conservative as a teenager, but I was in my 20s and early 30s. That was during the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was common for center-right intellectuals to define themselves in opposition to the utopian hopes associated with the counterculture of the 1960s and early ’70s. They were irresponsible and foolish radicals, willing to topple the imperfect but decent and hard-won institutions of liberal democracy in pursuit of an airy and ill-considered ideal. We were hard-nosed realists, keenly attuned to the fragility of these institutions and the need to defend and protect them against the reckless idealists.
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