Imagining Post-Trump Nationalism
America is in a period of tug-of-war politics, with cultural elites fighting to determine which views should be excluded from public life. For decades, overt racism has been stigmatized in polite society and penalized by the government; while racial disparities persist everywhere from the prison system to public education, many Americans regard openly racist views with horror, and quickly move to marginalize the people who hold them.
Now, the question is what other views will be similarly classed as intolerable, justifying the loss of a job, inviting a public shaming, or earning the label of “bigotry.” Among activists on the left, the spirit of the day tends to favor purity tests and bans: The rare student or professor who openly criticizes same-sex marriage or transgender rights often faces backlash or, occasionally, is fired; conservative legal groups that oppose the expansion of LGBTQ rights are included on hate-watch lists alongside white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Some public figures have pushed for similar treatment of those who oppose abortion. Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. senator from New York, recently compared anti-abortion views to racism: “I think there are some issues that have such moral clarity that we have, as a society, decided that the other side is not acceptable,” she told the Des Moines Register. “There is no moral equivalency when you come to racism. And I do not believe there’s a moral equivalency when it comes to changing laws that deny women reproductive freedom.”
This impulse, according to some conservatives, represents an existential crisis in contemporary American political life—a systematic silencing of any dissent against what they see as the prevailing progressive views on identity. “I’m kind of scheduled for ejection from society,” Rusty Reno, the editor of the conservative journal , told me in a recent conversation at the magazine’s office in New York. Much of elite conservative culture, especially in the world of essays and journalism, is focused on critiquing, mocking, and warning about identity-focused left-wing
