The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It’s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now — and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions.

First, human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation.

Global politics over the past few decades functioned as a massive social inequality machine. In country after country, groups of highly educated urban elites have arisen to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored. In country after country, populist leaders have arisen to exploit these resentments: Donald Trump in the U.S., Narendra Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France.

Meanwhile, authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping practice this politics of resentment on a global scale. They treat the collective West as the global elites and declare their open revolt against it. Putin tells humiliation stories — what the West supposedly did to Russia in the 1990s. He promises a return to Russian exceptionalism and Russian glory. Russia will reclaim its starring role in world history.

More:

Many people around the world look at our ideas about gender roles and find them foreign or repellent. They look at (at our best) our fervent defense of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and find them off-putting. The idea that it’s up to each person to choose one’s own identity and values — that seems ridiculous to many. The idea that the purpose of education is to inculcate critical thinking skills so students can liberate themselves from the ideas they received from their parents and communities — that seems foolish to many.

With 44 percent of American high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, our culture isn’t exactly the best advertisement for Western values right now.

Brooks cites this chart to show how very far much of Europe has grown from the rest of the world, culturally (obviously elite coastal US culture would be right up their on the woke peninsula):

Finally, this passage, which, I think, gives the author’s game away:

To define this conflict most generously, I’d say it’s the difference between the West’s emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the world’s emphasis on communal cohesion. But that’s not all that’s going on here. What’s important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments in order to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war.

Some people have revived Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory to capture what’s going on. Huntington was right that ideas, psychology and values drive history as much as material interests. But these divides don’t break down on the neat civilizational lines that Huntington described.

In fact, what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations. The status resentment against Western cultural, economic and political elites that flows from the mouths of illiberal leaders like Putin and Modi and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro sounds quite a lot like the status resentment that flows from the mouths of the Trumpian right, from the French right, from the Italian and Hungarian right.

Read it all. I can’t speak about the right in France, India, Russia, Brazil, or Italy, but I do know something about both the Trumpian right in the US, and the Hungarian right … and I find Brooks’s analysis to be weirdly blind and self-serving (weirdly, six years after Donald Trump was elected). That these leaders give voice and force to resentment is true. But what Brooks doesn’t seem to consider is the possibility that the people who support them have good reason to resent what the people of Brooks’s professional and social class have done with their power. 

In Hungary, for example, part of the pro-Orban vote was resentment over the fact that European countries seek to punish Hungary economically for asserting its right to raise its children according to Hungarian values, not the values of the Davos class. Plus, Hungarians resent what they regard as the EU’s unjust violations of their sovereignty. Why shouldn’t they? I mean, if you don’t believe they have a case, that’s one thing, but to be befuddled because Hungarians don’t understand that Brussels wants what’s best for them is just weird at this point.

Similarly, Hungarians voted for Orban in part because they trusted him to do a better job keeping their country out of war with Russia than they did the opposition, which was falling all over itself to assure Brussels it would be on side. Does Brooks blame Hungarians for being resentful, hence their vote for the peace candidate, Viktor Orban? Should they have wanted to raise the risk of entering the war, because that’s what all right-thinking neoliberals and neoconservatives think is best for Hungary, and all of Europe?

Similarly in the US, the idea that Trump voters and their resentments are nothing more than an expression of false consciousness is bonkers. The liberal institutional elites — including woke capitalists — are moralistically browbeating half the country into accepting a neoracist ideology that stands to dispossess whites of their history, status, and job prospects, solely on the basis of their skin color — and they can’t figure out why people would resent that?! Their agents are busy in schools and in the corporate and creative suites at Disney, figuring out how to queer children under the noses of parents, and these five Times writers cannot grasp why anybody would resent the hell out of that?!

I’m sure all five of those writers would be perfectly fine with this below, given their social and professional class, and geographical location. What is really interesting is that they all genuinely seem to be unable to wrap their minds around the idea that more than a few Americans find it wildly inappropriate for first grade, and that those people are not evil or crazy:

.@BrookeSchool 1st grade teacher records an “identity share” zoom call with K-2 grades where he spoke about being trans.

“When babies are born the dr looks & makes a guess on whether the baby is a boy or girl. Sometimes the dr is wrong. If they are right, the baby is cisgender” pic.twitter.com/qYGFm9B7rF

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) April 10, 2022

Tonight, before getting to the hotel, we stopped for dinner at a Romanian family’s house. They had some neighbors over when we rolled up. We ended up talking about global politics and the culture war. These Romanians seethe over what they (correctly) regard as US cultural imperialism, and how they all feel shat on by the West. Yet one of them, a high school teacher, said that the younger generation in her school is becoming radicalized on sexual orientation and gender identity questions by social media. She has no idea how to stop it. Of course no one anywhere does. These people are watching their children and their culture taken away from them by technological and social forces that they can’t understand or stop. But they’re supposed to be okay with all of this, because the arc of history bends towards queerness, or something?

In San Antonio, a hippie couple — a biological male and a female-to-male transgender — had a baby when the biological woman (who has a beard) got pregnant. A local TV story did a piece on it. Here’s how it framed the story:

A Loving Journey™. Here are the loving journeymen:

The Bearded Lady, Her Hippie Lover, And Their Baby — all normalized by a San Antonio TV station. The media never, ever explore any dissenting opinion from stories like this. Anybody in The New York Times newsroom who has the slightest twinge of objection to any of this has learned by now to keep his or her mouth shut, or prepare to be driven out of the office. Therefore, I’m pretty sure none of those NYT opinion journalists have much or even any significant contact with people who find this stuff repulsive. Their (our) judgments therefore strike them as inexplicable, aside from sheer bigotry.

I don’t think there is any reasoning with them anymore. Just resistance, via the vote and intense activism.

UPDATE: Perfectly normal here. Nothing to see. Only bigots notice this stuff.