Currents

The 2024 US presidential election cycle has been nothing if not full of surprises, but one of the biggest role reversals has flown under the radar. To many on the political right, their opponents across the aisle are seething with envy and resentment. Right-wing commentators declaim against the “racial resentment” embodied in the writings of critical race theorists like Kimberle Crenshaw, and pundits like Jordan Peterson accuse people left-of-center of being driven by envy. As Chris Rufo, author of America’s Cultural Revolution (2023), put it with characteristic culture war vitriol, “The true heart of the quest for liberation — the driving force behind its theory and praxis — is nihilism. [Eldridge] Cleaver believed that raping white women was ‘freedom.’ Angela Davis believed that taping a shotgun to the neck of a county judge was ‘justice.’ Black Lives Matter activists believed that looting and burning down shopping malls was ‘reparations.’ But all of these are, in truth, pure resentment.”

There are no doubt some on the political left who fit the cliché of being motivated by envy or resentment, just as there are some on the right who really are just looking for a superior moral justification for their own selfishness. What this long-standing accusation toward the left deflects from, however, and what the current moment reveals, is that today’s populist right is an ecosystem that runs on almost nothing but envy and resentment.

Let’s first define our terms. Envy typically refers to wanting to possess something that another person or group has. Resentment, by contrast, refers to begrudging someone something they have and wanting to take it away from them, whether or not it benefits the resentful individual. The proverb of crabs in a fisherman’s bucket who pull down other crabs about to escape is a good encapsulation. Resentment can emerge from envy and jealousy — “If I can’t have it, no one can!” — but it can also be stimulated by a feeling of being victimized or wronged by another. No right-wing philosopher has been more influential in articulating this dynamic than Friedrich Nietzsche.

Though Nietzsche’s writings lend themselves to a broad spectrum of political interpretation, his work has long been a frequent intellectual touchstone for right-wing accusations of resentment lobbed at the left. Indeed, Nietzsche was one of the first to argue that much of the moralism about justice, fairness, and equality is simply motivated by a desire for revenge against a real or perceived persecutor. These arguments are invoked to this day by figures such as Douglas Murray, Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing influencer “Bronze Age Pervert”, and Peterson, among others, to diagnose left-wing resentment as yet another symptom of the “victimhood culture” alleged to be sweeping the West.

Nietzsche’s main argument about resentment comes from his great work On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), where he takes aim at the ascendency of Christian “slave morality” and its “nihilism.” For Nietzsche, pre-modern societies were ruled by aristocracies that articulated unambiguously elitist and anti-egalitarian “master moralities” emphasizing pride, personal nobility, health, action, and even violence. Naturally, the lower orders resented this arrangement, and sought their revenge — but they did so indirectly, through this “slave morality”, which inverted the value system of the masters. Pride became the sin of Lucifer, nobility became hubris, strength and violence transformed into cruelty and wrath. The heavenly mandate of the upper crust was replaced by the equality of all before God, with the poor and the humble being perhaps the most equal of all. According to Nietsche, this slave morality took the world by storm through Christianity and then secularized it in the form of liberalism, socialism, and democracy. In this way, the “slaves” were victorious against the masters, with the political left, much like early Christians, concealing their unending desire for revenge against the noble under the veneer of righteousness and compassion.

Of course, few on the modern right are as audacious as Nietzsche in insisting that Christianity is the ultimate cultural source of resentment that needs to be uprooted (though there are a handful). More often, writers sympathetic to religious social conservatism or “cultural Christianity” like Peterson or Murray will simply pick and choose the portion of Nietzsche’s arguments that apply to the left and leave the rest behind.

Again, some on the left are surely motivated by envy and resentment. Calls to “eat the rich” and tankie nostalgia for communist dictators like Stalin and Mao and their uncompromising violence against class enemies and reactionaries are very clear expressions of a desire for revenge. But, plenty of people left-of-center are just as motivated by feelings of fairness and egalitarianism, not to mention a deep sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged.

Kamala Harris’s call to build an “opportunity economy”, for example, in many ways just takes Republican claims about meritocracy more seriously than they do, since a fairer competitive playing field allows for merit to shine through more than an unearned advantage. Similarly, one would be hard-pressed to credibly claim that policies such as universal healthcare are somehow driven by envy and resentment, rather than a simple desire to help everyday people. Pathologizing everyone outside the MAGA cult, from right-leaning centrists to avowed revolutionary communists, as an undifferentiated mass of critical postmodern neo-Marxists merely serves as a lazy way to dismiss opposing viewpoints rather than engaging with them on their, you know, merits. But just as crucially, this broad-brush tactic ignores the extent to which envy and resentment are a defining feature of today’s MAGA right.

On a policy level, rather than seeking to lift all boats, right-wing populists embrace the zero-sum ideas from the “anger and resentment” playbook. The idea of a mutually beneficial cultural and economic system is superseded by populist resentment that someone, somewhere might be benefitting at their expense. Hence the opposition to cosmopolitan integration and immigration, as well as the desire for America to withdraw from the world stage.

The populist right is also not shy about expressing its enduring envy and jealousy of the cultural clout allegedly commanded by “liberal elites.” Behind the outward disdain, the fact that global megastars endorse and perform for Democrats while Republicans have to settle for the likes of Scott Baio, Kid Rock, and Hulk Hogan is a source of intense bitterness on the right. Some even follow radical reactionaries like Curtis Yarvin or J.D. Vance in advocating for breaking the left’s hegemonic grip on all cultural media and taking it over themselves, somehow. To these (often comically shrill) ends, right-populists describe Trump as the “only middle finger available” or who look to him to deliver “revenge” against liberals. Trump himself, in a 2023 speech, declared “I am your retribution.”

The political theorist Wendy Brown, in her book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019), takes both Nietzsche and the modern right to task for paying exclusive attention to the resentments that emerge on the other side of the ledger, but never their own. She writes that this ignores how “resentment, rancor, rage [...] are at play in right-wing populism.” She goes on to say that “this politics of resentment emerges from the historically dominant as they feel that dominancy ebbing […] This resentment thus varies from Nietzschean logic rooted in the psychic vicissitudes of weakness. Though linked by humiliation, the frustrations of weakness (existential or historical) and of aggrieved power are worlds apart.”

Right-wing culture wars are rife with these feelings of envy and resentment, especially around LGBT issues. On style alone, the rhetoric and language the right deploys is shot through with possessiveness, entitlement, and victimization. The right-populist refrain is about how “America’s culture” or “our culture” is being destroyed by liberals and the progressive left, who supposedly have no claim to it, despite being fellow citizens; that the country is being “stolen” out from underneath them and must therefore be “taken back.” These kinds of victimhood and persecution complexes are foundational to resentment.

In The Courage to Be Free (2023), Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis describes a world in which the “modern left has jettisoned principles in favor of power” and laments its control of the “national legacy press” through which it defends the “nation’s failed ruling class.” He focuses in particular on how Disney issued what he calls a “declaration of war” by promising to “inject sexuality into programming for young kids.” This alleged aggression by the Mouse House and other “elites” justified DeSantis in passing sweeping legislation to limit LGBT rights by describing it as a defense or response to left-wing persecution. He even compares his efforts to the revolutionary “shot heard around the world.” Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance has helped add fuel to the fire of the worst anti-LGBT conspiracies by saying, “I'll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children.” In this, Vance echoes a host of his intellectual heroes who insist that liberalism has aggressively supplanted traditional culture and needs to be destroyed.

This coupling of cultural dispossession with a resentment-driven desire for revenge against those who have illicitly launched a “cultural revolution” belies the fact that in many respects, Americans have simply become more liberal. Same-sex marriage and LGBT acceptance, for example, once viciously contested, now comfortably enjoy supermajority support, raising the question of how the culture was “taken” from social conservatives rather than social conservatives standing against a liberalizing culture they want no part of. In some truly shameless moments, right-wing culture warriors will even try to sublimate their resentments around LGBT progress by presenting themselves as standing up for the lower classes against liberal elites.

For example in Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society (2016), the militant post-liberal intellectual R.R. Reno describes America in the midst of a “class war, a war on the weak.” He rails against the “dishonesty widespread in cultural liberalism” and resents no longer being able to call “homosexual acts immoral” on the grounds that it is somehow “failing to respect something essential to gay people.” We want to denounce you as abominations out of respect for you! Where do we see the most brazen signs of this class war and the dishonest culture of liberalism? Not in the plutocratic concentration of power in the hands of the ultra-wealthy, or the failure to implement universal healthcare for all like almost every other developed state. No, according to Reno, the “class war” and the “war on the weak” is above all:

“Epitomized in the campaign for gay marriage. There’s no more potent symbol of a post-conventional society. Redefining the age-old institution of marriage is in one sense a great achievement for freedom, transforming a once authoritative restricted code-one man, one woman-into something utterly manipulable. Marriage has become another plastic, open-ended option for the upper class […] Gay marriage bids fair to be yet another moral luxury for the rich that will be paid for by the poor.”

Here we truly see things come full circle. Reno invokes Christian rhetoric about protecting the poor and the working classes from the rich by denying LGBT persons the right to get married, recasting his resentful prejudices over liberal progress into a moral crusade on behalf of the downtrodden. And these downtrodden apparently don’t need policies that aim to make them less poor, no, what they instead need is a rollback of the Obergefell decision. What would happen to LGBT poor and working-class individuals and families in a post-liberal order is anyone’s guess.

The MAGA movement trying to elevate its anti-LGBT resentments and prejudices into some kind of class-conscious moral virtue is so brazen and absurd as to almost be a form of comedy. But as unintentionally funny as they are, they can also be dangerous if given the power to instantiate themselves. The liberal project, for all its flaws, has done a great deal to create freedom for people by expanding human rights and protecting them by law. The politics of right-wing populist resentment, by contrast, divides the world into an arbitrarily defined “us” versus “them” and tries to take society back to some imagined, ideal past. Will Americans heed the siren song of resentment, or will they say “We’re not going back?”

Published Sep 30, 2024