A Counterculture Without a Culture

By Abe Greenwald

Sometime around the start of the pandemic, it occurred to me that the country might be heading toward a right-wing 1960s. By that, I mean an era in which a youthful, politically motivated, right-coded counterculture would grow ever bigger and more influential until it comes to shape or even dominate most aspects of society. 

Six years later, I no longer see that in the cards. If it were going to happen, it would have happened already. But it’s remarkable how faithfully the right-wing counterculture has followed the path of its 1960s left-wing forbears, even if it fails to leave as lasting a mark. 

To be clear, this wasn’t a hope but a fear. The left-wing counterculture of the 1960s was violent and reckless, and we’re still trying to contain its residual damage. There was no reason to believe that a right-wing version would be any more restrained. The inexorable aim of a counterculture is provocation, which is also a common hallmark of young minds and anyone who loses himself in a collective frenzy. 

Nonetheless, many things pointed in this direction. The left had taken over as the country’s insufferable scolds and prudes. It was the right (including many youths) that took the lead in challenging establishment narratives around Covid. High-school-age kids were not only locked down and isolated for no reason. They were harangued by the woke establishment for being racist and privileged. And the boys were lectured on the toxicity of their sex. At the same time, young right-wing influencers were growing their audiences, and there was a newly defined class of young men, the involuntarily celibate (incels), to be hoovered up. 

These incel gamers moldering away in their parents’ basements “turned on” their screens and   “dropped out” of society every bit as much as the acid-eating hippies had a half-century earlier. And they “tuned in” to an endless array of angry, populist right-wing streamers from their own generation. 

As long as America remains a free country, its youth will look to transgress. And all told, it was now the right that offered the most welcoming avenue for transgression. Right-wing influencers used and promoted language proscribed by the left. The right counselled against trusting adults, revered institutions, and their account of how the world works.  

Just as in the sixties, counterculture gurus arose to cash in and guide their acolytes in the ways of transgression. And, similarly, some of them were significantly older than the kids who looked up to them. Instead of, say, Timothy Leary promoting psychedelics, we have Tucker Carlson and others endorsing anti-Semitism—which seems just as intoxicating and no less destructive to the human mind. And the new gurus have similarly led their flock into maximalist politics. 

In the 1960s, flower-child dropouts became politically active revolutionaries. Hippies became revolutionary Yippies or organized into various radical groups that blamed big corporations for the ills of the world. Over the past half decade, incel gamers were fashioned into groypers, who see Israel and the Jews behind every misfortune. 

But here’s why, after coming this far, the young right radicals will not dominate American culture or even pop culture: There is no unified “culture” to speak of. We have become too fragmented to lurch in any one direction as a whole. While this is something I usually lament, I’m thankful for it this time. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.