What I’ve come to realize is that the ideology that’s truly needed among young people and young men these days is an agenda of conformity. Conformity gets a bad rap in an age when “everyone wants to be the golden crocodile,” as my father used to say, but conformity doesn’t have to mean sacrificing your specialness and merging into some great grey blob of sameness. A dignified conformity simply means respecting and upholding what your society is all about, its traditions, history, hierarchies, and mores, and not waging active war against them. In other words, pretty much the complete opposite agenda of both the far left and alt-right.

What both extremes share is a common loathing of America, and American civilization. We know how anti-Americanism manifests on the far left, but the alt-right has never been particularly patriotic, either. They have created an alternate, pseudo-patriotism of their own based on worshiping themselves, and their dogmas, all of which frame the United States of America, by design, as a problem to be solved. They rally behind symbols of America’s foreign enemies, like the German National Socialist Party or Putin’s Russia, and American traitors like the Confederate States of America. Their foreign-policy views are often explicitly Chomskyite, and frame all of the world’s violence and chaos — up to and including 9/11 — as America’s conscious doing.