(…)

It’s easy to feel contempt for such people. It’s more honest to acknowledge our losses. We may say, ​“They were never really Left” — Tulsi Gabbard’s connection to Hindu nationalism is a prime example — or, ​“Good riddance, we’re better off without them.” But are we?

What they’ve become, yes. But was any movement ever made stronger by subtraction?

Meanwhile, the Right knows the power of addition. For Steve Bannon, his new War Room regular Naomi Wolf is just one more wedge he can use to peel pandemic-aggrieved suburban ​“wellness moms” away from the Democratic Party, just as he’s pulled the ​“white working class” toward Trump.

For every Wolf, for every Taibbi, there are so many everyday people following them rightward. Not selling out but breaking up, sometimes cracking up, giving into knowingness and the elation of ​“seeing through” the con— of Covid, or pronouns, or ​“the Russia hoax” or ​“Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

We, the authors of this article, each count such losses in our own lives, and maybe you do, too: friends you struggle to hold onto despite their growing allegiance to terrifying ideas, and friends you give up on, and friends who have given up on you and the hope you shared together.

Hope, after all, is earnest, and earnest can be embarrassing, especially now as the odds seem to lengthen. But as media critic Jay Rosen puts it, what matters more than odds are stakes. We, the authors of this article — such an earnest phrase — have spent much of the past 20 years documenting the mutations of the Right in the United States and around the world. We’ve taken courage from the fault lines such close examination reveals: that there is no singular Right, but many, so often squalling, like the GOP House conference that just spent a month searching for a speaker.

But in this age of Trump, his presence and his shadow, we’ve witnessed more right-wing factions converging than splitting, putting aside differences and adopting new and ugly dreams. They, of course, do not see the dreams as ugly, but beautiful. Utopian, even, with MAGA as merely prelude to what the intellectuals among them sometimes refer to as ​“sovereignty,” ​“greatness” or ​“the common good”: sweet-sounding phrases that find their purest expression in the image of the gallows erected outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The greater the spectacle, the stronger its gravity. That’s what makes fascism so scary when it genuinely flares. It consumes. It grows.