Radicalization, Served Two Ways

I’ve wondered for a few years now how people get radicalized into a specific set of “societal edge case beliefs,” be that school shootings or bombings or killing your wife vs. getting divorced, etc. I find it fascinating because it means you have to be comfortable completely moving outside of any societal guardrails. How does someone reach that point?

At the same time, what’s interesting recently is two-fold:

1. Everything (in America at least) seems like it has to be ideological.
2. We don’t really “see” each other anymore, or at least people on the opposite ideological side.

Let’s say there are two types of “radicalization.” Trump classifies almost anyone who even contemplated voting for Kamala “the radical left,” so I am not sure his exact definition of a radicalized person on the left is the correct one, but in general you’d probably think of someone talking about defund the police, or reading off a list of 191 genders, or screaming about how everyone deserves their loans forgiven. Maybe you’d throw in something about trans or femcels.

On the right, the radicalization is also easy to define: Rogan bros, Tate bros, guys acting incel-y while watching their “independent media,” red pill, 4Chan, etc.

You can argue with which of these specific archetypes represent “radicalization” vs. “just what young men and young women gravitate towards,” but let’s say those are the bigger buckets.

How and why do people get there?

Here is one theory:

This theory holds these two principles, at 35,000-foot level:

1. People on the right become “radicalized” because they see the way of life they understand changing too quickly. I have also seen this framed as “existing world” vs. “encroaching world.” In this way, radicalization on the right is a response to collapse. One interesting thing to me here is that the easiest population of men to find the ferment of extreme views in — is recently-divorced dads. That’s right after “collapse,” which makes sense.
2. People on the left become radicalized because they almost have too much going for them — not quite “entitlement,” although sometimes that’s the case. They begin to almost feel guilty about abundance, so they want to defend all insofar as they can. I have always thought kinda along these lines, as in, if you’ve never even attended school with a transitioning person but you’re willing to go stand at a rally for four hours for their rights, that’s awesome — but it also means you probably have a life of abundance, because most people can’t easily find four free hours, or their boss would be passive-aggressive at them in the process. In this way, left-side radicalization is about abundance.

So is it as simple as “abundance” vs. “collapse?”

I would say this theory is obviously over-simplified, but the core tenets are correctly in place. One additional thing I like about this theory is that it allows you to discuss the right-leaning side without bringing up Hitler or calling them all horrible racists, which tends to stop the discussion in its tracks.

The distinction is important here in that, most of the “Trump Right” defines it as “HR/Entitlement” (I.e. “lunatic leftists” with their tut-tut-tut you can’t do that here attitude). And most of the currently-talking-online left defines the Trump side as racists, fascists, and Nazis.

That breakdown of left-right is a complete non-starter, because when you’re being called “a fascist” or “entitled and a lunatic,” you generally don’t want to hear the next sentence from a person.

But thinking about it as “abundance” vs. “collapse” could be a little more guiding. I doubt we can still make a “wokester” and a “MAGA” get on the same page, but maybe changing how we discuss stuff is key. Maybe we’re more similar than we realize.

Your take?