There is one sentiment, I think, that links the people who were once part of the center-right — the anti-communist movement in Poland or Reaganism or Thatcherism — and who began to change in a different direction over the past decade or so: disappointment.
These are very often people who are disappointed, and they are almost always disappointed with their society. Whether it’s the superficiality of modern democracy, the demographic change that they don’t want or like, the decline in morals and values that they see all around them, or, in the case of Britain, England’s loss of its voice in the world. It’s a feeling of loss or disappointment, and sometimes it’s quite an extreme form of disappointment — a kind of despair. “My society has ended.”
I think anybody who has that view of the contemporary world — that it’s over, it’s finished, my civilization is dead and gone, my society is decayed — leads you almost inevitably into a kind of radicalism. If you have that feeling that it’s over, then why wouldn’t you try to smash everything?
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