Political Pendulum: The Rise of the Right

By Amy Lonergan

I’ve noticed a shift recently.

For years, it has felt as though the majority of the Western world has been living in a PC bubble, with the zeitgeist of the last decade being that of progression and acceptance. Same-sex marriage was legalised, The Equality Act was established, and across the pond, the MeToo movement sparked a global conversation surrounding sexual abuse.

It’s now 2025, and I can’t help but grow weary of the recent events of this year and the changing content being woven into my algorithm. What prompted this article was two separate pieces of media. Firstly, a TikTok of a tradwife advising her audience of 90k+, that despite what modern society tries to tell you, women shouldn’t be on an equal playing field to men and should stop trying to be. These tradfluencers’ ability to keep a spotless kitchen and raise perfect children — all with a full-beat of makeup — make the idea of placing oneself in a traditionally feminine, subservient role all the more appealing to the young, impressionable girls watching.

Other, more mentally draining corners of the internet (the right, white, male podcasters) have also been consistently rising in prominence. Consistently propelling their extreme conservative ideologies, figures like Andrew Tate — a self-proclaimed and prolific misogynist — and Nick Fuentes — a brazen neo-Nazi — have both had their platforms regranted by X CEO, Elon Musk. So we can thank him for more banger tweets like, “Your body, my choice“. Online discourse which was once banished to the far-right depths of 4chan is seemingly becoming acceptable in mainstream ‘liberal’ places. The second alarming, though absolutely absurd, piece of media was Conor McGregor announcing his plan to run for presidency in Ireland, just months after being found guilty of sexual assault in civil court. Worryingly, 7% of the public have said they would vote for him.

On the topic of X (it pains me to call it anything other than Twitter) — an app I have been innocently using since 2016 to track Azealia Bank’s frequent public beefs — is now be a cesspool of white supremacists, incels and QAnon conspiracy theorists. Research conducted last year has shown that this type of content is actually receiving a boost on X. My For You Page, once a happy place for me to mindlessly scroll, has been infiltrated with chronically-online nonsense — “Greta Thunberg supports ISIS” comes to mind.  Stumbling across this type of content every few posts is worth it for the sake of unfettered free speech, right? That is unless what you want to say hurts Elon Musk’s feelings. Musk regularly gets himself into hot water by suspending and removing verification badges of those who have been critical of him or his political stances — actions which align perfectly with Trump’s egotistical, thin-skinned life philosophy. No wonder he’s kept the bootlicking billionaire around for so long.

This shift away from PC culture has not remained solely online. Six European countries are currently under the control of far-right parties, with extremist political parties like Brothers of Italy regaining power. The president of the United States, a right-wing ‘populist’, has had more support than his first go-around in 2016.

So why does it feel like, as a society, we are regressing? Why are certain facsist ideologies coming back into favour with the masses?

It would be difficult to make the argument that humankind learns from our mistakes. Often, when we find ourselves in situations of turmoil, we look to the past — nostalgic for a time when things were better. This nostalgia, more often than not, presents us with an unrealistic, romanticised version of what things were like. Those who yearn for a post-World War 2 ‘American Dream’ renaissance, neglect the fact that there was a slim (white, educated) section of the population for whom this dream was actually feasible. With this idealised time in mind, one might jump to the spurious correlation that since moving away from these conservative values, we have actually made ourselves worse off. By blaming ‘woke’, liberal movements for instigating these global crises, anger and blame is placed laterally, instead of straight to those at the top of the economic food chain. Billionaires directly benefit from conservatism — and not only in the fiscal sense. By clinging to the success of mid-20th century economics, the upper echelon put forth conservative values and late-stage capitalism as the solution, not the problem.

Continous economic downturn and environmental disasters have left us with a ’90s-level nihilism. People are scared, and like we’ve always done — we look to the past and repeat. We gravitate towards the political party that hasn’t been at the helm during recent failures, hoping they’ll restore stability. In an attempt to reclaim the ‘good old days’ we revert our values and beliefs, clinging to the idea of a better time.

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” [1]

In our desperation for stability, we risk mistaking conservatism for comfort and backtracking the societal amelioration made possible by those who came before us. This conservative shift has been creeping up for a couple of years, slowly edging it’s way into mainstream media, and what worries me is that, by the time we recognise how drastically things have changed, it may be too late.

References:

[1] Margaret Atwood. (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. Harper Collins.