The Right’s con men promise liberation for those who feel themselves superior but are held back by the leveling institutions of mass mediocrity. Their rhetoric intoxicatingly combines feelings of superiority with a sense of dispossessed victimization.

The thing is, these seeming tensions are generative and add to the appeal of right-wing ideology precisely because they don’t fully make sense. They offer their constituents the chance to both feel like persecuted victims and masters-in-waiting — to individually applaud themselves for being self-made visionaries and collectively part of a genetic or civilizational elite.