I’m currently reading Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America, by Scott Greer. I’m really enjoying it, and I’ve learned a lot from just the first few chapters. I was born in 2000, and I was an apolitical “normie” when I began college in 2019. Universities have (deservedly) developed the reputation for “radicalizing” young people, but I am among the few curious cases of students who were pushed to the right. I sought out alternative views after sitting through alienating and nonsensical spiels from progressive bureaucrats during freshman orientation, and as I spent more time with right-leaning student organizations, I began to think of myself as conservative. Quite frankly, I just hadn’t heard any conservative arguments before college.

Greer’s book is a handy guide to how Trump reshaped the Republican Party and to what policy and cultural grievances made MAGA attractive to voters. It can be difficult to recognize political and cultural shifts as you’re living through them, and for young people whose adulthood has been limited to Trump-dominated politics, it is tempting to project the current state of affairs into the past. Whitepill has helped me understand how significantly the right has hardened on immigration, alongside other policy areas, in a relatively short time. But the book has also reminded me that the Democratic Party has morphed into something unrecognizable: I had completely forgotten the facts that California voted to reject same-sex marriage in 2008, and that Barack Obama opposed same-sex marriage as a presidential candidate that same year. I have difficulty believing, despite knowing it is true, that American culture evolved within my own lifetime from socially permitting public support for traditional marriage to demonizing individuals as “bigots” for thinking drag queens shouldn’t perform in front of kindergarteners. Although such a fact might elicit feelings of anger or frustration, I will treat it instead as cause for hope, or a reason to swallow the “white pill”: There is no inviolable natural law that requires that all cultural changes be in a progressive direction, and it is possible that the right can restore the norms that seem so distant now. 

Whitepill is something like a time capsule filled with anecdotes that might have otherwise been easily forgotten. It prompts us to recognize and appreciate the seismic disruptions in American culture over the past few decades that led to an entirely new sociopolitical order. The book is particularly valuable for those of us who only began paying attention to politics as a result of the woke tyranny in 2020.