The growth of malignant and exclusionary social movements

The US and many other societies are cycling into situations of toxic polarization today; discussion, let alone consensus, often appears impossible and the advantage goes to exclusionary social movements built on malignant rather than goodwill impulses.

As Heritage Foundation president Keith Roberts stated in July 2024, “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

As recently as a decade ago, violent social movements were gaining ground primarily in countries and regions that were struggling economically as they integrated themselves into the neoliberal global economy: examples include Russia, Hungary, and other states of the former Eastern Bloc, Turkey, India, and Greece.

More recently, however, toxic polarization has also threatened to engulf countries at the core of the liberal democratic political grouping, including France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US.

In every case, the malignant social movement aims to overthrow a political order built—at least notionally—on principles of inclusion and goodwill, which the movement blames for its followers’ loss of economic and political status within their societies.

What’s most striking, even counterintuitive, about this takeover is its seeming inexorability, due to the failure of parties of the center and left to offer coherent alternatives—and the resulting landscape in which extreme positions are steadily normalized.

The result is a crisis of democracy, stunting people’s faith in collective self-government owing to its inability to help address practical problems such as climate change, economic inequality and mass migration. To reverse this trend, we must first understand the conditions that brought