What are right wing conservatives so afraid of?

With right wing White Christian nationalism on the rise in America, I went looking for paintings celebrating it and, to my surprise, I found very few. Do they not like art at all?

The most popular painter seems to be Jon McNaughton, one of whose paintings is above. It's obvious what McNaughton's kitsch paintings are saying: it's about enforcement of conservative values. These values. The same thing is occurring elsewhere: in Germany, for example, the AfD is promising a "patriotic culture policy." But, I think the more important question is why do right wing conservatives around the world feel this way? Why are they so miserable? Why do they want to impose their values on everybody else in an authoritarian way? Why do Jewish conservatives behave the same way? What are they all so afraid of?

To some degree these fears are genetic: certain people are simply wired this way. There are plenty of genetic studies confirming this and, while we can prove just about anything with genetics, I find the idea convincing that authoritarian personalities are "wired" to be threat minded, to see the negative in things rather than the positive, and to seek out scapegoats. They do not do empathy, but they do fear and judgment well and they really like censorship. So right wing art, like the McNaughton paintings or Fox TV or online influencers or evangelical Christianity or Zionism, aims to be an enforcer of religious nationalism, to present the "right" way of thinking to prevent backsliding: the flag, the Bible, the military, Whiteness, family values, Israel, etc. Us and Them.

But, Us and Them thing is not just genetic; it's also situational and cyclical. My guess is that until Bush and 9/11, the previous trend was Americana, as in Thomas Kincaid's Morning Pledge (above), which celebrates patriotism through nostalgia for an imaginary (White and religious) past. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shared this painting on social media with the caption "Protect the Homeland." The post was widely condemned, including by the Thomas Kincaid Family Foundation, but I can see why DHS chose it.

Thom Waite in Dazed argued at the time that underlying all this kitsch art is fear of immigrants (xenophobia), and I would add that, if it was once fear of "criminals" during the Bush era, now in the Trump era it's back to fear of "illegal immigrants," especially Muslims and Haitians. America First! But I'd go further: I think it's fear of everything. It's fear of change. It's fear of young people. It's fear of the future. It's Great Replacement Theory.

I hear it all the time in the conservative area where I live. My social acquaintances are older people living in a bubble and they are so terrified and obsessed that they can't stop talking about it. I think it's getting worse. In the past week I've been asked "Are there many Muslim kids at your local school?" and "What do you think of Mamdani and Abdul Al-Sayed?" Both rhetorical questions were asked with smarmy offensive adjectives inserted (which I won't repeat here), so I refused to debate with either person. Next I expect they'll bring up Hasan Piker, who's in the news this week for upsetting right wing Democrats. Here he is:

I hear echoes of Russian and Nazi pogroms in these disturbing conversations. Waite brings up the Nazi exhibition of seized artworks, Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst), which went on tour from 1937 till 1941, to look at what right wingers hated at the time. An example is shown above, Lovis Corinth's Ecce Homo, which is one of hundreds the Nazis hated (and censored), because they weren't naturalistic or patriotic. Have things changed since then? They promoted their own "Aryan" artistic values in a parallel exhibition titled The Great German Art Exhibition (Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung). What did the Nazis like? Adolf Ziegler's triptych of Nazi kitsch, Four Elements (1937), was bought by Hitler, and the second painting A Country Venus was bought by Goebbels. The Nazis didn't object to nudity if it was to celebrate Nazi values - like traditional Aryan masculinity and femininity and the "Germanic spirit" - so it's not content per se.

But, if it's not content that upsets right wingers, what is it? Things that are coded to the people they hate? That's Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Women, Communists, maybe Socialists, LGBTQ+, environmentalists, scientists, vaccines, etc. - isn't it amazing how many people they hate? This happens even when they are from one of those groups themselves. They go from there to pin various "sins" on others (like the horrors of modern art, taxing the rich, Trans in women's sports or bathrooms, etc.). It's tribal thinking and MAGA is a very big tribe, a cult if you will. They know what they like and they know what they hate (when prompted by propaganda on Truth Social or WhatsApp or Facebook) and then they know how to assign people, cultures, religions and sexual identities into the appropriate slots to be hated. Us and Them.

Tragically, the Jewish right wing and PEP (Progressive Except Palestine) also suffer from this moral failure. Consider the example late last year of Anne Frank wearing a keffiyeh, an artwork by Italian artist Constantino Ciervo, and exhibited throughout Europe (it's shown below). Instead of debating whether the artwork is asking us to accept that Gaza is indeed a genocide, right wing Jews and PEP accused the artist of distorting the Holocaust memory and provoking antisemitism. They saw a Muslim keffiyeh and reacted tribally, deliberately missing the point. The same thing is playing out over Hasan Piker's warning that silence about war crimes and genocide is complicity in it. This idea of equivalence (or Tzelem Elokim) apparently is so discomforting that it leaves no room for empathy for Palestinians; it's always all about making Jews the forever victims here, not the Palestinians. Fortunately, most young Jewish Americans I know understand this, even if their elders do not.

So, why are right wingers so afraid? It's not complicated. They fear the loss of their entitlement. They are the defenders of old stale values and they hide behind walls, waiting to be offended rather than speaking out against poverty or inequality or racism or genocide. I think of left wingers as more open to accepting alternative ideas; it's a fundamentally different approach to life and, on balance, much healthier.