The Real Snowflakes: A Selection from David Frum’s Trumpocalypse (2020)
“Climate rejectionism has become a central theme of modern conservatism. Either it’s not happening, or it’s not happening because of human action, or there’s nothing to be done about it—or sometimes all three—have become doctrinal positions on the modern Right. Obviously, there are important economic interests at play here. But economics alone cannot explain the kind of personal offense conservatives take to the climate claims. To many, the topic feels like an aggression. To borrow a term they like to mock, it triggers them—and most especially when the topic is raised by younger people. . . .
In the age of Trump, conservatism has functioned less as a body of ideas, more as a defense of a distinctive way of life: the American way as white baby boomers remember it from when they were young. They remember split-level homes on suburban lots, Santa at the mall, and leggy blondes on TV. They do not want to be guilted about drinking from a plastic straw or driving a big car. On the eve of the impeachment vote, Trump’s favorite congressman, Matt Gaetz of Florida, appeared on Fox News with pro-Trump radio host Mark Levin to describe the stakes in the impending impeachment battle. Arrayed against the president, said Gaetz, are those who uphold ‘a worldview where you eat nothing but kale and quinoa, where those of us who cling to our Bibles and our guns and our fried foods and real America are looked down upon.’
It’s not only annoying Swedish teenagers who are looking down. A consensus of know-it-all scientists corroborates the impudent teen. Then, when you express your disgust with the scientists as a bunch of impractical idiots working for globalist billionaires . . . your own children look at you as if you were the idiot. It’s galling.
The Trumpist Right habitually applies the jibe snowflake to disparage the supposedly overtender feelings of modern youth. Yet no group of Americans complains more about microaggressions than the Trump base and Fox News audiences. No issue wounds their ego more than climate. They believe they should be on top, they should write the rules. Instead, they are told that they are ignorant, they are wrong, they are killing the planet. It’s insulting, it’s intolerable. That’s why they love Trump. He doesn’t put up with any of that crap. He shows everyone who’s boss, who’s entitled to be boss—and it’s not a bunch of liberal hippie scientists who probably bicycle to work.”—David Frum, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020)