One thing that the rise of social media (particularly Twitter) did is to suddenly put Americans in direct contact with people from all over the world, without Americans realizing this. A lot of the radicalization of Americans over the last decade came from overseas.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking the same thing.
Everybody around the world speaks English these days and everybody’s on the WWW, so there is more influence on young Americans from Continental European ideologies than when I was a kid. For example, I never heard of Carl Schmitt until I was 40, and I still don’t get why he’s now considered important (“Friend or Foe?” Wow, what a novel insight!)
Continentals tend to be more ideological extremists than Brits.
Let’s look at a sample of the ideological origins of three on the right:
Bronze Age Pervert is very Continental (e.g., Nietzsche as a huge influence), Mencius Moldbug is an Anglo-American contrarian rightist (Carlyle), and I’m from the old Anglo-American empiricist mainstream (Franklin, Darwin, and Galton) That I’m considered some kind of scary extremist is hilarious testimony to the intellectual decline of the Anglosphere.
So, I wouldn’t say that the non-English language influence is dominant, but it’s definitely grown. For example, when I was an adolescent a half century ago, the most prestigious conservative ideological summary was Russell Kirk’s extremely Anglophone book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Nowadays, a well-read conservative would include lots of Continentals like de Maistre.
But not me. I was never terribly ideological, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten less and less interested in ideology.
