We reasoned, back of the envelope, that the culture had taken a broadly reactionary turn, leaving MAGA closer to the median than the broad left. The implications were pretty frightening: Young people appeared to be gravitating toward reactionary ideas. Society would become angrier, meaner, more violent over time. Songs and movies would no longer assume decency and tolerance as default values. Several decades ago, “the culture” could depict men backhanding their hysterical wives, or Mickey Rooney portraying a bucktoothed Asian malcontent on the silver screen, and it made few waves, because that was all culturally normal enough not to cause widespread offense. Maybe we were going back to a future like that, or worse.