America’s Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship on Tuesday by six votes to three, preserving the rule Americans have lived under since the Fourteenth Amendment. But for the Right, the defence of a century-old status quo was treated as the fall of the republic.

Stephen Miller called it one of the worst decisions in the court’s history and warned that the Constitution cannot be read to require “our national self-obliteration”. Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh wrote that the ruling filled him with “rage so deep I can’t describe it” and that he “truly hate[s] the people who have done this to us”. The Texas congressman Chip Roy said the court had failed “the American people, the Constitution, and the rule of law”. A decision that kept everything exactly as it was became, within the hour, an atrocity.

The American Right controls the White House, the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court, yet its loudest voices have never sounded more persecuted. The movement is addicted to outrage, and now that it has won it has nobody left to be outraged at. With no external Left to blame in the way there was throughout the 2010s, grievance turns inward: even a ruling that largely held the line — backed by two Trump-appointed justices in the majority — can be cast as betrayal. The online Left previously slid into a similar posture of performative fragility as Joe Biden’s decline threatened its hold on power. A coalition convinced of its own righteousness treats every setback as evidence of sabotage rather than overreach; the Right appears to be reaching that stage, only at accelerated speed.

This outrage machine used to work because it selected its targets carefully. In 2023, Bud Light’s collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney triggered a boycott that made the brand look out of touch and cost Anheuser-Busch more than a year of sales momentum. Target, meanwhile, experienced a sharp hit to sales and quietly scaled back its Pride merchandising. And last August, similar pressure forced Cracker Barrel to abandon a redesigned logo and restore its old branding within a week, with Donald Trump claiming a victory lap.

Yet this well-oiled machine cannot power down, even after it has won — much as the Left couldn’t stop going further in pursuit of dictating the terms of diversity and inclusion. Last month, with corporate Pride sponsorships already collapsing and Right-wing media loudly declaring victory over the “weird LGBT stuff”, the head of a conservative Washington think tank announced that he had cancelled his HelloFresh subscription because the meal-kit company had posted some Pride Month fibre tips for improved gay sex.

The cultural targets keep shrinking, from a national beer brand to a subscription box selling mediocre microwaveable salmon fillets. The boycott has hardened into reflex rather than strategy: Don Quixote tilting at rainbow windmills, while the same performers of outrage are increasingly embedded in — and in some cases running — the federal government.

Raging at your own Supreme Court over a ruling that changed nothing — on a day that handed Trump many other judicial victories on issues like state bans of trans athletes at publicly-funded schools — is more of the same. There is no preening progressive to point at and no boardroom about to capitulate. Instead, we are left with the spectacle of the people in charge insisting they are the victims. Within hours, the same voices were denouncing opinion writers John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, the latter Trump’s own appointee, as corporate shills who had dissolved the country. This is the crybullying posture the Right spent a decade mocking in campus activists, and it looks just as pathetic coming from the winners.

The Right temporarily gained the upper hand in the culture wars by being funny, or at least by being less insufferable than the folks lecturing everyone about pronouns. Comedy drifted Rightward precisely because the Left had turned into a bunch of glorified jokescolds, forever aggrieved and always certain that some outrage was afoot. The free-agent comedians who made it fun will drift towards whoever is enjoying themselves more, exactly as they once drifted away from a joyless Left. The nags and schoolmarms always lose the room eventually, and the Right’s hold on the culture is slipping fast.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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