The image above is, at first glance, almost amusing. It is a familiar kind of social-media screed, written in all caps, heavy with expletives and indignation, expressing a sense of cultural suffocation and personal grievance. Anyone who spends even a modest amount of time online will have encountered dozens of variations of it. The tone is petulant, the demands are oddly specific, and the outrage appears simultaneously exaggerated and banal.

For readers unfamiliar with Swedish, the text reads as follows:

**NOW DAMN IT I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF THE STUPIDITY…………

I CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS HOW I WANT NO DAMN IDIOT SHOULD BUTT IN.
I EAT GINGERBREAD COOKIES AS MUCH AS I DAMN WELL WANT.
I WANT TO SEE GINGERBREAD MEN IN THE LUCIA PROCESSION.
I WANT TO SEE CHILDREN IN SANTA COSTUMES.
I WANT TO SEE CHILDREN IN CHURCH AT SCHOOL GRADUATIONS.
I WANT TO CELEBRATE MY HOLIDAYS THE WAY I WANT.
I WANT TO HAVE MY TRADITIONS THAT I’VE ALWAYS HAD.

TO HELL WITH MY HERRING AND A SHOT ON MIDSUMMER’S EVE.

AND ONE MORE THING
IT’S CALLED A “NIGGER BALL” SO THAT’S THAT
OH HOW GOOD IT IS**

Stripped of its local references, the structure of the message is immediately recognisable. This is not merely a Swedish phenomenon. Variants of the same rhetoric can be found across the contemporary Western world: in comment sections, in viral posts, in campaign slogans, and increasingly in the language of political actors themselves. What differs are the symbols invoked; what remains constant is the posture.

The roots of this mode of expression arguably lie in the culture-war politics that crystallised in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and which have since diffused outward through global media ecosystems. Since I published Globalism contra Nationalism roughly a decade ago, this tendency has accelerated. The world has continued to slide toward forms of neo-nationalism, hardened identity politics, and a geopolitical climate marked by increasing mistrust and a growing risk of large-scale conflict.

Much ink has been spilled debating whether this development represents a resurgence of fascism, or merely a return to older forms of conservatism. Such debates, while understandable, are of limited analytical value. The kind of “I WANT” discourse exemplified above does not map cleanly onto either tradition. It is something else—less disciplined, less civic, and less intellectually coherent, but no less consequential for that.

At first glance, this form of politics appears disengaged, unserious, even harmless. It presents itself as nothing more than an insistence on personal preference and cultural familiarity. Yet history offers ample reason to be cautious with political cultures that elevate appetite, grievance, and identity while shedding obligation, restraint, and moral universality. Beneath its seemingly innocuous surface, this mode of politics has the potential to drift into far darker territory.

To understand why, it is necessary to examine how contemporary right-wing populism differs—structurally and morally—from both conservatism and twentieth-century fascism. That examination begins below.

Conservatism

Conservatism, in its classical European sense, did not begin as an ideology of anger, nor as a defence of personal preference. It emerged as a philosophy of continuity, shaped most clearly by Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century, and later refined through a long interaction with Christian ethics, inherited institutions, and local customs. At its core lay a simple but demanding insight: societies are fragile achievements, not abstract constructions, and must therefore be treated with care.

Burke’s conservatism was not nostalgic in the shallow sense. It did not idealise the past as a frozen tableau, nor did it deny that change was sometimes necessary. What it insisted upon was that change should be organic, cautious, and respectful of accumulated wisdom. Traditions were not ornaments, nor consumer goods, but living practices handed down across generations. They carried obligations as well as comforts. To inherit a tradition was to become its temporary custodian, charged with passing it on—intact, meaningful, and dignified—to those who would follow.

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, this conservative worldview was closely intertwined with Christian ethics. In Sweden, as elsewhere, Lutheranism shaped a moral culture that emphasised restraint, duty, humility, and social responsibility. The individual was never imagined as standing alone. Family, parish, guild, and nation formed a layered moral ecology in which rights were inseparable from obligations. Even those who rejected religious belief often retained its ethical grammar: the idea that one’s conduct in public reflected one’s character, and that self-control was a civic virtue.

Against this background, it is not difficult to imagine how Edmund Burke would have reacted to the “I WANT” screed. He would not have recognised it as a defence of tradition at all. He would have seen in it a collapse of manners, a confusion of inheritance with entitlement, and a profound misunderstanding of what traditions are for. Rage, vulgarity, and obsessive self-assertion would have signalled not strength, but moral immaturity. For Burke, legitimate traditions did not need to be shouted into existence; they endured precisely because they were embedded in shared practice and mutual recognition.

Nor would the reaction have been very different among ordinary Swedes of earlier generations, regardless of class. A farmer, a factory worker, a schoolteacher, or a civil servant in early twentieth-century Sweden would likely have perceived such a screed as embarrassing rather than empowering. Public tantrums were not political statements; they were signs of poor upbringing. The insistence on personal desire, detached from consideration for others, would have been read as selfishness and petulancy.

Classical conservatism understood traditions as something to be nurtured—through participation, respect, and a willingness to subordinate personal impulse to communal meaning. Traditions survived because people showed up, learned the forms, accepted their limitations, and found dignity within them. The “I WANT” screed inverts this relationship entirely. Traditions are no longer practices one belongs to, but commodities one consumes. They are treated as personal possessions, owned individually rather than held in common, and valued only insofar as they deliver immediate emotional gratification.

In this sense, the screed is less a defence of heritage than a symptom of late consumer culture. It resembles the disappointment of tourists in Norrland who feel cheated when the northern lights fail to appear on schedule, or the bewilderment of visitors to Yellowstone who ask park rangers when the grizzly bears will be holding their parade, or when the geysers are going to be turned on. Nature, in these cases, is mistaken for a theme park; tradition, in the screed, is mistaken for a product.

What emerges is a form of egocentric consumerism applied to culture itself. Customs are stripped of context, obligation, and shared meaning, reduced instead to objects of individual demand. This is not merely alien to conservatism—it is antithetical to it. A conservative tradition grounded in stewardship, restraint, and reverence would find little to recognise, and much to abhor, in a politics that treats inherited culture as something to be owned, consumed, and angrily defended as private property.

In this light, the “I WANT” screed does not represent a continuation of conservative thought, but its negation. It signals not the preservation of tradition, but the hollowing out of tradition under the logic of consumer desire—a logic that conservatism, at its best, existed precisely to resist.

Fascism

Contemporary nationalism in the Western world—whether carried by movements that present themselves as populist outsiders or by parties with clearer roots in neo-fascist traditions—draws much of its emotional energy from the sentiments encapsulated in the “I WANT” screed. This is true even when the ideological genealogy of these movements differs. The affective core is the same: resentment, cultural anxiety, and a sense of personal dispossession framed as political grievance.

If the screed is not conservatism, the question naturally arises: is it fascism?

At first glance, the temptation to answer yes is understandable. Fascism and National Socialism remain the historical reference points for any discussion of militant nationalism, and for good reason. These ideologies produced catastrophic violence, genocidal policies, and an unprecedented collapse of moral restraint. Any serious analysis must begin by condemning them unequivocally.

Yet an honest examination also requires intellectual precision. Early twentieth-century fascism and National Socialism were not merely reactionary tantrums directed at a changing world. They were profoundly modernist movements in their own way. While they rejected Enlightenment liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and universalism, they were forward-looking, revolutionary, and animated by visions of radical transformation. They imagined a future defined by duty, hierarchy, discipline, and collective effort. They demanded sacrifice—not only from designated enemies, but from their own populations. They promised meaning through submission, belonging through obedience, and transcendence through struggle.

This distinction matters.

Fascist politics revolved around the idea of the nation as an organism greater than any individual. The citizen was not a consumer of tradition, but raw material for a national project. Personal desires were to be crushed, sublimated, or redirected toward collective goals. Suffering was not denied; it was glorified. Comfort was not a right; it was a weakness. The language of fascism was not “leave me alone,” but “tell me what must be done.”

Against this background, it is worth asking how the leading figures of twentieth-century fascism and National Socialism would have viewed the “I WANT” screed. The answer is unlikely to flatter contemporary right-wing populists. Their objection would not primarily have been to the word want, but to the word I. The screed’s obsessive focus on personal desire, private gratification, and individual entitlement would have appeared decadent, bourgeois, and contemptible. The author would not have been seen as a defender of the nation, but as a symptom of the very moral decay these movements claimed to oppose.

Where the “I WANT” screed demands that the world stop interfering with personal preference, fascism demanded the annihilation of the private self in service of a higher collective. Where the screed clings to comfort, fascism demanded endurance. Where the screed frames tradition as a personal possession, fascism treated tradition as a weapon to be reforged for a new historical destiny.

In this sense, the “I WANT” posture is not fascism revived, but something more hollow. It lacks the grim seriousness, the tragic ambition, and the perverse moral coherence that characterised fascist ideologies. This does not make it benign. On the contrary, it makes it unstable. Detached from duty, sacrifice, and collective responsibility, the politics of appetite floats freely, ready to be captured, redirected, and weaponised by actors far more disciplined than those who initially voice it.

The danger, then, is not that the “I WANT” screed represents a faithful continuation of fascist thought. It is that it creates a moral vacuum in which far darker projects can later take root. Fascism, for all its horrors, still believed in adulthood. The politics of unrestrained desire does not.

Pre-Politics and the Infantilisation of Public Life

The sentiments expressed in the “I WANT” screed are, at their core, not political. They are pre-political, and in an important sense also pre-adult. They do not articulate interests, propose solutions, or engage with competing claims in a shared civic space. Instead, they operate on a level prior to politics altogether: the level of unmediated desire.

To illustrate this distinction, it is useful to recall a small but telling pedagogical experiment. At a middle school, teachers once decided that fourth-graders should learn about democracy by forming political parties. The result was predictable and revealing. Instead of programs or policies, the children formed entities such as The Ice-Cream Is Good Party and The Girls Smell Poop Party. These “parties” were not designed to govern, negotiate, or persuade in any meaningful sense. They were performative identity statements. Their purpose was not to build coalitions or win elections, but to signal belonging, humour, provocation, or personal taste.

To a troubling extent, contemporary Western identity politics—particularly on the populist right—has adopted a similar mode of expression. Instead of saying this is what our material interests are, and this is how we intend to pursue them politically, the message increasingly becomes this is what I like, because this is who I am. Political speech collapses into personal branding. Identity ceases to be relational and becomes declarative.

This shift cannot be understood without reference to consumerism. In earlier social orders, identity was embedded in networks of obligation: family, profession, community, church, union. These structures were often restrictive and imperfect, but they grounded the individual in a web of mutual expectations and responsibilities. Consumer society, by contrast, has steadily degraded identity into a bundle of preferences. To be someone is to like certain things, dislike others, and signal these affinities through consumption. Meaning is no longer something one builds or inherits; it is something one selects from a shelf.

Under such conditions, it is hardly surprising that identity markers begin to function like cargo cults. When meaning is scarce, symbols become sacred. When life feels hollow, rituals are clung to with desperate intensity. The removal, alteration, or even questioning of such markers is no longer experienced as a cultural evolution, but as a personal assault. The stakes feel existential, because nothing deeper has been allowed to take their place.

What follows is a broader infantilisation of politics. The citizen is recast as a consumer, and politics as a service industry tasked not only with delivering material outcomes, but with maintaining certain emotional states. People come to expect not merely protection of rights, but protection from discomfort. When this expectation is frustrated, the response is not organised opposition or political engagement, but petulant and impotent rage—rage that cannot be satisfied by compromise or policy, and which therefore seeks its outlet in cruelty toward groups that do not share the same preferences.

There is also a demographic dimension to this phenomenon that is rarely acknowledged. Much of this discourse appears among people whose basic material needs are already met. They live comparatively comfortable lives, often as retirees or semi-retirees, buffered from economic precarity and insulated from the harsher consequences of political decisions. Yet comfort has not brought contentment. Instead, it has produced boredom, alienation, and a gnawing sense of meaninglessness. In the absence of purpose, anxiety metastasises. The result is not despair, but paranoia: a fixation on symbolic slights, imagined losses, and trivial changes framed as civilisational threats—such as the fear that “Merry Christmas” might be replaced by “Happy Holidays”.

The most serious problem, however, is not the existence of such sentiments, but their social acceptance. What was once recognised as childish petulance is increasingly legitimised as political expression. Worse still, it has become an effective tactic for garnering votes. By amplifying grievance, flattering resentment, and validating emotional impulsivity, political actors are rewarded electorally—while substantive issues are left untouched.

In Sweden, this has had concrete consequences. While public debate is consumed by symbolic culture-war skirmishes, successive governments have allowed foreign mining, IT, and energy companies to extract enormous value from national resources, often at the expense of local communities and long-term sovereignty. The spectacle of identity outrage serves as a smokescreen, diverting attention from decisions that materially shape the future of the country.

The “I WANT” screed, then, is not a coherent ideology. It is a symptom: of consumerism hollowing out identity, of comfort eroding civic adulthood, and of a political culture that has forgotten how to translate private feeling into public responsibility. Left unchecked, this pre-political rage does not remain harmless. In a world of finite resources and mounting crises, it becomes fertile ground for far more destructive forces.

Metastasis

Once, while working as a substitute teacher in a ninth-grade mathematics class, I was tasked with explaining statistics and percentages. Toward the end of the lesson, I introduced a simple applied exercise. I told the students that humanity currently consumes resources at a rate equivalent to roughly 1.7 Earths per year—that we are running an ecological deficit, drawing down stocks that cannot be replenished. I then asked a straightforward question: how should such a problem be addressed?

I expected suggestions along familiar lines. Reduced extraction. Technological innovation. Changes in consumption patterns. Perhaps even population control—an intellectually lazy answer, but one that at least acknowledged the existence of limits. Instead, after a moment of hesitation, a loud minority of boys offered a different solution altogether. The populations of India, China, and Africa, they said, should simply be wiped out. Consumption would plummet, and they could continue to live as they were accustomed to.

The remark was not made with theatrical cruelty. It was delivered casually, almost pragmatically, as if proposing the removal of an inconvenience. And in that casualness lay its significance. This, in distilled form, represents the end point of “I WANT” politics.

When ecological conditions deteriorate and abstract debates are replaced by concrete constraints, societies are forced to choose. Such moments demand civic responsibility, social obligation, and a willingness to accept sacrifice in the name of shared survival. What we increasingly lack, however, is precisely that moral infrastructure. Instead, we find populations—particularly in the affluent West—who have been sheltered from material scarcity for generations, and who react to even minor disruptions of comfort with disproportionate outrage.

This is not the politics of citizenship. It is not even the politics of interest. It is anti-politics: the howl of individuals who have been trained to understand themselves primarily as consumers, and who experience any limit as a personal affront. These are not impoverished masses fighting for survival, but what might accurately be described as decadent labour aristocrats—people whose basic needs are met, whose lives are saturated with consumption, and whose primary emotional register is boredom mixed with anxiety.

The danger lies not in their anger, but in its directionlessness. When meaning has been reduced to lifestyle, and identity to status markers, then preserving those markers becomes an absolute priority. The question is no longer what must we do together, but what must be destroyed so that I may continue as before. Under such conditions, cruelty ceases to be a moral transgression and becomes a technical solution.

This is why the “I WANT” politics cannot be understood as conservative or fascist. They are reactionary in a far more literal sense: reactive, impulsive, and unmediated by ethical reflection. They resemble, more than anything else, the sentiments of depraved eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landed aristocracies, who believed themselves entitled to the fruits of privilege while rejecting the social obligations that once justified it. When confronted with famine, revolt, or ecological ruin, such elites did not ask how to reform the system, but how to insulate themselves from its consequences.

Western consumerism has produced a similarly disassociated individual. A person taught that the meaning of life lies in the accumulation of experiences and goods, and that society exists to provide them. As ecological reality begins to unravel—through climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion—this worldview collides violently with the limits of the planet. The result is not collective adaptation, but a retreat into paranoia, resentment, and increasingly brutal fantasies of exclusion.

The metastasis of “I WANT” politics is therefore not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of a culture that has stripped identity of obligation and politics of adulthood. In a finite world, such a culture does not merely fail to solve problems. It begins to search for victims.