Liberal pundits have spent years hypothesizing about the various ways in which precarity and resurgent xenophobia have fueled today’s anti-liberal backlash. However, one theory that tends to receive less scrutiny is the idea that people are pushing back against liberalism because liberalism has left them feeling shitty about their lives.

Liberalism is best understood as an exercise in self-criticism. It is about questioning and sometimes rejecting biases that are intrinsic to personhood, no matter how deeply ingrained. But for those of us who fail to engage with this exercise, it is surely inevitable that we will be left feeling deeply alienated by a society that has embraced it.

It is a well-worn bromide, though one worth reiterating, that to hold conservative views does not automatically connote evil or malice. A right-wing person can be a borderline sociopath with a hard-on for scapegoating others to exonerate their own mediocrity. But it can also be someone who, whether through caution, paranoia, or parochialism, feels suspicious of change and resistant to progress. For a liberal to feel empathy for such a position is not the great cognitive leap that we often like to pretend.

Think of some small piety that drives you nuts. Perhaps it’s evangelical veganism, or the languid exhortations of lifestyle gurus exemplified by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, with its extortionate quackery and homespun recipes for a life well-lived. Now extrapolate from there and imagine that this small piety has become intrinsic to liberal dogma, and that failure to abide invites condemnation from the institutions and figures who shape our public discourse. Imagine that you cannot sit down for a meal without having a vegan slapping your hand with a stem of broccoli every time you reach for the steak, that ingesting “sex bark” or inserting yoni eggs into your vagina each morning has become a kind of social imperative.

Now imagine that this drumbeat of censure pervades every aspect of your life, from the food you eat to the church you pray in to the carbon dioxide–pumping truck you drive. You might get used to it after a while, but you’d be forgiven for feeling confounded by the dogmatism of it all. And under the right political stimuli and exposure to the right dog whistles, chances are you’d welcome the advent of a tub-thumping populist who promised to turn the clock back.

This isn’t to trivialize right-wing bigotry or to glibly compare mandatory veganism with restricting someone’s rights based on their sexuality or skin color. Rather, it is to emphasize the way conservative impulses can flourish in an atmosphere of cultural prescriptiveness. As much as economic insecurity and outright bigotry, anti-liberalism is born of an urge to push back against being told what to do.

If we, as mouthpieces for liberalism, expend all our energy anathematizing the things that conservatives hold dear — if we criminalize their culture, denounce their history, vilify their heroes, and stigmatize their lifestyle — how exactly do we expect the conservative mindset to respond?