There’s a Simpler Explanation for the Rightward Shift of Young Men

Why are young conservatives so radicalized? Why is there such a stark generation gap, something you hear about any time you talk to any Republican of any prominence, between the basically optimistic assumptions of late-middle-aged conservatives and the black-pilled doomers born after the Reagan era?

There are a lot of stories you can tell here. The young conservatives are mostly men, so you can talk about male struggles in a postindustrial economy or how the polarization of men and women makes sexual frustration an engine of radicalization. Young conservatives are also very online, so you can blame tech oligarchs and their algorithms or just cast the internet writ large as an engine of pessimism. You can blame President Trump, postliberal philosophers, racist podcasters. You can fold young male disillusionment into much bigger stories — the crisis of post-Cold War liberalism, the era of bad economic feels that Covid ushered in, the sense of human obsolescence under digital conditions.

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I am partial to several of these arguments. But sometimes a narrower and more purely material analysis is helpful. For about a decade, under woke and racial-reckoning conditions, certain important American institutions appeared to systematically disfavor younger white men for employment, preferment and advancement. In the process, these institutions forged a cohort that had concrete, economic, material reasons to regard the existing system and its values as a racially motivated conspiracy against their interests.

The rightward shift, the black pill, the extremism, the hard turn against all forms of immigration, the strange appeal of Nick Fuentes — in this reading it’s not primarily about new technology or postliberal ideas or some kind of cultural recoil from woke conformity. It’s about jobs, professional opportunity and feeling like a door has been slammed in your face or closed before you ever reach it.

The material experience of apparent anti-white discrimination is the subject of Jacob Savage’s new essay for Compact magazine, “The Lost Generation,” which I recommend to all readers, especially anyone who believes that the woke era was exclusively defined by vaporous ideological rhetoric and tedious propaganda sessions that had little practical effect. Savage argues that the effects of the diversity, equity and inclusion era were eminently material and practical: Across a wide range of elite professions, from academia to journalism to entertainment, the new system significantly changed who was hired and promoted by seemingly discriminating against younger white men.

The “young” part is crucial because, as Savage emphasizes, the older white men in charge of these institutions mostly kept their jobs. There were occasional coups, but white male leaders in their 40s, 50s or 60s didn’t all hand power to women and minorities. Instead they embraced the moral claims of wokeness and made sure that the employment effects fell on the rising generation instead of on them.

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. This was the watchword of the era, implying that any claim of anti-white discrimination is really just a resentful reaction to a long overdue balancing of the scales. The most important aspect of Savage’s argument is the use of data to suggest that, no, the apparent discrimination was probably real discrimination, yielding hiring patterns aimed at redress rather than just equal treatment.

In an essay on literary culture earlier this year, Savage noted the extraordinary fact that as of that writing, “not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.” His new essay offers many more such data points, less extreme but still remarkable, covering topics such as media internships, tenure-track jobs and Hollywood writing staffs.

And while his argument focuses on the creative class, he points out that “white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other high-status fields,” because the general pattern held everywhere. From medical schools to corporate middle management, white male enrollment and employment fell sharply under woke conditions. If you weren’t an absolute peak talent, it was a bad time to be a young, ambitious, well-educated white guy.

One progressive counterpoint might be that demographic change and the general educational struggles of boys explain some of this shift. I’m sure they do — but not the speed and scale of it.

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Another counterpoint might be that for the entirety of American history, discrimination ran the other way, and if the past 10 years were unfair to some subset of white men, well, revolutions are always a little messy, and success is nobody’s natural birthright.

But even if you set aside the moral problem of collective punishment — is a young white man who wants an academic job in 2020 responsible for how white men behaved in 1960? — and the legal issue of discriminating on the basis of race and sex (quite a lot to set aside!), you are still left with the political problem: This particular attempt at revolution has created a cadre of potential counterrevolutionaries with a clear material grievance against the entire system, especially against its claims to moral superiority on issues related to race.

“Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals,” Savage writes. “Some still are.” I would assume so, because disappointed novelists and unsuccessful screenwriters and would-be academics are not natural Trump constituencies. (Though they may be overrepresented among anonymous right-wing online accounts.)

But the ripples spread. The white guys who don’t get jobs in the culture industry or who lose out in applications to professional schools displace other white men competing in less prestigious, more Republican-coded industries, instilling resentment there as well. The same process happens for young white men in Generation Z as they apply to colleges and universities, alienating them from the system from the start. Even the white men who make out OK feel a sense of running in place that’s specific to their race and sex, and this feeds into resentments about the dating market, too. At the same time, certain schools and jobs and industries — especially tech, especially crypto — become hubs for men displaced from other sectors and thus natural hotbeds of reaction. And everyone ends up a little more radicalized, a little more open to extreme appeals.

As someone who writes a lot against despair on both the left and the right, I found Savage’s account extremely clarifying. There’s a lot of big-picture advice and encouragement a middle-aged columnist can give to young people. Have faith in God again. Put down your phone and talk to a member of the opposite sex; embrace marriage; embrace children. Don’t let the algorithms convince you that your generation has it worse than anyone before, that your enemies are more evil than any prior foe. Take the material opportunities before you, here in the richest nation in the history of the world.

But the cure for the kind of political pessimism that’s specific to young white men doesn’t lie exclusively in their inner life. You might get more young male moderates and Reaganites — more bros with a stake in the liberal order and an inoculation against paranoia and pessimism — through the simple and, in theory, liberal expedient of just not discriminating against them.