The Young Man's Burden

A response to the response to that viral Compact piece on DEI and young men.

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If you ever needed an argument to undermine or repudiate the existence of a meritocracy, you could do a lot worse than Bari Weiss. She represents the kind of mediocre grifter who has made a lot of money in political media, but one of the costs of this kind of gambit is that you can never move on from anything. The audiences who subsist on this gristle want only increasingly rough stuff, and their brand loyalty lies with that demand more than to any individual provider. Bari Weiss figured this out when she bailed from the New York Times and founded The Free Press. These rubes are an easy market to serve, but an impossible one to cater to in a remotely dignified manner. It’s like watching a child actor wither into bleak middle age, still bashing away at the cheesy material that made them famous, except that cheesy material all militates into sadistic, sniveling gripes that make it impossible for anyone to speak or exist in public. There’s a living to be made doing this, but it seems like a living hell. But the cost to one’s soul aside, the hackery and cowardice inherent to much of contemporary political analysis demands from those who do it to keep honking away on their specific instrument of petty grievance. This group of clammy self-interested hucksters understands their job as being louder than everyone else, and once they’re gathered onto a singular stage, it would be impossible for them to create a symphony. They’re there to make constant, obliterating noise.

America loves its problems too much, or has mistaken them for virtues, to ever resolve or let alone solve its systemic rot. In the absence of a more representative politics, or maybe as a grim satire of it, civic engagement collapses into various ways to perform outrage. None of this is especially dignified, and all of it is untenable and unworkable. So that leaves us with Jacob Savage’s viral/controversial article published in Compact Magazine, which explores how DEI hiring practices have made it more difficult for white men to break into competitive and prestigious fields like writing, film, music, media, academia, etc. This clearly resonated with a broader audience since many men are downwardly mobile, if not experiencing increasing rates of loneliness, suicidality, addiction. Shit, Harper’s Magazine just published a piece on gooners, the literary equivalent of watching Walter Cronkite with a broccoli cut signing off with “Dead ass, and goodnight.” Now, I’m a jaded Bernie Bro, so I don’t care about comparing oppression-suffering across demographics because there are plenty of underserved and marginalized groups who have valid grievances against American society, and effective progressive politics build mass movements by convincing various people who are unalike that they have a shared common interest, that society can do best for them when we do best for others.

The more constructive debate here would ask:

Assuming that it’s becoming more difficult for white men to break into these fields, do you think this is a good thing?

If there are a limited number of jobs in these highly competitive fields, has this not been the goal—if not the intended outcome—of the decade-plus efforts of corporate diversity efforts?

For all the metastasis and malaise of the last decade, it has been dispiriting to see left-of-center writers and commentators reflexively default to the same moral hygiene theater and oafish provocation that have proven to be viscerally off-putting, if not electorally damaging. It’s a totalizing epistemic closure, the de facto assumption that any criticism of the most narrow interpretation of left-liberal orthodoxy is definitionally an expression of support for MAGA. Many left-ish thought leaders (many of them whose work I respect) don’t seem interested in substantively engaging with the piece beyond pithy ad hominems. “Let me suggest that the impulse that leads someone to run to Compact Magazine to complain about DEI—‘they took my job!’—probably does more to explain professional failure than DEI,” Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times tweets. Jessica McKenzie quips, “Ugh my guy this should have been a conversation (or several) with a therapist.” “Again, anti-wokeness is a backlash to integration of white-collar work,” writes the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. “Only white men are allowed to have prestigious jobs otherwise it’s unfair.” Author Kashana Cauley responds, “Amazing how many articles are just ‘I’m a white guy who didn’t get the promotion I wanted and the only answer to this problem that concerns every single one of us is to re-segregate the workplace.” It seems a bit counterproductive for Team Blue to try and pull young men away from their fatalistic slide into rampaging reactionary nihilism if we refuse to talk about their problems.

On one level, the Blue punditocracy is incapable of quitting the snarky clapbacks that dominated 2010s Twitter discourse, but they are ultimately hostages to the cynical power projections of the Democratic Party. And the bleaker truth, here, is that their squawking is purely ornamental. Their jobs have become less concerned with influencing political outcomes and more about convincing the unwashed masses and themselves of why they deserve their media perches and their checkmarks, that their commentary provides some tangible value-add. Their views are not determined by reasonable dialogue; they’re determined by social hierarchy and their existential need to maintain their aristocratic sinecures. This is not something that can be argued against. Their professional fortunes are inextricably linked to the fate of the Democratic Party, and their interests are fused at their class project of furthering oligarchy, but with a rainbow flag and a smiley face. Their role is to be couriers, to lash themselves to the mast—and as they go down with the ship, they’re left to reassure whoever that they are not sellout dullards, but reasonable truth-tellers with cultivated expertise. Of course, this is all carefully constructed towers of bullshit to distract us from how their faux-intersectional handwringing has done nothing but deliver increasingly slavering and demented Republicans and more bloodless Democrats, but that’s besides the point. America is a business, fam, and all this blue gristle is to ingratiate these talking heads to their irredeemably lib-brained audiences, the core NYT and Atlantic subscribers who are so thoroughly conditioned on weaponized identity politics they’ll keep returning to the trough.

Last week, the New York Times ran a counterpunch column titled “There’s a Simpler Explanation for the Rightward Shift of Young Men,” and it references the Compact piece that more substantively examines the same phenomenon. With world-class resources at their disposal and all the ink spilled over grasping explanations about the appeal of Trump/The New Right/Nick Fuentes, our Paper of Record remains ideologically incapable of asking the obvious questions about what motivates young, specifically white, men. All they could do was task their token staff conservative to react to the piece, which speaks volumes about how disconnected our media class is from everyday Americans. It is baffling how the same outlets and institutions that pushed identity politics for the last decade can’t see the blunt and obvious dynamic they unleashed onto American public life: They put identity on the table. If the economy were booming and there were plenty of well-paying jobs and homes to go around, this would be much less of an issue. But, in the wake of once-in-a-generation financial crashes in 2008 and 2020, the general malaise has left both an indelible material and spiritual impact on young men, who, like everyone else, are alienated and floundering and searching for meaning, and their path to having a Real Adult Life is becoming more vaporous.

In his response in People’s Policy Project, Matt Bruenig sifted through the census data and concluded that Savage’s assessment was fairly dubious, but found his material analysis more compelling:

Ironically, I think Savage’s piece, especially its viral success, ends up unintentionally providing some support for the non-material theories of young male political behavior that are focused on the internet, podcasts, and memes. What Savage and those sharing the piece appear to be responding to is primarily the mental impression that was caused by DEI messaging, which may have had an impact well beyond its actual material impact. The institutions Savage discusses in his piece employ approximately 0% of the US population, but their transformations plus DEI rhetoric plus an internet community aimed at negatively messaging about it all can generate the impression of something much bigger going on.

The result of all of this is that some people end up doubting the qualifications and merit of minorities that are in high-status positions (as Clarence Thomas argues) and attributing white male failure to snag a high-status position to unfair discrimination, which can then also spill over into political beliefs and behavior. But this is not because the absolute number of people actually affected by any of this is all that large.

If this analysis is correct, then the situation is actually much more bleak than Savage’s argument would suggest. If diversification efforts generated a huge change, then the backlash to it might be acceptable, something worth risking and weathering if it comes. Instead, what appears to have happened is a lot of empty talk, no real significant change, and backlash that is causing real harm. This is the worst of all possible worlds.

As a fellow white dude, relatively speaking, our struggles are rightfully not at the apex of political sympathy. So it makes a deranged, delusional sort of sense that if politics are not to have a material base that points to capitalism as the cause of our problems, it will inevitably need a demographic scapegoat. So white men—for reasons both valid and misplaced—have become the stand-in for patriarchy and oppression; while many of us are also the victims of these same forces, we’re also the ones who, more than any other group of people, have gotten us into this position. In absence of a more ennobling or aspirational platform, the Democrats have become the left-coded half of the duelling sadism of American politics. This is a conception of power that is wholly negative, unconcerned with actual values and outcomes but hyperfixated on punishing the perceived enemy.

Contemporary liberalism’s brand pitch is now essentially, “Capitalism is good because it gives us Pride Month sponsored by Bank of America.” Their focus became less about using Affirmative Action and DEI as stopgap measures until other vectors of social mobility—access to education and healthcare, providing housing to previously redlined and underserved communities—became more equitable across racial and gender lines. This kind of redistributive agenda would disproportionately help the marginalized communities that libs claim to champion. And it would also, ideally, render DEI policies superfluous as the opportunity for a comfortable, middle-class life would widen across race, gender, sexuality, and religion. Instead, DEI seems to be motivated by a sense of guilt, to change the demographic makeup of the neoliberal hierarchy, to diversify who has a seat at the table and who’s fighting for scraps. The well-heeled social justice-types want a world that functions as if it’s governed by an HR department, because that world wouldn’t put their socio-economic status into question.

If the general vibe of left-liberal discourse is to argue that appealing to young men is inherently gauche or verboten, then it guarantees that this demographic will hear only from people who are willing to talk to them. And that void has been filled with charlatans, frauds, and risible freaks. Nick Fuentes and Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate are reprehensible goobers, a metonym for shitty conservative grievance politics. But they are merely the ugly inverse of a political game that normalized and instrumentalized the idea that self-worth and epistemology stem entirely from identity. After a decade of socially acceptable attacks, gloating, and scapegoating directed at young men, they flocked to these manosphere chuds in droves.

These midwit hatemongers provide answers to Why Your Life Sucks that are stupid at best and malevolent at worst. They harness legitimate disillusionment with American institutions and channel it towards mysticism, voodoo, conspiracy, and casual bigotry. It’s easy to spell out the destiny of young Americans in a handful of graphs about declining union participation, declining labor share of income, rising costs for tuition and healthcare and housing. It doesn’t require a magical cabal of Cultural Marxist professors or blue-haired feminists or CRT or gender ideology or the Great Replacement or Jewish space lasers or George Soros sneaking Al-Qaeda terrorists and El Salvadorian migrants in shipping containers across the Rio Grande. The foundational moment politically for Millennials was a massive economic collapse caused by the fecklessness, greed, and criminality of Wall Street, which was subsequently rewarded with a full recapitalization from public coffers, and the complete failure to offer any relief to the working stiffs who were the most harmed and least to blame for what happened. Similarly, for Gen Z, it was the COVID pandemic that robbed them of their formative years, as they observed a deeply bizarre federal response that was chaotic, disjointed, grudging, insufficient, and multiply overwhelmed in response to vulnerable people and small businesses, and queasily servile to Big Business. Young Americans, across all walks of life, are drifting without a sense of a future. Even if they can find dignified employment, everyone is acutely aware of the systemic breakdown happening around us.

The savage irony of the New Right, however, is that its movement is predicated on a sham, a refusal to acknowledge the shortcomings and culpabilities of its ideological predecessors. DEI is just neoliberal logic lacquered in a progressive sheen. It is maximally left-coded in rhetoric and performance, but substantively conservative in practice. Socialist writers like Adolph Reed, Freddie deBoer, and Jennifer Pan have all argued that the function of DEI is to neuter any serious, broad-based challenge to the prevailing economic and political order. Acknowledging that class and identity have been and remain inextricably tied, and using this intersectional reality to marshal a renewed civic identity toward a Common Good would involve a reckoning that social problems require social solutions. Instead, we are left with the fantasy that the forces of bigotry and discrimination can be conquered solely by personal moral hygiene and thrusting the onus of public policy onto businesses and the free market. We are living in the hyper-capitalist, hyper-individual world that Republicans from Reagan onward have insisted upon us and the Democrats have acquiesced to. And it sucks.

Even in this oafishly aestheticized political present, we are in conflict with the limitations of the neoliberal horizon. What Fuentes and the New Right offer is a farce, a gangrenous outgrowth of the implicit fascism that was previously allowed to remain latent in Republican political appeals. Unfortunately, the “pragmatic” libs who still wed themselves to the status quo are just as detached and delusional.

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