Beyond The Lost Generation
We need to try to strike a path forward
Well, it seems the algorithm has assigned all of us a response essay to Jacob Savage’s super-viral piece in Compact Magazine, The Lost Generation, due by the end of the year, with extra points awarded for personal anecdotes about how we’ve related to this whole phenomenon of institutionalized discriminatory practices aimed at white men in the name of social justice.
Unfortunately I managed to mix up the deadline and ended up publishing mine last September.
Certainly I wasn’t the first to bring the subject up (and frankly I was anonymously posting about the phenomenon, where I could get away with it, for years before publishing the essay below), but at this point we can’t deny that the notion that maybe, just maybe when you purposely favor some demographic groups in hiring, promotions, and other opportunities, you inevitably disfavor others, whether your stated ambitions are noble or not, has gone mainstream.
I have to thank Savage for more or less making my piece obsolete for most readers, but if you’re interested in how all of this has been playing out in the world of independent film, and in the context of nonprofit arts institutions more broadly, feel free to take a look.
Today, though, I want to talk a little bit about what comes next, about the framing Savage chose that allowed the subject to finally break through, and about the difficult task that lies ahead of us in moving on from this clusterfuck.
From near the beginning of Savage’s piece:
This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.
Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.
I think that The Lost Generation was successful not only because it was focused, well-written, very thoroughly researched, and simply well-timed, but also because its framing gives intersectional lib types a narrow escape hatch that lets them dodge responsibility for what they’ve done.
That is to say that the Savage piece offers identitarian social justice adherents the opportunity to add young white men to the intersectional mélange, to pivot from “everybody else vs. white men” to “everybody else vs old white men.”
Narrowing down our scapegoats will not solve the fundamental problem, though.
As Coleman Hughes used to regularly point out, woke types are constantly working with identity categories that are ultimately inadequate (and I’d add sometimes even inaccurate on aggregate) proxies for socio-economic class.
From his 2022 piece, Actually, Color-Blindness Isn’t Racist:
What’s more, eliminating race-based policies does not mean eliminating all policies aimed at reducing the gap between the haves and the have-nots. It simply means that such policies should be executed on the basis of class, not race. Not only is class a better proxy for true disadvantage, but class-based policies also avoid the core problem with race-based ones: to discriminate in favor of some races, you must discriminate against others. This discrimination creates an endless cycle of racial grievance and resentment in every direction. Income-based policies—such as progressive taxation, earned-income tax credit, and need-based financial aid—tend to be more popular and less controversial than race-based policies, in part, because they do not penalize anyone for immutable, biological traits.
Of course older white men are more likely to have gotten a good socio-economic deal, but it’s nonetheless true that not all of them did. The aging fortune 500 CEOs are doing far better than the aging cab drivers. This is the sort of common sense that identitarian social justice is remarkably good at ignoring and concealing.
From a certain perspective, maybe we can look at the past decade as a peculiar sort of alliance between privileged older white men and younger, college-educated women and racial minorities.
From the point of view of whose interests were advanced, what took place?
So far as I can tell, a cohort of college-educated women and minorities engaged in something resembling social terrorism - basically a great deal of bullying, scolding, browbeating and rhetorical manipulation framed in moralistic terms - aimed at white men in general. As a result, older white men in positions of authority threw younger, college-educated white men under the bus to save their own skins. Of course they didn’t do it alone, as not everyone in a position of authority is an older white man, but a disproportionate amount of people in these positions are.
Meanwhile, for the most part, American wage workers in less prestigious fields were left in the dust, as usual. The extent to which white men working (or trying to work) in fields outside of media and academia suffered from DEI-based discrimination remains unclear, although at a minimum, this was clearly a problem, to one degree or another, in the corporate world after things went way off the rails in 2020; hopefully someone will do the proper research to get a sense of just how widespread this phenomenon has been. Bloomberg published this piece in 2023, but apparently the piece’s methodology has been called into question (and by The Daily Wire, no less).
With a few prominent cancellations left out of the picture, though, the great awokening really was no skin off the backs of older white men in positions of authority. If anything, the political and cultural divisions it brought to the table only benefitted them (along with basically everyone else who’s sufficiently wealthy, of course).
Divide-and-conquer is one of the oldest power tricks in the book, after all. The significantly privileged are mostly capitalists, and capitalists tend to do very well when almost all of the scenes, milieus, and organizations that might facilitate people getting together to work towards establishing redistributive policies and checks on their power are collapsing under the weight of inter-ethnic and inter-gender struggles, cancel campaigns, and the like.
So the long and short of it is that one can reasonably argue that the primary beneficiaries of the great awokening were younger, college-educated women and minorities on the one hand, and the very wealthy on the other. And older white men are disproportionately represented among the very wealthy.
Maybe the libidinal economy of privileged older white men engaged in a bizarre, embattled alliance of sorts with college-educated women and minorities was laid out here in this ridiculous Megan Thee Stallion ass-shaking video back in 2021, but that’s beyond the purview of this piece so I’m just going to drop this link here and keep it moving.
As Geoff Shullenberger recently pointed out, maybe identitarian social justice adherents had a point when they so regularly suggested that universalist and materialist politics were actually representing the interests of white men:
In the 2010s, it became typical for liberal feminists and racialist radicals alike to impugn universalist and materialist politics as really just representing the interests of white men. Maybe in one way, they were right. In a DEI regime that affords preferential status according to demographic characteristics, it is unsurprising that universalism ends up being held up disproportionately by members of a group lacking any such status.
While I think it’s important to remember that universalist and materialist politics, when deployed effectively (and with proper oversight for that matter; the mostly Somali fraud fiasco currently exploding in Minnesota, which also very much appears to have been fueled by identitarian social justice - clearly the fear of being construed as racist played a role in the whole thing getting as bad as it has gotten - is also beyond the purview of this piece), advance the interests of all socioeconomically disadvantaged people, it’s also true that the more a regime is defined by DEI as we know it, the more such politics come to represent younger white men.
While Elon Musk was amassing two thirds of a trillion dollars and various college-educated women and racial minorities who were willing to play along with the identitarian social justice game were experiencing their own, more modest windfalls, younger, college-educated white men were having doors shut in their faces over and over again, and most everyone else - including most members of the various racial minorities that are still not doing as well as white people on average - was left in the dust by an economic system that continues to further empower and further enrich the hyper-wealthy.
And of course identitarian social justice is exceedingly good at generating the sorts of resentments that right wing authoritarians need to justify their projects. But what’s done is done. These people managed to help launch Trump back into the The Oval Office, again. And Trump is the sort of guy who’s all too happy to give the keys to the castle to the world’s richest men.
Next on the horizon? Most likely the continued rise of Nick Fuentes types; maybe at this point the future belongs to these guys, but if history is anything to go by, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that we could eventually end up with something even worse than the Groypers if we don’t right the ship.
So I don’t think Savage’s piece could have broken through without the key frame that involved blaming older white men who threw younger white men under the bus to cover their asses, but narrowing down our identitarian scapegoat group further and creating a new alliance between everyone except old white men will not solve the underlying problem.
The whole identitarian frame needs to be hurled into the trash-heap of history, inasmuch as it can be.
We need to return to a real egalitarianism defined by universal principles, and we need to actually address the complicated reasons behind why so many people are struggling in the context of the nation with the highest GDP in all of history.
We need to look at both the economic and cultural reasons behind why younger people don’t feel as though they can live full, independent lives, flourish, and form families. We need to look at the way that one man has a net worth of two thirds of a trillion dollars and was given free reign to slash government spending while average life expectancy is decreasing. We need to look at the housing crisis. We need to look at why a very small number of the nation’s most powerful citizens have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of American households. We need to look at why some 900 billionaires are sitting on almost twice as much wealth as the bottom 50% of American households.
So what comes next, then? Let’s hope it’s something better than an endless battle between clueless and incompetent identitarian wokesters and disenfranchised younger men who’ve turned to reanimating old forms of racism and sexism to make sense of their lives.
This entire concept is misguided. One person's wealth has nothing to do with another's. Elon Musk creating new companies did not steal anything from anyone. If there is a problem with broken humanities departments, book publishers and employers of journalists, avoid those industries. Work hard, bank as much money as you can, then start publishing books on your own. It will be brutal, but that is how men such as Elon Musk got rich.
The wealth distribution in the US is irrelevant. We have a series of terrible problems (fascistic zoning laws in NYC, Boston, California,...), and we need to raise taxes and cut spending to balance the Federal budget and pay down all the debt issued to pay for the COVID mass fraud, but people creating businesses and getting rich has no connection to this. NONE.
The problem with resentment at the successful is that it is easy and feels good, but it is a distraction. The key to the good life for the overwhelming number of people is to have rising wages, progressive taxation and limited regulatory constraints. If we could free up housing construction in NYC, Cali, DC, Boston,..., then our economy would boom for a decade at least, and housing prices would come down to earth.
Now, no matter what policies we take, there will never be much room for careers as tenured professors, fiction writers, poets, non-profit executives,..., so using those positions as examples just makes the writer look like a rich, arrogant out-of-touch DB. I finished my schooling in 2006 and got a good job. I did well until some problems after my divorce (too much drinking, brawling, time in prison), which led to a ten year journey through poverty, but now that I am back on my feet, I realize how stupid I was, and in general how badly we have been educated.
No one deserves an acting job, or a professorial job, or a journalist job. Those are gatekeeper roles where people blow the gatekeeper to get a job. the people who fight for those are literal tools. We do not need them nor do we need to care about them. If anything, we should heavily restrict financial aid and lay most of them off so they can do productive work. Southwest Mississippi State University does not need to grand PhD's in theater or English Literature or any other unemployable foolishness. We need to cut off the evil universities that fill young people's heads with foolish thoughts (like the idea that people with PhD's for Podunk universities have a shot at a tenure-track job). Law school enrollment would be another target to savagely cut back. We can promote realistic fields in lesser universities, such as teaching, accountancy, engineering,....
The problem is not ageing white males. It is not woke whatever. The problem is ossified zoning and safety rules that benefit no one but corrupt contractors and real estate developers along with moronic job requirements that require cops and construction managers to have university degrees. Those, along with balanced budgets, should be our goals. Worrying about those who have created new companies that employ people is silly. Their wealth takes nothing from you, and the only people promoting that concept are Chinese and Russian intelligence officers and their useful idiots who parrot their words.
Our best moves forward are to teach young men that careers in the humanities are frivolous, silly desires that should be left to the angry and the ugly while enlightened men go out into the arena and create value for the world. We need future executives and entrepreneurs, not whining losers with PhD's in basket weaving or gender studies. If such fields are that important, then go earn enough money to endow a chair at a university with values you share. For me right now it would be the University of Austin. We can create and support universities that promote healthy, open debate without silly repression to protect rich white girls with psychiatric problems (see the video of the creepy white chick at Yale screaming at some random member of staff that he was ruining her life by not behaving like a fascist, and remember that this is at YALE UNIVERSITY where every graduate goes on to wealth and power).
If some cultural areas in the US are ossified and dying, avoid them and create your own. If you cannot publish literature, try publishing sci-fi / fantasy instead. That area has so much more creativity and and craft than current mainstream US literature. If you cannot get into the movie business, try video games. Again, as movies have become ever more formulaic and boring, focus on video games where creativity thrives. It has become really easy to create basic games, and many graphics engines are so good that a small team or a really committed individual could make a game on the cheap (especially if you have access to university or corporate resources as a personal render farm). With music, and audio in general, anyone can plop in a quality used sound/audio card for under a grand and produce/edit at a professional quality level. Video is getting there, but you do need a serious graphics card and decent CPU (ideally bigger and badder).
Look at you and your friends. How many movies have you gone to recently? I saw Indiana Jones and the Oppenheimer movies. It was years before that when I saw my previous film. Yet, I buy PC games nonstop. Most men are like this. Gaming is where the creativity is, so let the movie studios engage in seppuku via DEI hiring. The same is true with so many other declining industries (such as journalism). If they want to die faster, let them. Focus your energy on building new things and/or making them better. If your country wants to block us from declining fields, let them. We can focus on building new, better paths for future exploration and success.
The only thing we need to do with the older establishment is make them pay enough taxes to balance the federal budget, AND to balance your local city and state budgets. Even with places, if enough of us go to New Orleans, Chicago, Madison, Denver, Boise, Austin,..., then we can avoid the institutionalized rot in NYC, DC, Boston and California. We can buy homes and start families. We can do better than our parents had.