On "our young men"

Demographic trends can be both troubling and a moral panic

I’ve tuned out from the news and the podcasts since the new year, turning off notifications, ending NYT subscription, etc. I’m not proud of this, btw, but it is needful for a number of reasons. Anyway, prior to the election and always in the shadow of the rise of MAGA there had been—and I assume continues to be—a lot of talk about the putatively lost generation of “young men” in the U.S.

I’m not going to sit here and say that there aren’t problems with some U.S. young men in the era of MAGA. There’s a reason for the popularity of dirtbags like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, etc. although we ought to be really careful about whether the influencers are the dog or the tail. I’m sure I’ve heard some statistic about what percentage of “young men” aren’t in relationships or live with their parents or whatever, and again I’m careful to say that there is a there there.

I don’t have the need to track this down right now, but I would strongly suspect that these “young men” we seem to have been talking about for the past decade are are largely white and heterosexual-identifying. That doesn’t mean non-white, non-straight men aren’t struggling too (and probably more) but rather that their struggle (for some crazy reason) doesn’t manifest itself in upswings in virulent misogyny and ethno-nationalism. I think it’s fair to suppose that the “young men” we tend to hear about are those “men” who, in the misty past of American’s putative greatness, could’ve expected a stable job with a decent wage unless they really f***ed things up.

Now I’m not here to psychologize these “young men” or to play the “who cares?/white tears” game that the left very unfortunately embraced pre-pandemic. We’ve learned how poorly that goes over and even if it hadn’t accelerated the rise of MAGA, even if its political consequences were negligible, it’s in real bad taste to shit on miserable people even if part of their misery stems from an expectation that not everyone, not even most, people in the country have or had.

The question the podcasters and book writers and “think piece” authors want to ask is: “Why did this happen to ‘our young men’?” The answer always seems to have to do with 21st century quasi-Daniel Patrick Moynihanisms about “strong male role models” and/or “the dangers of social media” and/or “the collapse of the nuclear family,” and/or the Bowling Alone rhetoric about the absence of socialization or community. If only we brought back essentially mandatory church attendance, or instituted national service, or limited social media enough, or lowered the divorce rate, or “taught our sons to respect women,” we could get “our young men” back.

I’m not going to say that none of this would make a difference to anyone; I think that’s foolish. It seems right to me that social media has screwed up our kids and that our lives are measurably more insular than they were 20 years ago. It’s also true that “flame wars” have existed since UseNet, if not before, that texting is a shitty substitute for conversation and so forth. So look, talking to more people and stepping away from the mill of “content” that dominates many of our lives is probably healthy.

But I have a different story to tell our “our young men” than the pop-sociological one.

I’m no James Carville fan but it’s the economy, stupid. The fact of the matter is that from the onset of industrialization in Euro-America, the social role of the straight man has been completely dominated by the importance of being a “provider” for a nuclear-ish family. Of course this role long precedes industrialization—it’s Biblical for heaven’s sake—but it has become the preeminent straight male role (in the U.S., I can’t speak for elsewhere) since we started clocking in, working for wages, buying cars and houses, etc. etc. It’s built into American economic ideology since the end of the Civil War, perhaps since the rise of Jacksonianism.

Being a provider is great, I’m not knocking it. But in the same way that women have internalized sexualized and misogynistic cultural depictions of themselves since as long as history as been recorded, “our young men” have drunk of the cup of “providing for” their families or the country or something. A “young man” of the supposed-to-be-upwardly-mobile-ish variety (read often white and probably straight) is generally seen as having “value” in terms of his “ability” or “prospects” to provide. To be clear, I’m not saying this is right or good or that there aren’t lots of people who don’t think of themselves or of men in this way. I am saying that it is a major part of the make-up of what it means to be “a man” in the West (I can’t speak for elsewhere).

The problem is that the economic growth of the United States since at least the Reagan years has been predicated on taking *away* the kinds of jobs/wages that allow for providing, to the degree that even with a dual income household a family may not be able to afford real stability, much less wealth accumulation. Add to this that in the U.S. home ownership is a central pillar of citizen economic stability and that because realty is a more or less unregulated and usurious slice of capitalism that has only gotten worse since the subprime mortgage crisis, you have an increasing number of people who would’ve been more or less middle class thirty years ago who cannot afford to buy homes, who don’t have pensions, and whose retirement can disappear in a day with market crashes.

This is an obviously untenable situation that can result in the very destructive nihilism we see in MAGA 2.0 and in the figure of the single male living in mom’s basement trolling and getting radicalized. I won’t go into the social media/internet aspect of the latter here, maybe in another post, but suffice to say this can’t end well and it helps explain the appeal of MAGA—even though MAGA is at the bottom complete fabulist bullshit. Until the economy stops producing huge amounts of wealth for a tiny percentage of population at the expense of the majority, until we realize that stable employment that allows for at least base-level economic security for the majority is the single most important job of a nation as they are present constituted, the problem will persist.

Why don’t American women feel this sense of hopelessness that leads to destructive nihilism, or at least not in the same kinds of numbers? Obviously there are multiple reasons very much including different gender role models. But I think the economic structure I’m talking about here will have a similar effect on women before too long. The thing for women is that due to millennia of sexism and hypertrophic gender expectations, entering the workforce remains a psychological point of pride.

To put it crudely, women started from more or less zero pre-WWII in the U.S. and their gains, which they and their allies fought long and hard for, have been dramatic and impressive. The very idea that a woman can more or less decide how she wants to live her life without discipline and punishment from the state and society, the very idea represented by Rosie the Riveter and Roe and birth control—the very idea that J.D. Vance and others in the MAGA coalition want to eliminate—is new enough to have been developed in living memory. In short, women in the U.S. broadly speaking have been on an upward trajectory in terms of self-determination since the post-WWII area and still are—demographically at least—are on the upward swing.

Women know that things can get better even if that better isn’t close to great. Men on the other hand, and for all the reasons I’ve already mentioned, know that things are getting worse with no clear bottom.