Generational Turnover Is Finally Happening

Trump's youth movement, the left on the post-Christian right, and more in this week's digest.

Nov 15, 2024

What I’m reading: The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Donald Trump’s picks for his administration so far show a remarkable shift to a younger group of appointees who are either early Millennials or Generation X: Vance (40), Stefanik (40), Gabbard (43), Gaetz (42), Hegseth (44), Zeldin (44), Vivek (39). Gen X heartland guys like Marco Rubio (53) and Elon Musk (53) are the old folks.

We’ve been talking about the Boomers passing from the scene for a long time, but they’ve kept hanging on. Now we are starting to see generational turnover finally accelerate in America.

Seth Barron wrote some thoughts on this topic for City Journal.

Trump’s Masculine Appeal

As has been said by others, there’s a difference between being a good man and being good at being a man. Masculine virtues and expectations are not exactly amoral, but can often be expressed in both good and bad ways.

With Trump appealing to much to men and especially young men, I wrote a piece for City Journal looking at the way he embodies the kinds of masculine traits anthropologist David Gilmore wrote about in his book Manhood in the Making.

“Fight! Fight!” Donald Trump shouted to his followers. He stood up straight, blood on his cheek, pumping his fist in the air, rising after having been bundled to the ground by Secret Service agents when shots rang out at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Such displays of bravura can’t be faked. Trump’s courage under actual fire helps to explain his appeal to men, especially young men.
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Seen through Gilmore’s lens, Trump, for all his flaws, models many traditional masculine attributes that young men would do well to adopt. He is high-energy—he famously derided Jeb Bush for being “low energy”—and competitive. He is “in the arena,” taking public and substantial risks on the nation’s biggest stage (and, before that, in running his businesses). He is autonomous, capable of what Gilmore called “absolute freedom of movement.” He presses on despite overwhelming opposition, media pressure, lawfare, and even assassination attempts. He even went back to hold another rally at the place where he was shot. And, in an era of increasing drug legalization and normalization, he famously doesn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs.
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To avoid those pitfalls, young men must wed Trump’s masculine attributes to greater moral integrity and a mature style. Despite popular suggestions to the contrary, assertive manhood is not inherently toxic. Even conservatives have too often equated being a good man with being a dutiful doormat. Healthy masculinity is agentic, aggressive, competitive, courageous, and generous, productive, moral, and dignified. Men need not consider these values to be in conflict.

Click over to read the whole thing.

The Left on the Post-Christian Right

Jacobin, a DSA magazine, published an interesting article about the rise of the post-Christian right.

For secular liberals who have made “believing science” their own kind of religion, the possible waning of Christian conservatism may seem like a blessing long overdue. What if it isn’t?
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A few stats show how quickly the moral majority has frayed. In 2011, only 23% of conservatives supported gay marriage — by 2021, 55% did. When it comes to faith specifically, the shifts are no less substantial. In 2016, roughly 63% of Republicans believed that “being a Christian” was an integral part of being an American. But in 2020, that number had plummeted to 48% — a 15-point drop, and during a Republican administration. Even self-identified Christians seem to be losing key tenets of the faith. A recent poll of American evangelicals found the number of respondents who agreed with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God” rose from 30% in 2020 to 43% in 2022.
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In fact, today’s Right, far from being censorious scolds, embodies a kind of effervescent transgression. “Triggering the libs” has now firmly established itself as a pastime of right-wingers. This is not just so in the United States but also abroad, especially where secularization has gone furthest. In Germany, where 27% of the country is nonreligious, it is the Alternative für Deutschland that comes off as the party of TikTok transgression. While in France, where “nones” make up 40% of the country, the massive social media wing of Rassemblement National is driven by young influencers willing to skewer liberalism’s sacred cows. Outrage politics, once the province of the culturally disobedient New Left, has migrated to the “dissident right.”
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Three of the most viral anti-Christian rightists — Curtis Yarvin, Richard Hanania, and Costin Alamariu (better known by his pseudonym, Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP) — all evince a disdain for the Christian emphasis on care for the weak, universalism, and equality. Far from endorsing Christofascism, some of the most influential figures of the hard right seem to hate Christianity. For Alamariu, whose book Bronze Age Mindset has become an underground bestseller, Christianity is a relic that has “degenerated into group vanity, pretense and mere hysteria.” The sooner it’s destroyed, the better. Hanania, a self-described Nietzschean liberal, adopts a similarly anti-egalitarian atheism. “Egalitarian ideology,” he writes, is “primarily driven by ugly instincts, namely envy and feelings of inferiority.” His successful Substack blog is read by many of the leading figures and funders of the dissident right, including billionaire GOP donor Marc Andreessen. Meanwhile, Curtis Yarvin, the Peter Thiel–sponsored monarchist notorious for his sneering dismissal of left-wing “bugmen,” describes himself as “unforgivably materialist and completely soulless.”
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Once Christian universalism, egalitarianism, and injunctions to peace and love are thoroughly discredited, the slope gets pretty slippery. If there is no appeal to goodness but instead only the cool, rational appeal to strength, if the pursuit of equality itself is seen as a distortion of human nature, if violence is recognized as the natural order of things, and if tribal nationalism supersedes the embrace of a global fraternity, then what? Well, a disturbing emphasis on heredity, genes, and race quickly takes hold.

Click over to read the whole thing.

When Politics Kills

In my election day post on how to respond to the results, I noted that it’s important not to lose control if your side loses and to not take an apocalyptic view of politics.

Two stories show the all too real dangers of failing to do this.

In Minnesota, a man killed his family and himself. And in Seattle, a woman killed her father with an ice pick on the evening of the election.

In both cases, mental illness intersecting with an apocalyptic view of the election seems to have been a factor.

We should take steps to protect ourselves from getting too wrapped up in politics. And we should also be careful about how promoting an apocalyptic view of politics might affect other people, particularly the mentally unstable.

Best of the Web

WSJ: How Barron Trump Connected His Father to the Manosphere

Oren Cass/Financial Times: Democrats do not know how to talk to young men — and it cost them

Katelyn Beaty: How Trump's victory could accelerate women's departure from evangelicalism - I get a mention in this piece. I think there’s something to her notion that the young female exodus from evangelicalism, which is already under way, will continue. I hit some of these themes in a previous piece. In my view a church that skews male is no healthier than one that skews female.

Zvi Moshowitz: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed - Thoughts from a former professional gambler.

The short answer is that it is clear from studies and from what we see with our eyes that ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors.

WSJ: It’s 10 a.m. and Dad’s Doing Jell-O Shots. Must Be Parents’ Weekend. - Another story of kidulting. A 53 year old man should not be doing jello shots. Act your age!

David French: I Believe in Miracles. Just Not All of Them.

Matthew Peterson: A Movement, A Market, America - A note introducing the Blaze’s new quarterly print magazine Frontier. I love the framing around the “frontier” idea, which is a historic, authentic, culturally resonant American symbol we need to reclaim and recenter.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest this week on the Issues, Etc. podcast.