Compact "Lost Generation" DEI article: too little, too late
Cervantes writing Don Quixote in jail…
This is short blog entry regarding much-discussed article exposing the discrimination against young white males in various industries:
It’s very good this is getting massive attention. The article is full of numbers that make the fact of racist-sexist discrimination against younger white men both undeniable and indefensible. Others who’ve written about this before should be happy it gets the attention it deserves regardless of who gets credit for it. I also disagree with critics of this article when they say that the writer is a liberal and that he places undue blame on older white men in this process as opposed to supposedly the young women and minorities who agitated for these changes and benefited from them. As others have said, it’s good he’s a liberal because it makes discussion of all this more palatable to liberals; second, I actually agree with the writer that the primary blame should lie with Gen X and boomer white men because in most cases they were the ones doing the hiring. Unqualified young women and minorities didn’t hire themselves and weren’t generally in a position to discriminate against others (though now and soon they will be). The problem of the article isn’t that it’s not “based” or right-wing “coded” (stupid phrase) enough.
I have very different problems with this article. I agree with this anon poster I quote:
In all questions of modern political commentary I’ve tried to keep my focus on the inadequacy of the so-called contemporary “elites.” They are manifestly dumb and unworthy of rule or position and it is entirely within the liberal intellectual universe and biome of values to criticize them on these terms. The focus of this article is instead on the evidence of discrimination or marginalization of a certain demographic from certain professions. This risks becoming a story of victimization and charity-solicitation, which, besides being inherently insulting to accept for yourself, is also generally ineffective. I think those who claim that stories of grievance and victimization were central to the leftist causes are somewhat misled on this point. It’s true they were central but two other components were initially even more emphasized by the left and their allies: the particular virtues or excellences of the aggrieved or victimized groups. The leftist narrative wasn’t wholly a sob story in its hour of ascendance. The example of Feynman being denied entry into his university of choice was also convincing: “here is a genius you possibly denied an hour in the sun.” It was for Jews as well as for blacks not just a narrative of victimization, but a case of “these people have particular excellences that you are unjustly suppressing and marginalizing.” It was in any case quite ambiguous as to some extent both Jews and blacks have always held a certain fascination for Americans and it was possible to paint opponents of their integration as “retrograde irrational bigots.” Even now American philosemitism and philonegrism isn’t primarily founded on sympathy for their victimization stories, and more so on the popularity many from these peoples enjoy in entertainment and athletics. (as I’ve argued elsewhere, antisemites underestimate the extent to which the Seinfeld “Jewish comedian” type was an enormous PR for the Jews, and outweighed or made look absurd possibly legitimate criticisms of “Jewish Hollywood”).
A closely related story of leftist success on this front was a ridiculing of the establishment elites of the time. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the ascendance of the new left as well as the successful promotion of the integration of Jews and blacks took place in the late 1960’s and 1970’s as a result of the liberal WASP establishment’s self-discrediting in the disaster of Vietnam. This is a longer story though of how American establishment personae were ridiculed and in part discredited starting with a 1950’s counterculture that wasn’t by the way altogether leftist or altogether wrong. Unfortunately many American rightists are all too eager to still embody the leftist archetypes not only of “stolid stuffy out of touch elite,” but also of Nurse Ratched or Archie Bunker.
Without these components the leftist story of victimization wouldn’t have been successful. When the left and its ethnic ally modules did switch to a pure story of victimization following 2009 or so, it discredited itself to a large degree in the American consciousness. The left is currently in a vague and transitional position because of all this. It didn’t “win” on stories of identity grievance decoupled from the other elements, it very much lost.
The Jacob Savage DEI article has this other problem too: the story it tells isn’t that new among “liberal elites,” it’s also a persistent dominant interpretation already among establishment liberals and even many “dissident’ intellectuals of the Trump phenomenon actually. The facts about the decline of white working class communities and the terrible condition that white working class men find themselves in is generally accepted and undisputed since at least 2016. Trump’s campaign and victory (and to some extent Bernie’s as well) was interpreted for a long time by this same liberal audience as a “cry for help” of those “left behind” by globalization. This narrative is false by the way: it is a story comfortable both for liberals and for insecure “right wing” intellectuals. Torbert Fahey covers this well here:
The general acceptance of the “plight of the left behind” and “cry for help” narrative by the liberal establishment did nothing at all to endear this demographic to them. It served as a condemnation (and even cause for contempt) of Trump himself. Their “solution” was further social welfare proposals or the absurd Andrew Yang campaign, offering some form of universal basic income opiates for the poor “left behind.” The unspoken and sometimes explicit response to all this was “the world’s smallest violin.” It is part of the attempt on the part of leftist media to continually discredit white males in the United States. Dumb “dissident” intellectuals are themselves willing to embrace this narrative and present themselves as faces (facefags) of this “discontent,” by which means they are then rewarded by the leftist media with attention for embodying this minstrel show. That’s par for the course for American media MO. It’s just not an effective position to take even if you think it’s true. It shifts blame from the manifest failures of the fake occupational class to, in this case, an impersonal historical or economic process of globalization. It’s true that in the case of this DEI article the blame is shifted to the particular vague class of “older white men,” who by the way I agree are craven. Nevertheless, that too is simply a culprit too-broadly defined to mean anything: it includes everyone from craven bad actors to men who likely had no real decision-making authority, to people whose only other option would have been to step down from their jobs themselves. Regardless, my point here is that this narrative did nothing to inspire sympathy for the white working class, nor any proposals that would actually help them. I think it would be a much stronger case if all such articles focused on the compounding mediocrity of all life under the decisions and activities of the “new elite.” As it now gets amplified, this article will be understood as a victimization and a sentimental begging for sympathy instead of as a just condemnation of corrupt and clumsy power.
I have though a bigger problem with the story Savage tells. I remember what it was like before 2012 and it wasn’t much better, particularly in the fields he focuses on: journalism, academia, and Hollywood or media. I know weirdly nostalgic right wingers are fond of edits showing the 2000’s or 1990’s as a great time, but I don’t remember it that way.
Usually when people face discrimination at the level described in this article they leave the country. I did in fact gradually leave the USA starting even before 2015, but certainly by 2016. Whether my own normal-life career was held back by racial and other discrimination—I assume we all were held back, but let me not talk about myself. I say that discrimination very badly affected the careers even and especially actually apparently successful exemplars, which is something left out of this story. I know genius-level white men in the hard sciences, with concrete very impressive achievements—the solving of decades-long open problems in their fields—who from the looks of it have “secure” positions in academia now. But under conditions of real meritocracy they wouldn’t have had to struggle for many years, retarding their own personal success and also I think more important, the general condition of the sciences in America. So left out of the story told in this article is that programs and grants for academic research well before 2010 privileged completely frivolous projects: look at the % of funds given to stupid and inconsequential proposals favoring pet causes like “HIV/AIDS” versus more exciting and real matters, all of which was done on purely political grounds. A legitimate question might be, why does it matter if the person receiving funding for a frivolous 1000th “HIV/AIDS” project is a dummy who is a female, a minority, or a white male. It’s still going to be a dummy and not anyone deserving of that funding, which is then denied to worthier projects.
This is the main reason I left America: I left in disgust at having to be around the people the author describes as having possibly liked to work around. What is left out of the article is that the fields Savage actually focuses on: the % white males in journalism, academia, and Hollywood….the types of white males that were in those even before 2010 were not good at all from all points of view. I don’t mean even mainly regarding political orientation “oh they were leftist.” But that’s easiest to quantify: look up the percentage of conservative or Republican professors, etc., at top schools before 2010. They were excluded entirely, at staggering percentages. There were all of two “conservative” professors on the whole Harvard faculty: Harvey Mansfield and Hankins (and Mansfield himself I think quite justly rejected always the label of “conservative”—it didn’t matter). As far as I know neither one managed to get a successor, so now I think there are none. Delusional leftist and some “dissidents” like to speak of a vast “Straussian” conspiracy, but for the most part the Straussians had been kicked out of all top universities before 2016—count the number of professors they had left even at their stronghold of the University of Chicago. I don’t know what Savage is like in person, but the character he plays in this article…liberals like Savage were just fine with excluding those. But, more important, that’s a proxy for something else: it wasn’t just “conservatives”…everyone of any unusual thoughts or bold ideas was also excluded. It was conformist company men only. It’s why culture broadly speaking sucked before 2010 as well.
This is why I find the article unpersuasive, because it’s not clear actually that journalism, academia, or Hollywood have gotten that much worse. They were terrible before 2010 as well, and it was because guys like Savage (again I don’t know him personally, but the types he is appealing to in this article I mean) and his friends were writing there. Even his concluding “emotional image” example is regret at not having worked on some ridiculous show about time machines. So now others get to write that crappy show, but not him. Again the legitimate question, which leftists are already asking, is why does this matter. If it’s going to be Netflix garbage and the 1260th HIV-AIDS grant, what matters the ethnicity of the person who gets it?
Because these fields are different: it is not finance, accounting, law, or other such—the article would have been stronger if it had focused on those. But at the level of cultural production, the final end-product is public and can be seen and should be judged not at an ordinary level, but at the level of the exception. The exceptional was thoroughly excluded even before 2012. I don’t know anyone who managed to get jobs in any of those fields before 2012 that I would even want to meet for a drink. Or maybe I would, but they would have had to practice an extreme form of taqqiya that I have long advocated for friends at the same time that I’ve admitted that I’m totally unsuitable for it myself.
This is similar to Asian complaints about being discriminated against at Ivies in student admissions. This is true: colleges did discriminate against them, because they only use those degrees to become an ophthalmologist in upstate NY. To some extent this was always the case with everyone, but with Asians there are almost no exceptions. It’s not clear from the point of view of an Ivy school why they should invest in that, especially when Asians don’t donate. For dolts: this is by way of analogy. It’s just that Savage doesn’t make the case for what he or the excluded might have done differently than what people in Hollywood & etc. are doing now.
But I can ask…and this is quite personal to me and friends I’ve known online. If these men who were excluded had a burning ambition to make movies, why didn’t they...there were cheap high quality digital cameras and Youtube around. David Lynch shot Inland Empire in 2006 on digital camera. Some people did, I would think: some even did well, and that’s good. Pewdiepie is an example, and you might say that’s just one guy, but there were many others smaller than him too. But here’s the thing…I wonder whether Pewdiepie was ever approached with an offer by anyone, including by important people now wringing their hands over the material in this article. They should have been, and should be given funding for projects—as far as I know, no projects were before this year even amenable to be pitched. There were frogtwitter 20 year old guys in 2015-6 making stuff these billionaires were enjoying to my knowledge, and they never offered them any support for projects; never met or talked to them for encouragement. In many cases those guys had to stop doing what they were doing and get jobs in finance, etc., and in other cases went into difficult situations and turned out badly. These were people who, unlike the author of this piece, chose to try to do things on their own, at least anonymously. They received zero support. Instead now we’re all supposed to seal clap for the tragedy of people who didn’t try to do anything on their own but are complaining they didn’t get jobs working in TV. I’ll grant you TV is nearly unwatchable now, but it was almost that way before as well. Why am I supposed to care about the demographic composition of those who write garbage and who were and would have been company men even before 2010, and who excluded relentlessly anyone who wasn’t a company man?
I think readers then are confusing the article’s actual focus with the things he mentions in passing that are much more important: the percentage straight white males in the student body at Ivies and top schools e.g., which I’ve commented on before, and then similar practices affecting medicine, law, etc. But these percentages were largely already established before 2015 at least regarding the student bodies--I don’t think the author corrects for percentage of gays, legacies, athletes, Jews. If you correct for those categories, it was maybe 3% straight white American men even before 2015. Please read that figure again: I stand by it. It was ethnic cleansing before 2012. I don’t see why it’s not within entirely the possibility of liberal sentiments and values to address. To fail to address that is in my view not a “strategic sugarcoating for liberals,” but a form of obfuscation:
The author mentions Yale after 2014. I know what happened there even well before: there was a witch hunt against the sole demographic that was straight white guys in the undergrad body (fraternity members and athletes) who dared to speak out against the suffocating campus culture. I don’t remember but I think that was before 2010 or maybe before 2012 for sure. As far as I know zero of “conservative” faculty anywhere supported them—let alone liberals (the famous hissyfit chimpout at Yale in 2015 surrounding Christakis supinely suggesting that students shouldn’t be attacked for their Halloween costumes, which led to weeks of Maoist Red Guard agitation was in my opinion an entirely inevitable development of the earlier targeting of white male undergrads, during which tenured professors dared offer not a word of objection). What followed after was, as the article documents, much worse for indisputably liberal males, but those who fell under any suspicion even before then had already been ruthlessly targeted. This included as I’m now saying even sometimes entirely liberal white men who fell under suspicion because they were part of a team or a fraternity at an Ivy. Again this isn’t to nitpick…it’s a substantial obfuscation of this article, whether it’s intentional or not. I’m all willing to call myself a loser who due to my own disagreeableness or as some would claim, psychosis, was justly excluded from polite society even before 2012, but I’m talking now about indisputably high-quality and perfectly “socialized” individuals who were in mass excluded also. There was in fact “ethnic cleansing” in America’s top institutions well before 2014, and at rates and %’s similar to those discussed in this article.
I remember meeting an undergraduate student once at the gym who had very much a “Jersey shore” affect. He was an American of Italian ancestry who behaved like Tony Soprano. From an external point of view he had little to complain about as he was finishing a degree at a top school, was handsome and seemed popular with girls, etc.; but he told me that his “manner”—which meant not speaking in a lilting voice and such—was considered by his peers as “coming on too strong.” He was conservative, he was from Long Island if I remember, but seemed perfectly capable of being apolitical. I take this tangent to remind you that even people who didn’t conform to a certain manner felt already targeted well before 2012 and were being excluded from creative positions in the fields Savage discusses in this article long before then. Maybe you think this doesn’t matter because you’re not a Jersey shore or Long Island gruff Italian, but it’s a proxy: if you are somewhat “spergy” that includes you. No jobs for spergs or eccentrics or anyone boldly creative in Hollywood before 2012 either.
The fundamental character of seats of American cultural production (at the career, not the student or apprentice level) was utterly loathsome going back well before 2010. Pointing to exceptions like a handful of movies by men like David Lynch or Whit Stillman (who themselves, despite documented high success, had enormous difficulty often finding funding, and indeed after 2010 seemed not to be able to mostly) doesn’t disprove the rule. If you think Savage is talking about white men “like you”...it’s possible. I know he’s not talking about me or anyone I was friends with. He’s talking about himself and his friends--who I personally would rather have slaved at University of Manila as a foreign professor (possible, but much harder workload than in the USA) than have had to endure being around.
If the article gets liberals acknowledging antiwhite racism in general...I suppose, good. If the purpose or the effect is to reestablish the status quo ante 2010 in journalism, academia, Hollywood...I don’t see why anyone who cares about writing, literature, movies or the arts has a stake in that.
What I want to read, and I may have to strain and risk nicotine over dose to write it myself, is an article on corporate life. Dreary office computer expert type jobs, not prestige media. I'm an older millennial, and have worked beset on all sides by Celestials, Hindustanis and other such witless and scheming "STEM brains". Someone needs to paint the picture of the unprecedented absurdity of 70 people on a Teams call pretending to understand an Indian consultant as he rattles off his platitudes and set phrases. We're talking about projects which five old school 1970s IBM guys could have wrapped in 6 weeks taking three years and 200k man hours to complete. Ridiculous broken English overlooked, bizarre code that spirals in to the solution instead of a tidy Saxon approach. Imagine nearly everyone you work with is Chinese or Indian, in America, at a well paying if unglamorous job. You signed up to be a computational septic man and now you have to work with these people, forever. It's not strictly discrimination, is a reworking of the labor market via the H1b visa. Path dependency means it's either a heroic career jump or go long BTC and Argentina until you can afford to flee.
This captures something that no numbers can: the qualitative decline in life in America during this period. It's different for different people, stunted careers for some, NGO sinecures for others, but the main emotion of my millennial career is a feeling that everything has kind of faded to gray, or that I've arrived at the party a little too late. Gave up on sports in undergrad because the other guys on the team were to stuck on womanly in fighting and pettiness instead of mutual support. Got to a once innovative grad program, to find no elders interested in doing work as disruptive as they had done in the 80s, and generations and generations of grad students making smaller and smaller contributions. Music and creative projects fell into endless edits and second-guessing. You're right about creative projects, the movie and other industries should be booming now with wild, experimental work: and most people noticing the decline blame technologies, social media, culture, anything but the lack of will, no inner flame (and I also wonder why no impresario has emerged, willing to lose money on something truly wild). What's missing everywhere is something mystic, the quality without a name. Even unpleasant experiences are gone, nothing truly dangerous in urban life, no transgression, no boundaries to cross, just a curated, disney experience of everything.