Why Your Son Is Right Wing

Identity politics wasn’t a weekend seminar. We did this to an entire generation, and it’s showing up in their preferences.

My earliest memory of anything vaguely political was my parents telling me that George Herbert Walker Bush was a piece of shit.¹

(Funnily enough, I would meet the Senior President Bush many years later, and I found that he and his wife, even in seriously declining health, were utterly delightful people and wonderful hosts. But that’s really neither here nor there…)

Baby Dave with President and Mrs. Bush. Walker’s Point, 2015.

My Mom volunteered on Bill Clinton’s first campaign, which was probably the context for the remark about Bush 41. So that would’ve been circa 1992, at which point I was 8 years old.

What was your first political memory?

Did you find that it heavily influenced you? Did it shape the development of your politics for years thereafter? It certainly did in my case.

I wish I could give credit for this, but I can’t remember where it came from: a wise person once said, “no child thinks their childhood is weird.” Childhood is all children know. Bad, good, violent, peaceful, safe, uncertain, it just is what it is. It’s why the duty of adults to safeguard the young is such a sacred one. The experience of childhood, once poisoned, cannot be unpoisoned. There are no do-overs.

Careful The Things You Say, Children Will Listen

We tend to talk about partisan swings in terms of shifting preferences. The observation that young voters, men especially, have been trending Republican for at least five years is treated as a PR problem for the Democrats. The general belief is that something has tempted these young’uns to the dark side, and putting things right requires our finding the magic words to lure them back to the light.

“We need a Bro Whisperer!”

There’s a degree of reasonableness here, in that people do change their minds about politics. But what we’re seeing now is a different phenomenon.

At the risk of stating the very obvious, today’s 18-29 year olds are not last year’s 18-29 year olds. Because we…age.

We’re talking about a literally different group of people, and not - as we often imagine (or at least, I do) - a fixed group of people with unfixed opinions. Every year, we graduate our 29s into the older bracket, and we welcome new 18-year-olds into the fold.

If 8-years-old - just to use my personal example - is around the time political sentience awakens, that means that today’s youngest voters were first learning what politics was just as “woke” was getting into full swing. Which is to say, the opinions they have brought with them into adulthood were all forged in one of the most bizarre cultural crucibles the modern era has ever known.

Those considered “marginalized” among this cohort were taught that they belonged to a multi-century legacy of hopeless victimhood. And they were taught exactly whose fault that was.

Those considered “privileged” were treated to what really amounts to an entire childhood’s worth of side-eye, suspicion, and blame for crimes committed before even their oldest relatives’ oldest relatives were conceived.

What a strange way to come of age this must have been. I think about it often.

There’s a reason we hold bigotry in disfavor, even when its most harmful expressions are prohibited by our laws. Communicating, even subtly, to entire groups of people that they are unwelcome, unwanted, or untrustworthy cannot help but alter how members of those groups see themselves. And alter their relationship to society, especially the parts of it that look askance at them.

Within full view and earshot of them, we separated children along the boundaries of moral righteousness. Kids from the unduly privileged groups were going to grow up seeing - on TV, online, at the movies, at school, at church, at home, everywhere - that they were fundamentally unsafe for members of other, more innocent groups to be around. Their ancestors and predecessors had seen to that, boasting such a bad track record that they should expect different, harsher standards to be applied to their lives. Probably also a degree of social exclusion and limitation.

They should expect it to be harder for them to enter the workforce, harder for them to climb social and professional ladders, and harder for their contributions to be recognized or celebrated. And not only should they refrain from complaining about any of this, they should be thankful, actually.

For one thing, come on, they still had it great. That’s what “privilege” means, after all. For another, their willingness to forfeit their respect and prosperity was a morally necessary act of penance. Their sacrifice would help balance the cosmic ledger.

When would it finally be balanced? Oh, probably not in their lifetime. Or their kids’ lifetimes. Or perhaps even their kids’ kids’ lifetimes. In fact, asking that question is kind of problematic, so really, they should keep those thoughts to themselves if they want to be considered “one of the good ones.”

Kids from saintly, marginalized backgrounds, meanwhile, would hear all of these lessons too. About their bad, lucky contemporaries. They’d be fed a steady diet of sour grapes and salt. Their problems? Those other people’s fault. Their failures? Better thought of as successes having been stolen from them. We all know by whom…

Exactly what did we expect the outcome of all this to be?

How did we expect the sin-drenched privileged to grow up seeing themselves and the world? Did we expect grace and optimism from them about the future? How about the virtuously downtrodden? Did we expect them to exhibit a charitable or neighborly view of their more defective peers? Did we expect this division and upholding of extreme double standards, among children, to be a force for later good?

Consider the political dimensions here. One of our two, great parties followed around the plurality of American youth with a megaphone, screaming at them all throughout their formative years that they were greedy and wicked, and needed to obediently queue up for a lifetime of quiet atonement. Was it really surprising that upon maturation, they chose to vote for the other party?

What Have We Taught These Kids?

An 18-year-old white man today was 8-years-old when “woke” kicked off in 2015. And remember that education was one of the earliest fields captured, so there’d have been little shelter for him. His teacher wasn’t just a parishioner at this church, she was a true-believing acolyte.

Such an 18-year-old had his entire childhood dominated by an ideology that favored every conceivable identity group over his own, well before he possessed the intellectual tools to push back or defend himself. He was instructed that his intentional marginalization was right and natural because, simply for being born as he was, to the parents he was, he was liable for a privilege he could never hope to pay off, even if he lived several lifetimes.

He grew up surrounded by classmates who were allowed to openly malign those who looked like him, in ways that would never have been permissible for him to emulate in reverse. He saw it on screens, heard it through the radio, read it in the books he was assigned. He was supervised by teachers, principles, sometimes even parents, who policed his words, thoughts, and deeds in ways that they did not bother to do for his more fortunate (read: historically unfortunate) contemporaries.

He was allowed no escape from this. He had access to no space wherein these rules didn’t apply, and God help him if he tried to create one himself. The precedent for that was, well…

All Too Real. And All Done.

This is not a hypothetical. It is not a thought experiment. We did this. We did it for real. To real kids. And we absolutely do not talk about it enough.

In 2022, the Manhattan Institute organized a survey of about 1,500 recent high school graduates, 82.4% from public schools, and asked if they’d encountered a series of six “woke”-coded ideas while at school. For all six, a majority had learned about the concept either directly from a teacher or from another adult at the school.

Let’s look at this. Of American students under the woke yoke:

• 62% learned that America is a systemically racist country

• 66% learned that in America, white people have white privilege

• 57% learned that in America, white people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people

• 67% learned that America is built on stolen land

• 53% learned that America is a patriarchal society

• 51% learned that gender is an identity choice, regardless of the biological sex you were born into

But please. Tell me more about how conservatives are hysterical for complaining about indoctrination at school.

I’m 41. I paid attention in class. None of this shit was on the curriculum when I was coming up. I mean maybe, arguably, the “stolen land” thing was at least thematically present. But that was it. We certainly didn’t learn about white privilege or that our unconscious biases were harming our black and brown peers. This stuff is all very new.

I don’t want to get sidetracked, but speaking as a teacher, there is a special latrine in Hell that I hope these folks will have to clean one day. Public education is one of the great triumphs of small-L liberalism. To treat it like this is just unforgivable. I don’t want kids being fed 70s-era, liberation gobbledygook any more than I’d want them learning about eugenics or the dangers of race mongrelization.

The types cheering this would shit pineapples if a public school teacher ever told their class that they were all created equal and loved in the eyes of God. But they’d see no problem at all with that same teacher explaining that some kids are born with a moral stain that others lack and that skin color determines this.

Little Billy First Grader is not your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. And he’s not the guy in the cubicle next to you guffawing at 4Chan. Little Billy and his friends probably do not need to have their White Privilege wrung out of them, or for their classmates to regard them as guilty of inflicting generational trauma on everyone else.

A good lesson for any teacher is that, in the digital age, your job really isn’t to prepare students for the “real world.” Far earlier than you think, and far more fully than you’d like, they’re already living in it. They’re online at astonishingly young ages. Which is to say that by the time their consumption habits have developed in the first place, we’ve already lost the ability to control or regulate them.

And even if we think that divisive identitarianism is limited to online spaces - which it is not - it would still be a problem that kids whose prefrontal cortices are 20 years away from full development are getting force-fed an endlessly repeating message that their sex and skin tone make them better or worse than others around them.

So yeah. That was a weird choice we made; doing that. Nobody my age or near it experienced anything even remotely comparable in our youth.

For Millennials, *actual* anti-racism - opposing racism by or against anyone - was the order of the day. Racial prejudice was for the outdated and the unenlightened. Sexism was described to us as a sad relic of a bygone era.

But then for GenZ, we decided that actually, those evils were still totally with us, they explained everything, and the only way to even things out was to grab the heirs of unearned privilege by the ankles and drag them the fuck under.

And then something happened: they all grew up.

We Made Them This Way

It’s been well-documented, at times by yours truly, that young men are more right wing than they used to be.

Last October, I warned the following:

“So to sum up: blacks (especially young, black men), Latinos (again, men in this group are more skeptical of Dems than women), working class white men, young people, young men, and men in general are all turning away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans. Even if this isn’t enough of a shift to propel Donald Trump to a second term, the trendlines are sufficiently worrying that we might want to spend some time exploring the cause of the bleeding. Maybe see if we can find a tourniquet or something?

And did anyone notice a theme in that last paragraph? A through-line, so to speak? I hope so, because I was rubbing your nose pretty hard in it: Democrats have a problem with men. And if they don’t want to lose this election, and many more after it, they need to start taking it seriously.

And man, are they not.”

It’s been many months, and I don’t think I’d offer a single amendment to what I wrote back then.

And Democrats have a bizarrely difficult time understanding what these voting trends are actually telling us about the electorate. They’ve just spent $20 million to “study” young men, in the hopes that they can understand and reverse their rightward drift.

The favored narrative goes something like this:

• Young men were left-wing 10 years ago

• They’re now right-wing

• Ergo, somebody (Theo Von? Andrew Tate?) hypnotized them

• We must seize this magic for ourselves so that they may be re-hypnotized back into the fold

This, as we’ll see in a moment, is partially correct. But it misses a rather glaring point, which is that, again, they’re not the same men!

Joe Rogan did not trap a bunch of 18 year olds in stasis, poison them with right wing ideas (like that *checks notes* Bernie Sanders was a good choice for president…) and then release them to answer Gallup surveys 10 years later as the same, vernal youngsters.

What actually happened, of course, was that a bunch of boys grew up to become voting-age men. They did indeed have different politics from their sprightly predecessors, because - and this is the part Dems get right - they were, in a way, hypnotized.

By us!

We trapped these kids in an ideological straight jacket against which they were not allowed to resist. Against which resisting made them evil. Then we gasped in horror when they aged out of our stewardship and decided that, actually, they’d had rather enough of all that.

Not to be hyperbolic, but what we did to these guys was something like abuse. What we did to their childhoods was something like theft. And we would have no trouble - none at all - understanding that if it had been any other group on the receiving end. We caused them to come of age in a world that hated and blamed them, and that never missed an opportunity to remind them of just how much.

10 years. For 10 years, we did this.

We also ruthlessly punished any liberal voices that dared extend them comfort or encouragement. Thus ensuring that the only supportive voices they could hear from were the toxic ones who’d made “cancel-proof” edge-lording their whole brand.

As to their support for Trump and the GOP, think of it like this: they left an intimate partner who’d promised never to stop smacking them around for one who promised to love and respect them. Quick, Democrats, better drop $20 million to crack that nut.

Never Again

To those wondering why I don’t spend more time criticizing Trump, or why I refuse to drop my irritation with the woke movement, it is this:

I have a young son. I don’t particularly want him to grow into a man who votes for people like Donald Trump or listens to people like Andrew Tate. But I can’t ultimately stop him from doing either.

What I can do is try my damnedest to ensure that he never wants to. That he grows up in a world that doesn’t make him feel victimized, marginalized, or despised. Where he can choose his politics according to his preferences, not just by fleeing to the only side that doesn’t want to watch him bleed.

I have seen what this disgusting ideology did to boys a little older than mine, and I’m not letting it get its grubby hands on him. Over my purple, festering corpse will I let you roll out another decade of this filth.

I was happy to nod along with the lecture. I politely clapped for the seminar. I opened my mind. I listened. It was kind of hard not to when you had the podium for a full 10 years. But that’s over now.

Now, you can take your generational contamination and you can fucking eat it.

Now, I’m your enemy. I’m coming for your silly project. And I’m going to burn it all down.

1. Mom insists I clarify that this was not a direct quote to eight-year-old me.