Sometimes, young white men feel wronged.
Should liberals care?
That’s the question that’s been rattling around in my head since Jacob Savage’s Compact magazine essay “The Lost Generation” went viral a few days ago.
Savage writes that the DEI era wasn’t just about diversity trainings and racial “climate” assessments.
It had real impacts, he argues, on who got hired in prestige industries like entertainment, the media, and academia — and in the broader economy. And the clear losers, he writes, were white millennial men like him.
Savage, a frustrated television writer, describes repeatedly getting to the precipice of a real Hollywood career, only to be passed over for a young woman or someone else from a favored class. Today, he writes, he sells scalped tickets for a living and wonders what to tell his sons about his dashed dreams.
And his experience, he argues, is hardly unique.
Hiring practices started shifting about a decade ago, Savage writes, and accelerated after the murder of George Floyd. In 2021, 78 percent of new hires at NPR were people of color. And at the California Times, parent company to the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune, just 39 percent of new hires were men.
“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” a hiring editor who spoke to Savage recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person. ... It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”
Older white men held on to their jobs during this period — often at the pinnacle of their professions.
But that only masked what was happening lower in the hierarchy, Savage writes, where young people were trying to start their careers.
Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American men, he writes. And at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, a premier showcase for contemporary art, none of the 45 featured millennial artists were white American men.
Reaction to Savage’s essay has been about what you’d expect.
Vice President JD Vance called it “an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.” Left-leaning columnist Joe Nocera acidly referred to it as “a new high point in a burgeoning genre of magazine articles: The Lament of the Whining White Boy.”
Some critiques were more nuanced than that.
The lawyer and commentator Matt Bruenig dug into census data and found that the percentage of white men ages 30 to 39 working in the arts and media didn’t actually change much in the woke era Savage describes.
And young white men did pretty well, overall, in this period. The share earning a college degree jumped from about 24 percent in 2013 to 32 percent in 2024. And 30-something white men kept their place near the top of the 30-something earnings distribution.
But if Savage failed in his attempt to turn his carefully assembled data on the hiring practices of certain prestige magazines and Ivy League universities into a broad argument for a “lost generation” of white male professionals, his piece cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Anyone who’s worked in the fields he describes knows he wrote about something real. After years of exclusion in some of America’s most elite institutions, women and people of color really were hired preferentially. And young white men really did lose out as a result.
It’s complicated.
Figures on the right, like Vance, are happy to skip over the complications and plant a flag.
But what should liberals do?
They can do some flag-planting of their own, of course. “Over thousands of years in the Western world, white men have made sure to take care of themselves, and to hell with everybody else,” Nocera, the liberal-leaning columnist, wrote in The Free Press in response to the Savage essay. “Now, for a nanosecond in the great arc of history, there is an effort to redress that. And how do the whining white boys react? They whine. Oh, how they whine!”
Some might say it’s unfair to insist that a 20- or 30-something white guy pay for the sins of the white men who came before.
But even if you disagree — even if you believe that some inequity today is required to correct the inequities of the past — there’s this: The last couple of years have demonstrated that dismissing the concerns of young white men is terrible politics.
Too many of them, alienated by the left and worried about the economy, drifted to Trumpism — or even worse, to Groyperism. And the damage to the progressive project has been immense.
Liberals need not proclaim — like Vance or President Trump — that young white men are some uniquely put-upon class. They are not. Young white male professionals, in particular, are doing just fine in the aggregate.
But it’s OK to acknowledge that some subset of those professionals bore the brunt of the DEI correction.
It’s OK to acknowledge that the correction had real effects on their lives.
And it’s OK to say that young white working-class men — too many of them faring poorly in school, struggling to adapt to a post-industrial economy, and wrestling with mental health challenges — deserve some empathy, too.
Young white men are not a lost cause for the left.
In this fall’s gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, a majority of them voted for the Democratic candidates. But if progressives hope to hold on to this constituency, they have to understand — and respect — its concerns.
Sometimes, young white men feel wronged.
Liberals should care.
David Scharfenberg is the editor of Ideas. He can be reached at david.scharfenberg@globe.com. Follow him @dscharfGlobe.