Excluded Generations

Blaming older white men is counter-productive

“Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting.”—Jacob Savage

It can also be clarifying.

The fur is flying after the publication of Jacob Savage’s “The Lost Generation,” which Matt Walsh called a permission piece, a signal that cultural leaders can or must now admit, within carefully circumscribed limits and without accountability, of course, what the rest of us have known most of our lives: that discrimination against white men has been rampant in North America, with the result that at least one generation of such men were prevented from contributing their talents to key fields such as law, medicine, science, policing, popular culture, media, academia, reporting, Big Tech, business, and many more.

The fallout in substance abuse, screens addiction, nihilism, anger, loss of trust, and self-destruction has been massive, and is even now not being publicly confronted. Whether anything will be done remains an open question. Savage has little to suggest in this regard, putting emphasis on his own lack of anger at women and racial minorities. Only the older white men who allegedly engineered his exclusion—the safely demonizable Boomers—come in for direct criticism in his essay.

**

For years I have marveled at the patience of young men and wondered why a backlash didn’t come. I have spoken with many men about their sadness and anger at being passed over for opportunities and recognition. The whole of it can never be captured in raw numbers of the sort that Savage and others have supplied. It was relentless and exhausting, both subtle and crude. It was in the little and the big things that were consistently withheld: the letters of recommendation, school-leaving prizes, university admissions, apprenticeships, bursaries, scholarships, speaking engagements, opportunities for collaboration, appointments, public recognition, job offers, promotions, distinctions, workshop invitations, and many more; it was in what one could write about, what one could research, what counted as significant, whose lives mattered, what stories could be told. It was reflected in how attention was or was not paid, the casual misandry, the allowable jokes, the manner in which the entire culture turned against an agreed-upon target.

I vividly remember a small example, a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos that was disrupted at DePaul University back in 2016, as so many such talks were. Some black protesters surged onto the stage, taunting Yiannopoulos and flaunting their righteous victim-power. The camera panned over the audience members, who were almost entirely young white men, sitting in the hundreds while the speaker they had assembled to hear was harassed and silenced. Later, the President of DePaul condemned the disruption, but not before making clear that he hated Yiannopoulos, disagreed with every single one of his puerile utterances, and blamed him for the ruckus. The slap in the face to the students couldn’t have been clearer. I wondered then where they found their patience.

These are the same young men who would go on to find doors to employment and opportunity closed in the name of fairness and progress, who were lectured on their bigotry and privilege.

The Savage essay is shocking only in that anyone could pretend to be shocked by it. All those who worked in the fields he mentions—the publishing industry, Hollywood, academia—were perfectly aware. Many of them participated willingly, purchasing their moral righteousness on the backs of the men whose dreams they destroyed. These men had it made clear to them that social justice would be achieved at their expense, so that others in comfortable, highly paid positions could hold their anti-racist and anti-sexist heads up high. The few white men who complained were scorned and excoriated. Cry me a river, white boy! Equality feels like oppression to those who are accustomed to privilege. And so on. It was a con of massive proportions, smug and triumphant, leveled at men who were not privileged, and often leveled by those, women of all races, who had repeatedly been given special advantages, some of whom never legitimately earned anything.

I used to post academic job advertisements on Twitter that were women-only or Indigenous-only, etc. (for a partial list, see here). Always there would be a flurry of responses asking if they were legal. In the academic departments where I worked, there was no pretense of hiding what was going on because there was no question of any illegality. Universities and other government-funded corporations and enterprises in Canada were encouraged to practice so-called equity hiring.

Excluding white men didn’t require any subterfuge; the difficulty was in hiring any white men at all. (Usually, one had to explain in writing to one’s higher administrator why a woman or minority ethnic had not been selected.) The white man had to be demonstrably head-and-shoulders better even to have a shot, and even being much better didn’t guarantee success. Those involved in the hiring weren’t always honest about what they were doing either. I heard the rationales many times: how this female applicant with her very thin track record and unfinished dissertation was actually doing better work—more innovative, more cutting-edge, more in line with our department’s interests—than the male academic with a prestigious book and a dozen peer-reviewed articles in top-ranked scholarly journals.

I raised objections repeatedly to no avail. Most of my colleagues, if pressed, admitted that it wasn’t quite right. But what could they do? They didn’t want to go to war with the acknowledged leaders of their workplaces. A few did go to war, and lost. This was, as I’ve already said, established policy. It wasn’t a whim, an occasional outburst of intersectional feminist zeal. And once a hiring practice is instituted, there is no longer any need for those in favor to defend it.

The truth was that many people—even including a lot of young white men—were staunchly in favor. The policy didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the result of decades of anti-white and anti-male propaganda that made it clear to white men that they were in polite society at all only by the grace of the formerly victimized. As white men, they were the inheritors of an oppressive world, and a better one would be forged only through extensive power sharing and diversity of experience, which had to be gerrymandered into existence as quickly as possible. They would need to take a big step back and let the formerly marginalized, those possessed of moral purity and the capacity to empathize, take the helm. Many white men accepted this platform; some were enthusiastic about it, some grudging.

It would be satisfying to take Savage’s article and rub it in the noses of every single person, almost always a pious feminist woman, who made a career of claiming that she had to work twice as hard as any man even to have a chance at a career, poor-wonderful-me. These always pooh-poohed our pointing out the reality of the intolerable injustice, and the harm to merit-based structures, that was being done by decades of ham-fisted, closed-minded, smugly self-congratulatory equity hiring. Of course, it wouldn’t make any difference. The capacity of these people for self-delusion and their determination not to see the damaging consequences of the policies they championed is fathomless.

**

Most people who have discussed Savage’s essay accept his time frame: that the exclusion of white men took place mainly over the past ten to fifteen years. But this is not true. It has been going on for much longer than that, as Nathan Glazer made clear in his comprehensive Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, first published in 1975 and updated in 1987. Government initiatives to provide jobs for women and racial minorities, particularly blacks, were rooted in the equal rights legislation of the 1960s, implemented later that decade and aggressively expanded in the 1970s and 1980s. The National Organization for Women under the leadership of Betty Friedan, for example, brought a lawsuit against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to force it to comply with federal legislation, and sued the country’s 1300 largest corporations for alleged sex discrimination.

Anyone wishing to read a detailed prehistory of what Savage has chronicled can also consult Martin Loney’s extensively documented The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada (1998), which shows how what was called equity hiring in Canada spread across areas such as the police force, firefighting, the civil service, crown corporations, law, teaching, academia, and elsewhere, beginning in the 1980s. What Glazer’s and Loney’s research shows is that discrimination against white men in employment is far more deeply embedded than most people realize and has affected many more men than is currently recognized.

It is ridiculous to castigate Boomer white men, as it seems popular now to do, for allegedly implementing and benefiting from diversity policies. The last thing that should be encouraged is for younger white men to turn their anger on older white men. Many of these older men themselves faced active discrimination, psychological warfare, divorce-rape, and immiseration. Every organ of the culture told them it was time to change, get with it, stop being Archie Bunker, recognize the superior merits of the women and racial minorities their people had allegedly oppressed for so long. White women were by far the majority and most enthusiastic architects and proponents of equity hiring, bullied in turn by the black and brown women with whom they originally formed their alliance against white men (and all men, with a few exceptions).

Older white men may have secured (tenuous) positions of power, but they had no power in themselves as white men. Most of them knew they could find themselves disgraced, friendless, and jobless as the result of an unpopular decision or an unguarded statement. Accusations of sexual misconduct to take such men out of their positions were not confined to millennial males.

I was in the academic job market in 1997, and diversity hiring was already commonplace then. Everyone knew it was going on, and it was signaled both explicitly and implicitly in the advertisements that encouraged applications from women and visible minorities. My friend Steve Brule remembers when affirmative action was brought in at the large chemical company where he worked in 1984. At the beginning, it was said that these programs would be time-limited, lasting only for a short season. Instead, they lasted for well over 40 years and are still going strong.

It is foolish to imagine that such discrimination is now going to lie down and die. There have been a number of occasions over the last few years in which that was confidently predicted (remember Claudine Gay?) and did not occur. Already the diversity advocates, who are legion, are marshalling their counter-arguments and nit-picking the evidence, finding (or lying about) the ways in which what Savage described hasn’t really happened, recalibrating numbers, rationalizing and justifying them. Thousands of academics will spend years joining forces to discredit claims about discrimination, recasting them as a MAGA or Groyper lament and a dangerous attack on the legitimate (but still inadequate!) gains made by valiant women and long-oppressed racial minorities. Recently for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle, in an ostensibly critical article, is still playing with false justifications and outlandish untruths, saying the following about the rationale for equity hiring:

“ … One could say of course it’s unfair, but repairing the legacy of slavery and sexism is a hard problem, and sometimes hard problems have unfair solutions. It wasn’t fair to round up huge numbers of men born between 1914 and 1927 and send them off to fight the Nazis, but that was the only way to win.

One might argue that, but I haven’t seen anyone do so. No one seems brave enough to state baldly that we should penalize White men born in 1988 for hiring decisions that were made in 1985 by another White guy who was born in 1930. Instead what I’ve seen is a lot of deflection.”

What bizarre nonsense, what spurious claims even if her point is that such logic is ugly. Discrimination in favor of white men has been illegal since 1964, and affirmative action/equity hiring was already fully in place by the mid-1980s when the “white guy who was born in 1930” was allegedly discriminating in his hiring practices. As McArdle inadvertently shows, we’ve been operating on the basis of deliberately-perpetrated false beliefs for years, beliefs that the intelligentsia adhered to and promulgated.

**

I don’t know Jacob Savage, so I don’t want to impute motives or political allegiance. But there is a tone of resignation and do-gooder acceptance in the essay that is unwise and self-defeating. White men have every right to be furious about what has been done to them in the countries their forefathers built: not only the employment discrimination, though that is bad enough, but the entirety of the belittlement, mockery, defamation, demonization, and dehumanization; the steady marshalling of hate speech, dishonest claims, unfair policies, fake research, and false representations that have justified and mandated their degradation and dispossession.

It has mostly been done by intersectional feminist leaders and their so-called anti-racist allies. The attack on white men has not been, as we were so often told, a necessary sacrifice for the greater good, but a disastrous waste and warping of human dignity. White men should not go quietly into the night—the loss to the larger society in talent, energy, intelligence and leadership potential is inestimable—and I don’t think they will.

Their forefathers built North America, and North America needs them.

In the wake of the grudging admission of what has been done, there is the possibility of a more concerted resistance than has yet been marshalled. John Carter, for example, mentions various possibilities in his analysis, including grassroots public education, community organizing, political activism, large-scale investigations, class action lawsuits, the dismantling of DEI programs and university sinecures, repeal of unjust laws, and continued (digital) guerrilla warfare. All of these are worth pursuing. We must also correct falsehoods with facts and call out bigotry when we see it at every opportunity.

What is most urgently needed is a larger cultural renaissance in which the extraordinary achievements of white men will be fully recognized and honored, including by the women who have so often been the beneficiaries of their hard work, ingenuity, intellectual curiosity, individual enterprise, collaborative genius, humanity, and self-sacrificing generosity. This is a signal opportunity for white men to become aware of their identity as white men, despite the predictable arguments that will be launched against that. What is clearer than ever is that we cannot rely on those who dislike white men and made a living slandering them to correct the injustices white men have suffered.