Young men are drifting toward the alt-right. Can it be stopped?

New studies reveal the cause and severity of the crisis. Now what?

Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.

This week has been an utter onslaught of major news stories, many of which deserve their own special mentions in the next generation of high school textbooks (assuming those are still legal). Look at this lineup:

• A former president, who is once again his party’s nominee, fell asleep in the courtroom while on trial for paying hush money to cover up a night of sex with an unimpressed porn star.

• The UAW is holding a union election at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee and Republicans are terrified.

• Clarence Thomas, who shockingly rebuffed Dick Durbin’s request that he recuse himself, has decided that the Jan. 6th insurrection was no big deal.

• Arizona Republicans are plotting ways to legally gut an amendment that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.

• We are now waiting on Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to decide whether to attempt to drag the United States into a full-blown regional war in the Middle East.

We’ll cover all of those stories, but right now, we’re looking a bit further into the future — and how we can save it.

Please consider a subscribing and/or donating to keep this work sustainable. Far-right extremists are financed by billionaires and corporations, who invest in conservative outlets, think tanks, and law firms to advance their interests. We rely on forward-thinking readers like you.

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A massive new study released on Friday found that young adult men grew more conservative over the past decade, a stark reversal of past trends that tracks with other polls and election results.

Conducted by the research firm Glocalities, the study surveyed people in 20 different countries over the course of a 10-year period. The shift to the right was especially pronounced among men ages 18-24, and even more so among Americans in that demographic.

How it worked: Instead of asking respondents about their partisan alignments or political identities, Glocities asked respondents a series of questions that elucidated their values, personal outlooks, and broad policy preferences. Their answers were plotted along two axes.

One axis, which spanned across Despair and Hope, was “based on key indicators about feeling let down by society and feelings of pessimism and disillusionment about the future.”

The other axis, between Freedom and Control, asked questions that probed whether people supported a patriarchal society or one that prioritized “emancipative values including gender role flexibility, gay marriage and unmarried couples cohabitating.”

Research has shown that the Freedom and Control axis has a strong correlation with political beliefs, while Hope and Despair are more indicative of personal outlook and sentiment.

Young American men experienced a drastic shift toward despair and expressed a dip in support for a public emphasis on equality. Put together, their answers indicate a deep disillusionment with modern society and its mostly liberalizing politics, which an increasing number of young men in America do not feel serve their interests.

“The growing feelings of despair are related to a toxic combination of the cost-of-living crisis and diminishing prospects, increasing polarization, feelings of loneliness, social media timelines constantly drawing attention and the mental health crisis that many young adults are experiencing around the world,” the firm wrote in a report that accompanied the findings.

Men ages 34-55 also experienced a decline into despair, though it was far less dramatic.

In an email exchange this week, Martijn Lampert, the co-founder and research director at Glocalities, expounded on the correlation between personal finances and worldview found in the study.

“Poor economic prospects certainly plays an important role,” Lampert told me. “People at the bottom of the despair-hope scale are much more likely to have experienced a decline in income and also are more likely to expect a decline in income, while at the hope end of the spectrum the opposite is the case.”

Young American women who participated in the survey avoided the same shift toward conservatism, but experienced a similar sense of despair over the past decade.

Respondents from both genders said that they aspired to financial independence and stability, while on the macro level, each cohort also indicated concern about education, unemployment, economic growth, climate change and human rights violations.

Both genders also said they were concerned with sexual harassment, domestic violence, child abuse, and mental health, but they were more important to women respondents.

Young men, on the other hand, were more focused on “competition, bravery and honor,” which combined with resentment makes them prone to reactionary media personalities, social algorithms that promote extremism, and toxic online communities.

Similarly, a 2023 study titled “State of American Men: From Confusion and Crisis to Hope,” presented evidence of a growing disaffection fueled by tattered social connections and opportunities.

The study, conducted for the non-profit Equimundo, found that men aged 18 to 23 have “the least optimism for their futures and the lowest levels of social support,” while 65% of young men say that “no one really knows me well.”

The grim outlook and feelings of isolation and alienation give context to the fact that 44% of all men had thoughts of suicide in the two weeks prior to taking the survey, with young men experiencing suicidal ideation more than any other age group.

In search for meaning and empathy, they often turn to right-wing media figures who have aggressively sought to define manhood as “white, militaristic, and often gun-owning,” the report states. Fully 40% of all respondents said that they trusted alt-right influencers who back “men’s rights” and reject wokeness.

Remarkably, more young men said that they trusted Andrew Tate, a despicable grifter and alleged rapist known as the “King of Toxic Masculinity,” than said that they trusted Joe Biden. While Biden has suffered low approval numbers throughout his presidency, Tate became famous by exploiting women via webcams and last year was arrested in Romania on charges of sex trafficking.

It goes unsaid in both the Glocalities and Equimundo studies, but as the politics of the trusted influencers and communities listed in the study indicate, the move toward a more conservative worldview can be predominantly attributed to white men. The rise in neofascist attitudes, open racism, and campaigns against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives all emanate from those influencers and people like them.

For those despairing young men looking for more intellectual stimulation

A poll conducted by Change Research and released this winter (see above) honed in on more specific political identity can help us understand with more nuance where voters are right now. Nearly 40% of men identified themselves as progressive (24%) or liberal (15%), while 18% said that they were conservative, 111% identified as MAGA, and 13% called themselves libertarians (a fake identity that eventually gives way to right-wing sympathies.

How did this happen? Should we care?

It’s tempting to roll your eyes at the despair felt by young white men at a time when women are losing control of their bodies, people of color are losing their voting rights, and LGBTQ+ people are being ostracized and denied medical care, and five million poor people have lost their health care.

We can probably all agree that young white men as a whole don’t have it as bad as most other people in America, and after 275 or so years of control in the United States, their collective concerns shouldn’t be government or society’s top priority, especially when those concerns are derived from an inability to cope with the liberation of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities.

At the same time, people can only live within their own context, and the disillusionment is not simply a phenomenon of American conservatism; this shift toward illiberalism has already helped elect a number of far-right governments in Europe and in Argentina at the same time that it is having a profound impact on American politics.

Without efforts to reverse the trajectory, young men will likely only become more disillusioned and susceptible to the appeals of scumbag reactionaries in media and politics, who they often discover thanks to algorithms that reward extremism over rationality.

Thanks to the siloing effect of social media, it’s already probably worse than you realize.

For example, earlier today, the Kent State campus chapter of alt-right youth organization Turning Point USA is hosting a conversation between Charlie Kirk (imagine the Neanderthal version of Tucker Carlson) and Kyle Rittenhouse, who is famous for traveling hundreds of miles to kill Black Lives Matter protestors and getting away with literal murder.

The head of the campus group was more succinct in his description, calling Rittenhouse’s sordid tale an example of “standing up for yourself,” which speaks to the victim complex that has engulfed so much many young white men. Other students are protesting the event, but it says something that there was enough interest in bringing this lunk to campus. Even more alarming is the fact that these clowns have wormed their way into our lives to the point that it’s merely a local issue.

The origins of despair and resentment

It’s important to note before we go any farther that there are plenty of people who are just born with a natural inclination toward being nasty, miserable jerks, and many others who are raised in an environment that encourages malice. Much of human history has been shaped by their personality flaws.

What we’re talking about here is an attempt to mitigate their influence going forward by understanding and counteracting the issues that have put them in position to exploit those who might otherwise not fall prey to their influence. Addressing despair, for example, is in some ways a matter of providing some reassurance and creating a true sense of opportunity.

Young people are trying to establish some foothold in adulthood during a time of precariousness, working in jobs that either do not offer much hope of advancement or could be downsized at any time. Paying rent is increasingly difficult, leading to more young people living with their parents, and for a vast majority, owning their own home is a distant pipe dream. The Glocalities study found that young people have little optimism that the future will be much better, either for themselves or the planet at large.

Though I recently aged out of that 18-34 cohort, I have a decent understanding of what its members are experiencing.

I graduated college in 2008 and immediately ran into the buzzsaw of the global financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession. People around my age were either locked out of the job market or stuck in low-paying jobs for years, then got stuck trying to navigate through tremendous upheaval driven by technology, monopoly, and the financialization of previously functional industries.

Traditional blue collar routes to middle class prosperity were outsourced, employers embraced the independent contractor model, and startups came and went on the whims of mildly sociopathic venture capitalists. We were told to “learn to code,” but even highly skilled programmers are now facing layoffs and increasing difficulty in finding new work.

Whereas being a journalist once ensured a comfortable living, I got into the business just before the collapse of print newspapers and magazines, which were gutted by hedge fund owners and Big Tech’s domination of paid advertising. For millennials, a career in media has been a cycle of trying to ride the ever-smaller waves of investment and avoiding the wipeouts, which continue to pile up. The same can be said about many other fields — even young doctors are now finding themselves in financial uncertainty, carrying crushing debt while stuck in practices bought out by private equity or at hospitals more concerned with profit margin.

The situation is in many ways worse for more recent graduates. From childhoods rocked by the foreclosure crisis and countless school shootings to adolescences spoiled by extreme isolation that gave way to early adulthoods stunted by an uneven economy, they have only known a world in chaos and helplessness. In many cases, these events proved transformative.

According to Lampert, his study found that the Covid pandemic “further contributed and accelerated the trends” toward despair and embrace of right-wing influencers.

”People who are despairing and feel isolated [feel that] their world is shrinking,” he explains, which draws them to an online world that is “much more polarized than a much more moderate reality, where the majority is in the middle of the bell curve.”

In this way, the problem has already metastasized beyond its original dimension.

Diagnosis: Main Character Syndrome

For young men in particular, traditional gender roles and expectations have collided with liberal social movements and the inability to nail down full-time jobs or upwardly mobile careers, resulting in feelings of inadequacy and rage.

The #MeToo movement, for instance, was a sorely needed flashpoint that led to broader — and often difficult — conversations about gender dynamics, inappropriate behavior, and the occasional reckoning for famous serial offenders, yet some young men found themselves feeling unfairly attacked and scapegoated. A poll conducted in the fall of 2022 found that 53% of men believed that it was harder to know how to interact with women in the workplace.

(The answer to that conundrum, obviously, is to simply be considerate of others and avoid being a creep, but not everyone wants or knows how to do that.)

As a political journalist who spent in a decade in cultural media, including during the height of the #MeToo movement, I see these sort of comments every day. Still, the opinions about feminism held by the youngest adults left me somewhat floored.

I have no sympathy for retrograde attitudes, and don’t think we should coddle them. But we do need to examine their context. Economic stagnation and feeling scapegoated can easily curdle into resentment, especially at groups perceived to be either responsible for or even beneficiaries of their struggles. The revolt against DEI was the product of wanky bigots like Christopher Rufo, who worked with right-wing media it as another instance of reverse discrimination against white men, examples of which are legion in the miserable alt-right universe.

Much of the far-right media purports to expose high-level, far-reaching conspiracies that are stacked against the viewer — our allies in the Deep State are evidently very preoccupied with middle school bathrooms and the minuscule funding that goes to student groups at small colleges.

It sounds preposterous, but so for many people, this kind of conspiracy serves a quasi-religious purpose by explaining seemingly intractable problems as the work of an evil power, absolving them of blame while conferring a kind of holy righteousness.

Cynical politicians and right-wing figures have spent recent years feeding this sense of victimization. When they try to manipulate school history books to center the stories of white people who opposed slavery, it is in part a message telling their adult followers that they shouldn’t feel guilty for past injustices, and therefore shouldn’t be forced to sublimate their interests in support of social justice.

Is it possible, then, to find ways to arrest this alarming trend without selling out other groups?

The solutions require long-term commitments

An enhanced social safety net would alleviate the immediate pressure so many young people feel, while economic policies that break up monopolies and incentivize the creation of good-paying jobs can foster a trust in government that many rightly believe is more often than not working for the ultra rich.

Unionization protects rights in the workplace and create a sense of purpose and camaraderie, essential for any hope of restoring a social fabric tattered by years of neoliberal economic policies and conservative culture wars, then the isolation of a pandemic. For all its benefits, remote work also exacerbates these problems.

The good news is that there has been an uptick in unionization campaigns spearheaded by young people, while the Biden administration has worked to enact or encourage some of those policies to one degree or another.

Still, half-measures, unavoidable government bureaucracy, opposition from corporations, steady bashing from conservatives, and trailing indicators have slowed their implementation and hampered any broad public acknowledgement. That should evolve some as the year goes on, but attempting to guide a generation of young men (and women) will require structural changes that go far beyond the construction of bridges, dispersal of industrial subsidies, and reduction of junk fees.

Glocalities and Equimundo both recommend a concerted effort to provide alternatives to the alt-right influencers by identifying and promoting more positive, moderate role models for young men. While not a bad at idea, new personalities on their own won’t reach people on the other side of the far-right echo chamber, and frankly, moderates are never going to catch on with people used to extremism.

What’s needed now is a new infrastructure of independent progressive media that is driven by real reporting and authentic voices who give serious thought to the issues facing young people, match their anger, then direct it toward those who are truly responsible for societal decline. Podcasts, YouTube channels, online community platforms and organizations that can put on live events — we laugh at Turning Points USA, but Kirk now operates a national umbrella organization designed specifically to radicalize college students, men and women alike.

This new progressive media sphere must be funded, at least at first, by the unions, non-profits, wealthy liberal donors, and individuals who can afford monthly pledges. Institutional donors must be committed for the long-haul and not suddenly threaten to pull back every time the reporting makes them uncomfortable, opinions cause controversy, or the content is hard to decipher.

It can’t simply be a press organ of the Democratic Party — it may seem counterintuitive, but Republicans often succeed because their base demands more of them, forcing a more populist approach. Editorial independence is key — partisan astroturfing is obvious, even when the messenger is a Gen Z liberal. In fact, they’re often even more cringe. Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense.

There are important other facets to consider — in-person organizing is crucial, and not just the transactional kind in the months before an election. The crumbling of social institutions have made this far harder, so it may come down to opening community centers or sponsoring bowling and softball leagues, bringing people together in places that do not have any overt political angle. Socializing is essential for broad-based empathy.

Donors will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into TV and digital campaign ads in the hopes of nudging polls a few points one way or another, and in some cases, it may even work. It’s a lucrative hustle for Democratic ad buyers, who are really the only people who derive any long-term benefit from this practice.

The amount of money that goes into one competitive Senate race could establish a beachhead in media and fund expansion for years. It shouldn’t even really be a choice — the numbers tell us that doing more of the same is likely to cement a bitter, angry, reactionary majority for years to come.

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