How Compact learned to love the PMC

They began promising post-woke class war against the PMC, but now they just want more white men among the "cultural elite."

After an impressive three year streak of overwhelming irrelevance to the national discourse, Compact Magazine finally has a viral article: The Lost Generation, written by Jacob Savage. As Savage puts it, the article is “a story about white male millenials in professional America” and how, in their quest to build careers, “a whole generation found their path was blocked” by DEI. An argument like this is destined to get attention from all of the usual suspects, of course — from white supremacists like Scott Grier and Patrick Casey to left-coded “heterodox” streamers like Sh0e — but unlike most Compact articles, it has even been promoted by high-profile figures like Vice President JD Vance.

Substantively there is not much here.

Savage writes the sort of sprawling piece that will convince lazy readers into deciding it is exhaustive, and its handful of random data points give it the appearance of rigor. Mostly, however, The Lost Generation is a collection of anecdotes and hearsay. In one typical passage, for example, Savage quotes an anonymous reporter complaining about his newsroom that “The femaleness is striking…where have the guys gone?” Then we get some data about alleged demographic shifts — specifically at Vox and Buzzfeed. (Savage also provides current data for Condé Nast, but doesn’t bother documenting any shift.) Then we get this passage:

The demographic shift reshaped not only who told the stories, but which stories got told. After George Floyd’s death, Andrew’s colleague Lucas was assigned a piece about why you should never call the police. “I remember having to interview one of these abolitionists for a story about how if somebody breaks into your car or your home, it’s white supremacy to call the cops—even if you need it for an insurance report,” Lucas told me. “That always made me feel gross. I think back on that with a lot of regret.”

Note, of course, the complete lack of demographic information about who assigned the piece — a curious omission, since the article also insists that “older white men [have] remained in charge” throughout the news industry. So is this a story of black diversity hires forcing hapless subordinates to advance their radical anti-cop agenda? Or is this a young white intern complaining that his white boss made him interview a leftist that he disagrees with?