Lament for the white male socialist media guy
Why aren't there more of us?
Debate over The Lost Generation, Compact Magazine’s lament for the plight of white male millenials, continues. For one response to the piece itself you can see my reply from earlier this week; for another, take a look at Matt Bruenig’s critique. At this point I think it would be reasonable to say that Generation’s central thesis of economy-wide discrimination against white males have been completely dismantled, so here I’d just like to talk about a related topic.
Compact’s Substack has a new post up on the plight of the white male millennial socialists in the media. In other words people like me, as well as folks like Matt Bruenig, Nathan J. Robinson, and the hosts of Chapo Trap House. Author Geoff Shullenberger notes that folks like us have only been able to succeed insofar as we have been able to build platforms outside of the mainstream media, which has clearly excluded us. He then asks why people like us “are devoting their efforts to debunking Savage’s criticisms of the legacy institutions they themselves fled,” and concludes that “the simplest answer is coalitional”: we would lose supporters.
This is not, of course, actually the simplest answer. The simplest answer is that we are criticizing Savage because we think he is incorrect. When I saw the buzz around The Lost Generation I was genuinely curious if the author had put together some sophisticated and rigorous analysis that I had never encountered on the demographics of discrimination. Instead, what Savage gave us was an endless parade of anecdotes and decontextualized data points. There was no there there.
I want to dwell on this point for a moment. A week or so ago, I spent an afternoon working with Census data on class mobility. I had a theory that once a parent hits a certain income percentile his children become markedly less likely to face downward mobility since at that point they are just living off of capital, so I wanted to test it. But after working with it for a few hours the data seemed to fit my theory almost too perfectly, so I called up Matt Bruenig to talk to him about it.
At this point, according to Shullenberger, you would expect us to have a conversation about how our audience would respond to this, and I would have eagerly run to publish the results since “here’s a quantitative way to identify the bourgeoisie” is such a convenient discovery for someone with my politics. But that wasn’t how the conversation went at all. Matt and I went back and forth about it for a half hour and sent each other some charts, but in the end it became clear that the data we were working with just wasn’t granular enough to make the kind of case I thought it might make. We were both genuinely curious about what the data might say, but when the case became too weak I abandoned it and (as you may have noticed) never wrote about it.
Over the years, folks in my media niche have often found ourselves laying out data rebutting right-wing narratives about identity. But we have often taken on liberal narratives as well. As far back as 2015, for example, you can find Matt criticizing liberal claims that race plays a greater role that class in incarceration rates. In this piece, you can find me arguing that anti-socialist attitudes are much more prevalent than racism and sexism. These arguments have often faced a serious backlash from precisely the audience that we are accused of pandering to. When Matt wrote his article about black incarceration rates he was publicly excorciated by liberals and socialists who accused him of “erasing” racism. When I wrote my piece on anti-socialism, DSA members wrote entire articles criticizing it.
For me, what all of these episodes have in common is my interest in what the data actually says. That is the simplest explanation for why I think that Savage as wrong, and the one that is most consistent with my demonstrable record as a guy who writes a lot about data. That is why I make this argument even though, as a white male millennial socialist in the media, it would obviously be convenient for me to argue that I am being discriminated against.
That said, since Shullenberger has decided to speculate about motive, allow me to return the favor. Imagine that you are a white male millennial populist of some sort who saw the niche market of socialist media open up a decade ago. You tried to break in, but you failed. This left you with three options:
Conclude that you failed to make it into socialist media because of your personal shortcomings as a writer.
Conclude that we live in a ferociously anti-socialist country which keeps the socialist media market so tiny and underfunded that almost no one can make a living in it.
Conclude that you were shut out of the media because of some fact about your demographic identity.
I have no problem with admitting that option one would be very hard for me to accept even if it were true; it would be such a serious blow to my ego and self-image that I don’t know if I could ever believe it. Fortunately, option two seems not only plausible to me but entirely consistent with both the numbers and my experiences as a socialist writer. I know perfectly well that even if I wanted to I would never be able to work at the overwhelming majority of mainstream outlets simply because my views as a socialist are too well known.
But what if I didn’t have very strong convictions as a socialist, either? What if, like the DSA folks who criticized my piece on anti-socialism years ago, I didn’t believe that anti-socialism is actually a sufficient explanation for many of the challenges we face? And what if, on top of that, I saw a career path open up at a populist-right publication that’s sympathetic to claims about reverse racism? In that case, I would have several overwhelming incentives to adopt explanation three.
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