♦ H. Richard Niebuhr taught at Yale Divinity School for many decades. In 1953, he made the following observations in a short column, “On Our Conservative Youth,” in a special issue of the Yale student newspaper:
Present-day youth has to rest its large-scale security on deeper foundations and this is probably the source of its religious interest. . . . Some of it is finding no greater security than an Epicurean philosophy of chance offers; but much of it is getting down to bedrock and finding a foundation on which life can rest unmoved, if not unshaken, in these stormy times. There is a venturesomeness in the quest, but it is a hidden thing, and not apparent to those who think of risk only in terms of risked capital or risked lives. In this respect, once more, youth today, as far as it participates in this movement of the human spirit toward a less vulnerable faith in life than that which has been tested and found wanting, is more representative of a period of history than merely itself.
Something similar can be said in 2025.
♦ The courts are tangling with the Trump administration. One judge blocked the administration’s ban on transgender persons in military service, which was issued on the grounds that they impair military effectiveness. The New York Times report on the court order cited the effect of the ban on Sgt. First Class Julia Becraft: “She [sic] was so distraught over the president’s order that she decided to take vacation time to focus on her mental health, and has been attending therapy sessions.” Who could possibly imagine that men presenting themselves as women would be anything less than exemplary platoon leaders?
♦ Jacob Savage, writing at Compact (“The Vanishing White Male Writer”):
Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).
Savage observes the rank discrimination at work, which became rampant in the late Obama years and then accelerated as the academic and literary world went into Resistance™ against Trump, only to be supercharged by 2020’s Summer of Denunciations. But Savage makes a larger point about white male millennials: Their imaginations are hamstrung by the surreal, morally inverted world that frames their adulthood. It has required them to acknowledge their privilege in the interest of professional advancement, even as doing so rarely proves effective. Savage summarizes the generational differences:
White male boomer novelists live in a self-mythologizing fantasyland in which they are the prime movers of history; their Gen X counterparts (with a few exceptions), blessed with the good sense to begin their professional careers before 2014, delude themselves into believing they still enjoy the Mandate of Heaven (as they stand athwart history, shouting platitudes about fascism). But white male millennials, caught between the privileges of their youths and the tragicomedies of their professional and personal lives, understand intrinsically that they are stranded on the wrong side of history—that there are no Good White Men.
♦ I’d speculate that white male dominance of the tech start-up culture stems in part from the fact that so many avenues of professional success were off limits to white males in recent decades. In the 1990s, I saw professorial appointments in the humanities denied to young white males coming into the academic job market. But one could still go to Wall Street and become a Master of the Universe. DEI came to finance a generation later, narrowing the pathways for white males, who, if they were fired with ambition, went instead to Silicon Valley and other hubs of start-up culture. In another Compact article (“The Emerging Democratic Minority”), John B. Judis notes that, aside from Joe Biden, during the last twenty years, no Democratic nominee for president has been a white male. None of the current members of the Democratic House leadership is a white male. Would it therefore be surprising if ambitious white men born after 1970 were to gravitate toward the Republican Party and conservative politics as the avenue to high office? Affirmative action was designed by white males of earlier generations to increase non-white and female participation in elite professions and powerful positions. Those white males, now aging out, gained a great deal of social prestige, wealth, and power through their sponsorship of this project. Social scientists have failed to grapple with the fact that younger white males, especially ambitious ones with high social capital, have not been an inert portion of the body politic. They have found pathways to success that have transformed American society.
♦ Civic friendship is the glue of solidarity. It transcends our proper expectation of justice. Civic friendship cherishes, for their own sakes, the shared loves and common projects that bind us together. It is warm and does not wait for the arrival of perfect justice.
♦ Ryan Burge is one of the best analysts of data on religious practice. Here’s his assessment of the relation between educational attainment and religiosity: “The people who are most likely to identify as non-religious [nones] are the folks who didn’t finish high school. The least likely [to be nones] are those who have earned master’s degrees.” The likelihood of a religious outlook increases with educational attainment.
♦ Joseph Ratzinger, in his “Letter to Marcello Pera”:
Living on the great values of the Christian tradition is naturally much harder than a life rendered dull by the increasingly costly habits of our time. The Christian model of life must be manifested as a life in all its fullness and freedom, a life that does not experience the bonds of love as dependence and limitation but rather as an opening to the greatness of life.
♦ Richard Weaver on the importance of a historical memory that resists progressive arrogance: “It is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the ‘progress’ of history through the eyes of those left behind.” By Weaver’s reckoning, entertaining “lost causes and impossible loyalties” provides a gateway to freedom. Those causes and loyalties prepare us to oppose “the pragmatic verdict of the world.”
♦ More from Weaver, this time on the metaphysical heresy of progressivism: “The intent of the radical to defy all substance, or to press it into forms conceived in his mind alone, is thus theologically wrong; it is an aggression of the self which outrages a deep-laid order of things.” Transgender ideology has brought this heresy very much out into the open.
♦ Over at The Lamp, Jude Russo reflects on the potential contributions that Indian English might make to American slang:
For example: the versatile “-wallah” formation, endlessly useful in our modern world of gigs, side hustles, and rackets. What if this were applied to American English? Your cousin who is into day-trading becomes a stockwallah; the fellow from your high school who collected and traded sneakers a shoewallah; your humble correspondent an inkwallah.
♦ I find myself returning to John M. Owen IV’s recent essay, “Liberalism’s Fourth Turning” (August/September 2024). Owen outlines the many forms of liberalism that have shaped American public life, the latest iteration of which he describes as “open liberalism,” characterized by “a dogmatic rejection of all boundaries, material or social, particularly inherited ones.” This kind of liberalism is coming to an end, undermined by its own excesses. But Americans are unlikely to adopt “postliberalism,” or some other political regime “after liberalism.” Instead, Owen foresees a future consensus that “will assemble around pluralistic liberalism, a liberalism that embodies a paradox different from the compulsory fluidity of open liberalism: the paradox that freedom can entail choosing to stop choosing.” By “pluralist liberalism” Owen does not mean the dead hand of multiculturalism. Rather, he envisions a liberal polity that encourages connections and obligations that transcend politics—connections and obligations that will diverge, given the pluralistic nature of our nation. We’ll know that this new consensus is taking hold when our legal system and cultural mores buttress lifelong marriage (perhaps by rolling back no-fault divorce) and encourage religious observance (perhaps by overturning mid-twentieth-century Supreme Court rulings against school prayer). Here’s hoping that day arrives soon
♦ A friend drew my attention to a January 21, 2025 article in the New York Times. The topic was the Trump administration’s effort to limit the scope of birthright citizenship, the constitutional provision that accords citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The article’s title: “Undocumented Women Ask: Will My Unborn Child be a Citizen?” When the issue is abortion, the New York Times would never dream of referring to an “unborn child.” Apparently, that editorial discretion falls away when illegal immigration is under discussion.
♦ Carter Skeel served First Things for three years as director of development, and for the past year as director of advancement. His efforts have borne good fruit. Our donations have increased significantly under his watch, a testimony to the generosity of the First Things readership, which Carter has done a great deal to encourage. Carter also managed the redesign of our website, which has been a great success, as well as our publication management system, unseen by readers, but very important for our long-term success as an organization. He is leaving our employ to take a position as executive director of the Institute for Family Studies. I’ve enjoyed every day that I’ve worked with Carter. He has been a splendid ambassador for all things First Things. Please join me in wishing him great success at IFS.
♦ The annual First Things Intellectual Retreat in New York City will take place on August 9–10. This year’s theme: Faith and Technology. The retreat begins on Friday with dinner and a lecture, delivered by Jon Askonas, professor of political science at the Catholic University of America and one of the most astute commentators on the ways in which technology has transformed public life. On Saturday, participants gather in small groups for seminars throughout the day, discussing readings assigned in advance. The retreat ends with a festive dinner. I can report from long experience that the Intellectual Retreat stimulates the mind and provides welcome fellowship. To sign up, visit firstthings.com/events.
♦ David Varghese, in Washington, D.C., would like to form a ROFTers group to meet every month to discuss the latest articles in First Things. To join, get in touch with him: [email protected].
