Are White Men a "Lost Generation"? Interview With Author Jacob Savage

The disenfranchisement of young men has already come at a heavy cost, and the biggest consequences likely lay ahead

Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff were sold to Democratic voters as masculine ideals

From Jacob Savage in Compact:

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

Savage’s piece, which is rocketing around the Internet this week, describes a bait-and-switch. A generation of young white men raised to believe in traditional liberal principles like racial liberation, equal pay, and gay rights woke up in the early 2010s to discover they’d somehow signed on to a program of disenfranchising themselves. What started out as an anecdotal hassle, dangerous even to whisper about, suddenly became undeniable statistical truth, and millions of men like Savage who didn’t want to leave what Savage calls his “home” (Liberal America) were not only forced out, but left facing the reality of a society “deliberately rooting against you.”

Regrettably, I was part of it. In 2014, the year Savage refers to as “the hinge,” I started work at an American corporation for the first and only time, in a job with hiring responsibilities. I’d left Rolling Stone to work for eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, ostensibly to head a satirical complement to The Intercept. Before the publication had a name, before we had authority to buy pencils or an office computer, we were already rejecting applicants for racial reasons.

The interviews were surreal. Young men in their early thirties walked in with heads hanging, expecting the exact dynamic Savage describes in his article: white-guy Gen-X bosses telling younger counterparts there was no room for them. Making things worse was the fact that my project was meant to be a digital homage to Mad, Cracked, and Spy, publications whose readers were overwhelmingly rebellious boys and young men, so stacks of resumés came in from the grown versions. We had to turn them away, as the Omidyar bosses insisted on stressing diversity goals, which were more than once expressed to me not so much as efforts to hire more women and minorities, but as a cap on white guys. “The world doesn’t need more Gawkers,” is how it was put to me in one meeting.

Six years later in 2020, a writer I’d tried and failed to hire, Lee Fang, got in hot water at The Intercept over a preposterous non-incident. At the peak of Summer-of-Floyd mania, Fang interviewed a black man in the Bay Area who’d had two cousins murdered. The man, who went by the name Maximum Fr, wondered “why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?” For the crime of tweeting that video, Fang, who is Asian — absurdly, there were no white people in this alleged racism story — was accused of being racist by a black female co-worker. To save his job, Fang was dragged before HR and made to issue a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.”

In covering that episode I interviewed a handful of writers from other places who had similar experiences. All were more skittish than bank whistleblowers or intelligence sources. They’d call back multiple times, or late at night, to make sure I didn’t give away identifying details like their beats or, in one particularly weird case, a time zone. Savage described the same issues in writing his piece about what he calls the “Lost Generation” of millennial men:

There were frenzied pre-publication negotiations over what personal details I could include, back-and-forths over words and phrases, requests to change pseudonyms to sound even less like real names. Standing behind it was a fear: that they would end up being that guy.

Savage’s piece is itself written carefully. He doesn’t blame women or minorities or anyone in particular for his own rough experience climbing the not-ladder, scalping tickets for fifteen years while he waited for a screenwriting break that never came. Instead, he focuses on his own experience and regrets, with the most powerful part a personal confession:

Mostly I’m annoyed at myself. Because instead of settling down, proposing to my then-girlfriend (now wife), and earning a steady income that might support a family, I spent a decade insisting the world treat me fairly, when the world was loudly telling me it had no intention of doing so.

You’ll hear more from Savage in the Q&A below, but a word first about an issue that’s long been taboo and matters quite a bit, whether or not you empathize with young men who for the first time are getting a taste of what women and minorities long went through as a matter of course: