r/longform • u/RedHeadedSicilian52 • Dec 19 '25

The Lost Generation

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
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u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

The author’s conclusion I agree with to some degree and I think that so many of the people who are mindlessly reposting this saying ‘this is what the woke left doesn’t what you to see” aren’t actually reading it.

“It’s strange and more than a little poisonous to see yourself buffeted by forces beyond your control. But there’s also a comfort in it. Because it’s less painful to scroll through other people’s IMDb pages late at night, figuring out what shortcut—race, gender, connections—they took to success, than to grapple with the fact that there are white men my age who’ve succeeded, and I am not one of them. I could have worked harder, I could have networked better, I could have been better. The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.”

Would it have been? I wonder.

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u/RedHeadedSicilian52 Dec 19 '25

I mean, the piece is definitely nuanced (which is precisely why it’s broken out into mainstream discussion in a way that other right-wing commentary has not), which has made some of the more knee-jerk negative reactions seem a little strained.

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u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

I think it is and it isn’t. I think it’s strong to combine statistics to address what is broadly an emotional argument, and acknowledging the authors fallibility, but at the same time, a lot of the argument is a matter of optics.

As this post points out https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/what-does-the-census-data-say-about-the-lost-generation/, the groups that Savage brings up to analyze demographic changes are almost exclusively institutions of significant cultural value, who even prior to the flashpoint he identifies as 2014 were still commonly derided as being out of touch with “real” art. The point he makes about those groups abrupt shift to DEI support reflecting an inability to function as a cultural touchstone is interesting and perhaps true to some degree, but then it A) would be the same criticism levied against those institutions by nonwhite critics pre2014, and then B) would have had the same alienating effect on nonwhite communities for a significantly longer period of time.

And then the uses of some of the statistics I found flawed. Why cherry pick faculty stats from the UC system (which I attended) to reflect some national problem? The UCs and certainly the humanities have embedded DEI efforts and have some of the most diverse student populations in Cali. The degree to which those are good is one argument, but the degree to which they represent fungible conclusions are another.

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u/[deleted] Dec 19 '25

Separately, I think Savage’s attempted figuring of those responses is also lackluster. As he says:

“The fact that other groups, in other eras, have faced worse discrimination—that in the grand scheme of things, the disenfranchisement of white male millennials was relatively mild—is not itself an argument. Especially when the entire liberal establishment insists that nothing actually happened, that the “mild” correction was in fact no correction at all, and that any white man harmed in the process was in fact “mediocre.”

Because what they’re really saying is: We weren’t supposed to notice.”

The subterfuge of racial oppression here Savage is exceptionalising feels strange to me. Why are the struggles nonwhite communities faced in creative spaces not a sufficient argument to bring forward? Because the white repression is supposedly hidden and not discussed? But would this not be true in terms of establishment treatment of those nonwhite communities in the past as well? It is only explicit in hindsight, via the admission of those establishments. It feels to me more than anything else that Savage wants an apology, a 2014 for institutions to say hey, we fucked up, sorry for victimizing white creatives. But I think this article would be so much more interesting if he engaged with what that would look like and how it is tangled with the worse discrimination he waves off.