Life as a Vocation

A wonderful new essay raises deep questions about how and why we’ve ended up in our present political predicament

Cambridge University’s James Orr, one of Mana Afsari’s college teachers, speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC in July 2024. (A still taken from a video of the conference posted on YouTube.)

I write a lot of posts that look at what’s happening on the right and attempt to evaluate these developments. How bad is this? Is it “normal” bad? “Abnormal” bad? Or “truly alarming and dangerous” bad?

But today’s post is a little different. It takes a cross section of what’s happening—the shift of the youngest cohort of voters toward Donald Trump’s right-populist MAGA movement—and seeks to answer the question of why.

In doing this work, I’ve been invaluably aided by a remarkable essay that’s generated considerable (and well-justified) buzz over the past week or so. In “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” published in the excellent journal The Point, author Mana Afsari does something at once very simple and extremely difficult: She writes about and insightfully describes what she saw and heard at a pair of Washington conferences in July 2024: one the fourth National Conservatism confab; the other the inaugural meeting of “Liberalism in the 21^st Century,” organized by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. (I attended and wrote about the latter, and I make a cameo appearance in Afsari’s essay.)

I highly recommend you read the essay for yourself. I will describe some of what Afsari notes in her piece, but the precise (and delightful) flavor and texture of her descriptions will inevitably be lost in the paraphrases and brief quotations to follow. Yet as I’ll try to convey, even without those details, the essay is a welcome contribution to our understanding of (one important aspect of) what everyone seems to be calling a major “vibe shift” in our culture. Young people, and especially young men, are moving right—or finding themselves on the right as they come to political consciousness for the first time. That’s a big deal, and we need to grasp its causes.

An Intellectually Vital Right