There's a Simpler Explanation for the Rightward Shift of Young Men

Why are young conservatives so radicalized? Why is there such a stark generation gap, something you hear about any time you talk to any Republican of any prominence, between the basically optimistic assumptions of late-middle-aged conservatives and the black-pilled doomers born after the Reagan era?

There are a lot of stories you can tell here. The young conservatives are mostly men, so you can talk about male struggles in a postindustrial economy or how the polarization of men and women makes sexual frustration an engine of radicalization. Young conservatives are also very online, so you can blame tech oligarchs and their algorithms or just cast the internet writ large as an engine of pessimism. You can blame President Trump, postliberal philosophers, racist podcasters. You can fold young male disillusionment into much bigger stories — the crisis of post-Cold War liberalism, the era of bad economic feels that Covid ushered in, the sense of human obsolescence under digital conditions.