Transcript: Jacob Savage
An interview with the American writer
The popularity of identity politics, and the subsequent fallout from this ideology, is something that we’ve tried to unpack and understand on the Lean Out podcast. My guest on the program this week has published a viral essay on the impacts of this moment on Millennial white men. He argues that an entire generation was shut out of certain professions and found themselves in a society that was “deliberately rooting against” them.
Jacob Savage is an American writer. His latest essay, for Compact Magazine, is The Lost Generation.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: In mid-December, you published an essay with Compact titled The Lost Generation, which went viral. The thesis, in a nutshell, is that white Millennial male professionals have been shut out of a lot of industries. You do provide a lot of very compelling data. You write that 2014 was the hinge year and that DEI became institutionalized: “In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man and then provided just that.” You tell your own story here about trying to break into Hollywood. I have heard this argument that you make from white men in the creative class — media, literature, academia — on an anecdotal basis. But as you point out in the piece, a lot of people are not comfortable making this argument in public. What made you decide to do it?
JS: I think personally, I exist outside these institutions at this point. I scalp tickets for a living. I don’t have a boss. I gave up on Hollywood a couple years ago. So, I think for me at least, the stakes were not such that my future employment was at stake. I spoke to academics who had tenure, and some of them were very paranoid. But I think it makes sense, in a way, because you’re going to have to spend the next 20 years of your life around your coworkers and you don’t want them whispering behind your back every time you go to the bathroom. So, I think what made me comfortable is that I just was no longer part of it at all. And that led to the freedom, I guess.
TH: You initially started this story for The Atlantic. How did it end up in Compact?
JS: It was a long road. I had pitched a friend who was really into it at The Atlantic. I really hope I didn’t throw her under the bus when I initially revealed that tidbit to Matt Taibbi. But The Atlantic came back to me and said, “We only want to make this about you.” They weren’t going to commission it, but they basically said, “We’ll probably publish it if it’s just about you and Hollywood. You can use a few stats, but that’s it. Not a generational argument.”
You know, I’m not 25 anymore. My dream is not to be published in The Atlantic. It’s not going to suddenly make my career and my life all better. And I really wanted to get the full argument out. So, I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Then I didn’t really work on it for a while. I wrote a spinoff. I sent cold emails to people I kind of knew at New York Magazine and The New York Times Magazine and basically got nothing back. Then I wrote this piece that was a spinoff of the previous idea, about white men in literature, and Millennial white men not being able to write about their experience.
That had been commissioned by — I won’t name the outlet — but they then thought it was a little too spicy. They didn’t want it. At that point I was like, “What am I going to do?” I sent it to the slush pile at Compact and they liked it and published it. And then Matthew Schmitz, the editor of Compact, we talked and he was like, “The bigger piece, I think you should do it.” Then I did. That’s the long trial of getting this to print.
TH: The piece really illustrates something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is this gap between expectations and reality. This idea — I guess we’d call it a social contract — that if you go to school, you work hard, you respect the law, you can have a decent life and a decent place to live and a family if you choose that. That’s just not the case for a lot of people now. I do think this is a collapse of the social contract. We can focus on elite professions and on college-educated people, but it’s not limited to just that sphere. What do you see as the social consequences of this gap? This is something Ross Douthat got at when he wrote about your piece in The New York Times.
JS: I think it’s bad. I think that the thing is — I mean, especially for people my age, or Millennials — is that it’s one thing to be told … You know, my father-in-law is pretty old, and he’s Jewish and went to Penn in the 1950s. He knew implicitly that he wasn’t going to get a job on Madison Avenue when he graduated college. And it was fine. He didn’t. He found other things to do and had a great life.
I think part of the tragedy for us specifically — because I do think that this has applied to Gen Z as well — but we graduated college really thinking that the world was open to us in this way. And absolutely, as soon as we started our careers in earnest, it was not. You can be annoyed or angry in a different way if you don’t waste your time on something than if you spend a decade of your life going to grad school and doing the things that you’re supposed to do, only to then realize at the end of the journey that the exit tunnel has been closed.
On some level, that’s not just true of white men. I understand some of the critique that that is also true for a lot of other people who’ve attempted to enter these professions. But I think it was very specifically something that did happen to white men.
TH: It’s interesting to talk through the response to the piece, which I found very instructive, in terms of where this conversation is at. On the one hand, you had the “Bluesky” response, which I found very immature — a lot of ad hominem. I’m thinking of Jamelle Bouie from The New York Times saying, “This is just about personal failure.” Given the stats you provide in the piece, I just don’t think that criticism holds. It was disappointing to see the name-calling, and the “LOL,” eye-rolling. How did you digest that side of the response?
JS: That side of the response, that rolls off. Because I think it’s so crazy. I think they’re so siloed in what they believe and what evidence they’re open to, like almost Bush-level epistemic closure, as people used to say.
I didn’t write the piece just about myself because that is exactly what would have happened had I done that, and people would’ve been, in some cases, justified in saying that. I think to ignore both the research that I did do — the people who went off the record but told the truth about what hiring looked like — combined with the stats, I don’t see how you can get to “this didn’t happen.”
What I also find strange about that critique — it’s not really a critique — is that these are the people ostensibly most interested in having prevented Donald Trump from being president in 2024 and most interested in preventing J.D. Vance or whoever else from being president in 2029. If they actually have that as a goal, instrumentally they might want to look at what led to Donald Trump being president, beyond him being bad. And I think their unwillingness to even contemplate that white men can have some self-interest in the way society is run — that that itself is illegitimate — does not bode well for that kind of politics going forward.
TH: You come from the left, so do I. How do you feel about the left these days?
JS: I feel bad, mostly. I feel like there was a really wild wrong turn taken. In retrospect, I think I’ve become more right-wing in other ways. But I think that we thought after Obama was elected, we were going to enter this sort of post-racial utopia. And when we didn’t, things kind of spun out in a way that they didn’t have to.
I think you can vote for whoever you want. I totally understand people who still voted for Kamala Harris. Or who voted for Donald Trump, for that matter. But I think there’s something personally beneath my dignity of voting for people who I think my existence is a problem for them. I think that the same way that a Black person in the 1980s, no matter what the Republican Party said publicly, had a spidey feeling that their world would be easier if they didn’t exist. That’s the way that I feel, basically, about the Democratic Party today. Not to say there aren’t things that I agree with them about, platform-wise. But for my own dignity, how can I support people who look at my existence as a problem?
TH: Was there a moment when you realized that you felt that way? Was there a turning point, or was it gradual?
JS: I mean, most of these things are gradual. I think it was pretty gradual. I always rolled my eyes at the woke stuff, but I don’t think it made me furious until later.
TH: In the interests of really trying to understand what has happened here — which a lot of the critique just doesn’t — [I want to raise some counterpoints]. I should mention, too, that from the right, there’s been some anger about this piece as well, saying basically, “Yeah, join the club. We’ve been saying this for a long time.” So, it’s not just the left that there was anger about this piece. But I did see some thoughtful points being made. I want to raise a few of these points, to drill down. These are people I know and respect, and I know that they are writers and thinkers who do actually want to understand what’s going on. Both Musa al-Gharbi and Thomas Chatterton Williams made the point that even talent from diverse backgrounds struggled if they did not espouse the standard progressive opinions. Does that point complicate this for you?
