Kathryn Jezer-Morton has an interesting, anguished piece in New York Magazine‘s “The Cut,” about being a progressive parent and raising sons in an age when many young men are noticeably turning to the political right. Now, set aside the ethical questions that face any parent who chooses to write about parenting their own children in public. Jetzer-Morton delicately points the finger at progressivism’s fascination with grievance and being an aggrieved identity. All women and people of color have a ready-made story of overcoming patriarchy and white supremacy. Picking up on the work of Dr. Robin James, she writes:
Overcoming obstacles is the most hallowed narrative in our culture — it’s a place where capitalism’s growth imperative dovetails with the progressive appetite for stories about emancipation. So for young men, and straight white men in particular, to feel like valid participants in the storytelling of selfhood, they feel the need to start from a place of grievance, because otherwise there’s no way to bounce back and beat the odds. James cites the gender-studies scholar Michelle Murphy, who has argued that girls’ venerated place in our culture right now is the quintessential example of this mobilization of human capital: “Her rates of return are so high precisely because her value begins so low.” (This argument is the entire basis of the Barbie movie’s success.)
Translated, there’s a very strong progressive cultural bias toward building identity stories of resilience or overcoming social prejudice. But progressivism does not (or cannot) see young white males as having to face any peculiar social difficulties, whereas conservative such as Jordan Peterson or other online influencers on the right offer a narrative to young men about how they are devalued, ignored, and impugned. Thus something that progressives put into them draws them toward the right.
“The appeal of a grievance-based identity makes it hard to convince straight white boys that they in fact have plenty going for them, and that they have no reason to feel aggrieved. Doing this convincing, whether it’s in the classroom or at the dinner table, requires a light touch,” Jezer-Morton writes.
There’s something to this, and really what’s she’s fingering goes beyond the home. Even in conservative homes, the pull of progressive meta narratives about grievance leaks in the way the rest of the cultural messaging does.
On the one hand, boys are struggling more than they used to do. Top schools have to lower their standards to admit more boys. Boys are now minorities in law school and medical schools. A large class of women is going to enter the professional world, and while they will find many men have risen to the very top, they may find men thin on the ground in the ranks of law firms, major accounting firms, medical groups, etc. This imbalance, when it ran the other way, was automatically a warning sign to egalitarian progressives that something was systematically wrong and biased about these fields and institutions. Now that men are on the short end, there’s a kind of shrug. “You have plenty going for you, young man.”
On the other, the grievance-based identity really may be psychologically unhelpful — and socially poisonous. It trains people into a kind of narcissism where the background indifference of the vast majority of strangers to your particular situation is reinterpreted as a malevolent conspiracy to keep you down. The verbal slights of the uninitiated are confused with systemic prejudice, rather than recognized for the inevitable social awkwardness that comes from fallible humans who are often strangers to one another.