Unhappy young men are not reading David Brooks
To have a mass uprising, America's youth must remember rebellion.
NYU Business School professor and podcaster Scott Galloway has been complaining that 45 percent of young men have never asked someone out in person and may never fall in love. Instead, they spend their time playing videogames, listening to The Joe Rogan Experience, stewing in grievances, and voting for Republicans, when they could be staying in school and living fulfilling lives.
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Men are increasingly less likely than women to have a college diploma. Fewer of them are graduating high school at all. They reach major life milestones later, such as moving out of their parents’ homes and becoming financially independent, marrying, or having children. Mr. Galloway grimly recounts to anyone who will listen: “If you walk into a morgue and you see five people who’ve died by suicide, four of them are men.” These are overfamiliar statistics by now, recited like a litany by every influencer with a book to sell the youth.
I think many older men are tempted to raise their eyebrows, look at these guys hitting the bong and playing Nintendo and advise: “Just say no!” But that is the horse that got us here. We let this epidemic of loserdom grow so great that these men have become delusional reactionaries or worse, MAGA Republicans.
We are in a place where even New York Times columnist David Brooks is calling for a “mass uprising,” for Americans to take to the streets and initiate a general strike. Mr. Brooks has not traditionally been known as a mohawked punk rocker, nor has he been the type to don a powdered wig and pick up a musket. I was, for a long time, a regular viewer of Shields and Brooks on the PBS NewsHour. I am not a David Brooks hater. But he is hardly an alarmist—especially not when there are causes for alarm.
In the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic, Mr. Brooks only just noticed that “[he] [sh]ould have seen this coming,” that his conservative cohort had always been composed of vile, bad-faith “fringe reactionaries” who, quoting Orwell, are “interested in only power” they demonstrate by “mak[ing] others suffer” and “inflicting pain and humiliation.”
The naïveté is tiresome. Mr. Brooks, like the whole class of Republican editorialists who gush about character and virtue, such as in his book The Road to Character, owe the rest of us a debt for having not communicated the menace of their fellow travelers. I do not accept that Mr. Brooks was unaware that the ideological space he inhabited was full of odious people to whom he would never open his house or invite to dinner. But Mr. Brooks has still offered them mild defense up until even a month ago, when he joined the absolutely dreadful Messrs. Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat at an insufferable NYT roundtable.
Now Mr. Brooks thinks we ought to be in the streets, while also admitting he was not the sign-waving type. Until the end, sir, must you continue to play coy? “I don’t usually do this sort of thing” is the premise for every Pornhub skit this nation’s young men have studied, instead of pursuing higher degrees or reading Mr. Brooks’s recent bestseller, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
I must confess: neither have I. It feels futile. These days, character no longer counts in American politics. Instead, I recommend to leaders its opposite—total disinhibition, but without the indolence that plagues the youth.
The radicalization pipelines begin when men start looking for dating advice, bodybuilding and diet tips, psychedelic drugs, or self-improvement philosophy à la Jordan Peterson. That tells me Gen Z dudes do have an appetite to change their unhappy lives, but for some reason think they can feed it by listening to podcasts.
I purposely do not allow comments on my blogs to avoid becoming the target of that sort of parasociality from fans. I was recently asked about this practice at a gala by a Zoomer with tears in his eyes. “Is it personal? Do you not want to hear from me, specifically? Are we not friends, even though I reread your newsletter every day? Three times. I read it three times a day.”
“My son,” I told him, placing my resolute blue donkey hand on his shoulder. “You must understand… you can no longer be assured this bad shit will end, unless you get yourself a leather jacket. Do you understand, Chat? You must draw upon that—the archetype of the Easy Rider.”
“If you want to be cool, like me, and live a fulfilling life of sexual conquest and other adventures in the elite corridors of power, you must fight the Man. For real. How do I define ‘for real?’ Don’t care at all. If your efforts feel urgent, and you are really meaning it hard, the rest is your business. I am no gatekeeper. What matters is you’re telling the world you’re fighting. Get yourself a ‘Trump is a Bitch’ T-shirt, too.”
There is real, vigorous rebellion natural to young men—roughly one in five will read Paradise Lost and side with the Devil, and an additional two of the five will think he is awesome for it. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” he says, and they believe him. “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” And when the world kicks them in the teeth, they cinematically stand back up to the spirit whispering: “Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!”
So why cede that energy to the GOP? They are the Man again. The instruments of surveillance, book bans, and censorship, of hassling cool guys for smoking weed outside the movie theater, of banning pornography and making fun of gamers while stripping them of their health insurance—that is the Republican Party.
When the cost of living is too high, blame the disastrous Trump tariffs and call it “GOP economic cock and ball torture.”
When the landlord fucks them over and the law will not help them, that is the Donald Trump Republican Party. In fact, Mr. Trump was a landlord.
When bank fees suck up all the beer money, it was President Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who bragged about killing the Consumer Finance and Protection Bureau.
Men in concentration camps? Republicans.
The next time a cop kills someone in the street? Republicans.
Violent suppression of protests? Republicans.
Your girlfriend getting pregnant when you are not ready for children? Republicans.
Streaming buffering during your favorite show? Republicans.
Old friends of mine who are now fathers have become prone to sighing when discussing which protests to attend. “This should be a young man’s job,” they complain. “I will do it for them, if I must, but they should be on the front line. I am tired from work.” I agree. I might still have that devil in me, but resisting authoritarianism is a task meant for hellions. I hope the spell can break, and they realize that rebellion is not banning books and jailing librarians—if these young men still want to be dangerous, wild-eyed chaos-bringers or whatever, then they ought to threaten the actual source of their suffering—The Man.
postscript: Dear Democrats, do not fuck up this conceit. I recognize and am generally in solidarity with the desire to protect institutions—I love my local library, and I care very much that our nation’s laws are upheld and that the Social Security system works. But that is not the temperament we ought to be cultivating right now.