by Br. Jacob
This was an article which my dad sent me to give my opinion on. It is by David French who is know for being a opinion columnist for the New York Times, he is also know for being open about his Christian faith and this year drawing attention to the crisis of young men in his July 10 2025 article “What is the Matter with Men?” I also know him from a very good interview with Jordan Peterson which was an episode named When Does Masculinity Become Toxic, though that was far from the main point of their discussion.(Link below)
youtube.com/watch?v=UBtduYEQ7Fw
Quickly, before I go in to my comment on this article “What Happens if You Refuse to Recognize That We Are in a Death Spiral” I will summarize it for those who are not able to read it because of the NYT paywall.
Summary
He begins with a story about joining a internet discussion on an app I don’t remember, called Clubhouse, it was a discussion with panelist and comments called “David French: Based or cringe?” He goes in to the required explaining of these terms. Although I would say he puts these words in a way to us that they are like a Greek lexicon with more meaning than some word definitions Plato might have had a dialogue on.
He creates for us a vision of these young men who find him cringe or find him an writer that lacks a consciousness of what he calls, refusing “to recognize that America is in a death spiral”. The article as a piece is saddened by the decay of young men, who seem to be rejecting the establishment and who are taken by con-men. He also comments on statistic that on each side, Democrats and Republicans, have more for the other side than 20 years ago. A stat that although unsurprising also make me sad.
He gives an example to prove the falseness of the stance of these young men by using a metaphor from writer Michael Anton, who later worked in the Trump Administration, in an piece called “The Flight 93 Election.”
“He acknowledged that voting for Trump was a risk, but, he argued, electing Hillary Clinton would result in certain national disaster. There was only one option: “Charge the cockpit or you die.”
But what happens (as I’ve argued before) if you charge the cockpit, incapacitate the pilot, take the controls and realize the plane wasn’t being hijacked; it was only experiencing turbulence? Well then you’re now flying a plane you don’t know how to fly, and you’ve created your own emergency.“
My Comment
David French is creating a straw man argument.
As in it is not a fair summary of the situation and has weak arguments because its starting place is wrong. The New Right is not a generation of intellectually vapid young men. I mean you can look at the internet and find anyone who is superficial and limited in vocabulary. It would be similar to trying to define what Liberalism would be and what people who define themselves as Liberals are, by going on ticktok and watching videos of people talking about the personal pronouns they are inventing. They exist, but it is not accurate to make assumptions about a group of people (or a different group of people) and what they believe or think based on that little information.
While he is talking about fact checking a feeling, he doesn’t have facts to back up what he is saying about the right.
He is trying to write a seemingly non partisan article that comes off as a caricature of young conservatives.
In my opinion, the rise of the right is taking place due to the youth resourcing the roots of western culture, the philosophy of the Greeks, the traditions and faith of the Middle Ages, a sense of beauty from the Renaissance, the freedom of thought and expression of the Enlightenment. It is a movement in reaction to the intellectual pride of the last half of the twentieth century which chose the European existentialists like Jean Paul Sarte and their grandfather Frederich Nietzsche as the new transplant to graph on to the entire tree of western civilization. It was an academic movement that found its way into politics and every sphere of popular life. It’s only rule was that ‘One has to cut one self off from the past and create a new identity’. Not only this, as the politics of the world go, many now are looking to replace all the religious, cultural, and philosophical rooting of the entire world, in places like Asia, Latin America and Africa, with these poisonous roots.
This is a direct contradiction to the human condition as it has been since the beginning before Marx. Where identity was a heritage, something given, not created.
It was the intellectual pride that said we must revolt against our past and create something new; seeing our past as an obstacle to our future.
This is exemplified in one of the slogans of Kamala Harris when she was running for president.
AI SUMMARY CREATED FROM GOOGLE
The phrase “unburdened by what has been” is a frequent and widely recognized part of Vice President Kamala Harris’s public speaking style. She often uses variations of it, such as “see what is possible, unburdened by what has been,” to suggest an optimistic, forward-looking vision for the future, free from the constraints of past challenges or traditional thinking.
Origin and Meaning
- Personal Philosophy: Harris has linked the phrase to her upbringing, stating her mother raised her “to see what could be, unburdened by what has been”.
- Self-Help Influence: Her speaking style, including this phrase, has been described as having a “self-help” or “new age” vernacular, similar to that of motivational speakers, which is a style not commonly heard in national politics.
- Political Framing: In a political context, the phrase is generally used to advocate for a fresh start or a departure from the status quo to explore new policies and societal shifts.
I believe this is what young conservatives feel some consternation towards and not the fear of a “death spiral”, as David French tries to point to the exact diagnosis of the discomfort that young men today feel. It’s not true that we have no hope, we have faith in God, and it is not true that we are intellectually stunted, we have a lot more grounding and are seeking rootedness in the thoughts and writings of those whom, were being spoken of, when our great men and women from the 20th century are quoted as saying “We stand on the shoulders of giants”.
A more apt comparison than to turbulence, which is of course bound to happen, is that in the turbulence, nobody knows how to fly the plane. However, those who are oldest now, threw away the manual when they were young, and now we are searching for a manuel, but others say to us “We are going to learn to fly the plane in a new way, not in the way those before us did, who did not really know how to fly the plane, (even if they built the plane!)”
Conclusion
The main problem with the article is revealed by the very problem which David French is doing but has placed the blame on the shoulders of the young. As he himself is not very young, my heart stings at the injustice perpetrated by this article. Yes it does reveals the problem of the widening pit of disaffection between those who are conservatives and those who are liberals, but at the same drawing a crude caricature of the young conservative man.
I thought David French cared about the crisis of young men today. Yet it seems like he has less sympathy than I thought and is willing to take a paycheck for writing for the readers of the New York Times to dismiss those who will lead them in a few years. In fact it seems dangerous to dismiss these young people so out of hand rather than trying to actually understand them which this article fails to do.
To go back to the plane metaphor, it is actually a really silly metaphor, but it gets a lot sharper when we think about what happened to the pilot. Nietzsche was entirely correct in his diagnosis that the problem of the future will be that God is dead and we killed him. As a civilization we have almost thrown him away, except those people who live in the past like these “cringe” young men. But the remedy is not what Nietzsche, or Sarte offer us, to “create our own meaning”, or to become “Ubermensch” and build ourselves as what we can call the new ‘tower of Babbel’ without God or without the meaning and purpose which was given to us. But instead to hope and pray for God’s resurrection in our world which is based on the one that is a reality that happened nearly 2000 years ago, which has been the event that stands alone in history as one that has carried the world and many of its people in faith to where it is today.
Mary’s Little Bro — ANDREW HEAKES 