Intro

Mana Afsari is a writer and sometime contributor to Wisdom of Crowds, whose career has taken her from the RAND Corporation, to a job as an assistant to a great American poet, to the position of Research Associate at the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy and Society Initiative. In January, Mana published an essay titled, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” a fascinating reported piece about the young men with intellectual ambitions who joined the National Conservative movement and voted for Donald Trump. The essay went viral and earned praise from both liberals and conservatives. Damon Linker of Notes from the Middleground called it “a remarkable essay that’s generated considerable (and well-justified) buzz.”

Mana joins Santiago Ramos and Shadi Hamid to discuss the essay and the general question of why ambitious, inquisitive and searching young men are attracted to the MAGA movement. “I am not a right wing zoologist,” Mana says, but it is important to understand where these men are coming form. These young intellectuals are not your average Trump voter. They are not the “DOGE boys,” either. But they are becoming a significant part of the GOP leadership class.

Shadi wants to know why an interest in culture and ideas has led these men toward right wing spaces. Mana responds that right wing spaces, at least until recently, had a less politicized approach to culture. Many of these young men are interested in things, like history or cartography, which some suggest are “right-coded.” “Most things that are supposedly right-coded should not be right-coded,” Mana says.

And what do they think of Trump? “They don’t think of Trump as Odoacer, they see him as Julius Caesar. They don’t see him as a barbarian, but as a restorer of the republic.”

In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Shadi talks about going to a recent right wing party and says it was “a safe space, it was inclusive”; Santiago asks Shadi if he ever went to right wing parties during the War on Terror; Mana distinguishes the desire for free and open discussion versus the desire to “say whatever you want,” i.e., slurs; and Santiago argues that the Israel-Palestine conflict has made all political sides rediscover the importance of freedom of speech.

Required Reading and Listening:

* Mana Afsari, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History” (The Point).

* Santiago Ramos, “Let Us Now Praise the Supermen” (WoC).

* Santiago Ramos, “Do You Know What Time It Is?” (WoC).

* Damir Marusic, “Barbarians at the Gate” (WoC).

* Shadi Hamid, “Why Half of America is Cheering for Chaos” (Washington Post).

* Wisdom of Crowds podcast episode, “The Masculine World is Adrift” (WoC).

* Henry Kissinger quote about Trump (Financial Times).

* Vittoria Elliot, “The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover” (Wired).

* Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer (Amazon).

* C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians” (Poetry Foundation).

* Odoacer (Britannica).

* Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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