SCAM AMERICA 777

Another explanation for the conservative turn among young men

Some housekeeping: The guys over at

Nothing But Respect

were gracious enough to have me on to talk about aura, Ball Don’t Stop, and whether we outmeated Shai. It was a fun conversation, and if you enjoy my basketball writing you should check it out (and subscribe to their show wherever you get podcasts)

Its Gotta Be The Aura with Ock Sportello

---

Four days after Donald Trump was re-elected, I saw a group of six idiots at the gym. These six idiots were young men, ranging by my eye from roughly 30 to 22 years old, and they moved in a pack as they exercised, wearing mostly matching shirts (which, underneath a garishly painted dollar sign, read “assets over liabilities”), gassing each other up, and filming one another’s pull-ups and single-arm dumbbell rows. I felt as if I immediately recognized them not because I had seen these specific idiots before but because I, as someone who has spent the majority of his gym-going life in New Jersey, was familiar with their type. The difference was that here, at this specific gym, they did not belong. They did not seem angry or hateful, but they made the people around them, myself included, feel angry and hateful, which sometimes can amount to the same thing. They stood in the way, they monopolized the space, they got what they wanted; they did not feel the eyes on them, or they did not care.

Later, as they blathered on in the sauna, I learned against my will that the idiots did not know one another. The filming idiot asked the others for their Instagram handles so that he could tag them in workout videos; the muscular idiot fielded questions about his cardio warm-downs; the youngest idiot scrolled his phone, dead-eyed. The only thing these young men shared aside from their lowest-common-denominator masculinity and their t-shirts was a profession. They griped about the travails of evasive leads, nosy contacts who insist upon reading every page of a contract. It clicked: they were multi-level marketers, meaning they were scammers, meaning they were real Americans.

I had figured that these young men were in town for a convention or meeting—as a rule, groups of people wearing matching t-shirts tend to spend only a long weekend in New Orleans—until I saw them the next Sunday. They wore their same shirts, made reference to a coach having assigned them each their own workout plan. I got the sense that their entrepreneurial spirit had led them to the sort of scam that leads you to wear a shirt with a huge dollar sign on it alongside a number of similar young men willing to wear that same shirt, the type of scam that encourages you to work out with and find community among your new colleagues, the type of scam that answers the two dominant questions posed by the young American man in 2024: what will make this mean something, and how can I get rich as quick as possible?

---

Young men, if you have not yet been told, are becoming more conservative. It’s true—it feels true—I don’t mean to dismiss the sentiment. Though Trump was too convincingly re-elected for there to be any one explanation for his victory, the wake of the election has been characterized in large part by a collective panic over young men. Kamala Harris lost, it seems, because phones and computers have turned young American men into incel Nazis. Unless the liberal left creates its own Joe Rogan, the thinking goes, America will be locked into a sort of mirror image of the demographic destiny that, as recently as 2012, was supposed to lock in a permanent democratic majority. I have seen people legitimately suggest Stav from Cum Town as a progressive message-bearer. Ours is a discursively fraught moment.

The conservative turn among young men is demonstratively true. And yet this party line explanation feels…incomplete. I’m old enough to remember last year, when TikTok was supposedly turning young Americans into Osama Bin Laden-worshipping fanatics. Phones are always supposedly brainwashing young people—at best, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. But I haven’t encountered a satisfactory explanation for how, or why, they are.

One of my most visceral online political memories, as embarrassing a phrase as that may be, was the moment in 2020 that I started seeing overt racism on my Twitter timeline. I remember the dizzying feeling of seeing people who ostensibly talked like me, who traded in the same online semiotics, proudly spout off fascist nonsense. But once I spent enough time with these people, I realized how easily and justly they could be dismissed. Their politics were something even less principled than reaction; they flailed against liberal-left boogeymen for no obvious reason other than the fact that most people online and around them seemed to agree with the basic tenets of that liberal left. Because the type of person who decides to build their identity on the internet is also often the type of person who relies upon an unstudied and pathological contrarianism to distinguish themselves from the dreaded average opinion-haver, the formation of something like a liberal-left consensus in popular culture and on the text-based internet made it inevitable that some people would start talking like Tucker Carlson to feel edgy. Just because these people are repulsive for the way in which they view hatred as an interchangeable aesthetic mode does not mean that they need to be taken seriously, because these people do not move culture in any meaningful way.

The internet feels more right wing now—it is more right wing—and it’s not crazy to think that this shift is what’s responsible for turning young men more conservative. But the turn is more toward, to borrow Max Read’s immortal phrasing, the Zynternet than it is Bronze Age Pervert, Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, or any among the miscellany of freaks that we have had to know about for what feels like forever now. What I’m trying to say is I don’t think that young men are irredeemable, or that they have been radicalized into an abyss of hatred and bigotry, although some have been and some are. I think young men have turned more conservative because “conservatism,” as it were, is the mode of politics that makes the most sense in Scam America, and these young men are the Scam Generation.

---

Nothing about Scam America is new, per se. America has always been a nation of grifters, con men, and schemers; what’s different in Scam America is the scope and form. America in 2024 is not a fallen or crumbling empire; it is an enshittified product, a tired casino, a website losing ad revenue, a restaurant line full of private delivery drivers. Scam America came into shape some time between the moment that sports gambling was broadly legalized, the moment that people turned pandemic stimulus checks into fortunes through crypto, NFTs, shitcoins, and meme stocks, and the moment that Donald Trump won his second presidential election. Scam America is not predicated upon the upward transfer of wealth, of deeply-rooted inequality, of the sorts of material analyses that have structured the last four-or-so decades of American politics; at least it’s not predicated upon these things as such. Rather, Scam America is a country that runs on scams like cars do gasoline. In this new country, the only way to not be scammed is to scam someone yourself. Everyone gets rich overnight except the people who lose it all; your job is to be the last one on the boat. No rules, no regulations, no sacrifices.

When I hear about young men turning conservative, I see the idiots from the gym in their dollar-sign shirts. They are not enlightened—nowhere near it—but they are not explicitly hateful either. They think of themselves as open-minded, and to the extent that they believe the last thing they are told, they sort of are. They are aspiring scammers, though more likely than not they are being scammed. They’re willing to tolerate a lot of nasty shit—maybe they don’t believe Trump means it, maybe they don’t care, maybe they think he’s got a point—but it’s not clear that their hatred is what gets them out of bed. It’s not immutable, in other words.

For these guys, the difference between the left and the right is that one side are winners and the other are losers. The right is here to keep the scam rolling. The left, to these young men, are the losers being lost in the dust because they’re in denial about the country they live in. To these young men, the left says: follow the rules! Watch your mouth! Wait your turn! Play nice! To the left, these young men say: can’t you fucking idiots see that there are no more rules?

None of this is to deny that, as Sophie Kemp eloquently if with a broken heart put in the Los Angeles Review of Books, a rot has taken hold of masculinity. This rot should be seen as a crisis by anybody invested in a compassionate, just future. But a more potent explanation, to the extent that you are looking for one, comes from Martin Dolan in The Point, who identifies that Trump has plugged into “a sense of entitled excitement about technology, money and the future.” What I take it to mean is that America is a casino now, and the young men voting for Trump are the sort of young men pounding free drinks at the blackjack table and toasting the pit boss. A vote for Trump is a vote for a cig inside, for another round, for the line to keep going up, up, up. Does that mean this configuration is permanent? Maybe, maybe not. Casinos are windowless so that you cannot tell the time; they pump in oxygen to keep you alert. They do this, of course, because their owners know that in time everybody loses. The young men of Scam America are not necessarily out of reach, but if the left wants any chance at swaying them, it should plan ahead to when party’s over and the hangovers kick in.