Quote · Modern Wisdom
The Collapse of American Politics - Ezra Klein - #1114
Where this was said
Are the Left Losing Young Men?
At 1:26:43 · chapter starts 1:24:28
Williamson pushes Klein on whether the left has an equally serious account of what is going wrong for men as it does for women. Klein is honest: it doesn't, though it is beginning to notice. But his deeper argument is about a structural error. Liberalism has always had a tradition of individual self-cultivation — Klein cites Kant, John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass, MLK, Lincoln, FDR. The left betrayed that tradition when it began treating individualistic explanations as excuses for ignoring structural dysfunction. [1] — Ezra Klein "A very damaging thing that happened on the left is that it began to see individualistic explanations as excuses for structural dysfunction.…" 1:26:43 This hostility was especially acute toward male-coded self-help: when it came through figures like Peterson and, Klein carefully says, 'Modern Wisdoms,' it triggered a reflexive rejection rather than an effort to answer the impulse constructively. The tragedy, Klein observes, is what came after Peterson: not a virtue-centred successor but Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes — figures who have no real concept of virtue at all. The algorithmic apex of political culture has moved in both directions away from character: the left abandoned virtue while the online right moved toward vice-maxing. Meanwhile the quiet middle three quintiles just keep raising kids, loving partners, going to church, and voting.
Klein argues the left abandoned individual cultivation politics while the online right evolved from Peterson-style virtue into vice-maximizing figures like Andrew Tate.
The left became hostile to self-improvement as a political frame, treating it as cover for ignoring structural problems. The right, after Peterson, pivoted from virtue toward vice-maximizing through figures like Andrew Tate. Klein's diagnosis: the apex of the attention economy in both directions moved away from character and toward performance.
People download information from books. That's wrong — books are a scaffold for a particular form of sustained attention that produces thinking. The value is not the information, it is what happens inside your mind while you read. In an AI age, cultivating that form of attention is the most radical and most necessary thing you can do.
A study cited by Williamson found single women living alone do approximately twice as much housework as single men living alone.
