Perhaps you have noticed that in recent weeks, significant portions of the institutional right have gotten onto the “doom beat,” pounding the drums urgently about the looming threat posed to the Republican Party’s future by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and the “Groypers” — more accurately described as the disproportionate number of policy-oriented young men in current Washington politics who dabble at least a foot (and sometimes wade hip-deep) into the toxic waters of antisemitic nihilism. They are right to be concerned.

You can choose to believe Rod Dreher’s estimate that around 30–40 percent of “Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington” hold these views — characterizable, beyond antisemitism, as a general belief that “the system” as it exists is corrupt and must be leveled, along with whoever is perceived as having been its beneficiaries. Or you can credibly argue that it’s an exaggeration born of a skewed sample. (A connected D.C. friend of mine more charitably puts it at around 10–20 percent of current Hill staffers. He jokes: “Certainly no reason for concern in that case!”)

Yet every conservative who has spent even a minimal amount of time around the younger generation of self-designated elite, right-leaning minds — lawyers, policy wonks, staffers, would-be commentators, etc. — knows this to be a very real phenomenon. (Before class-based objections pour in: The emphasis here is on “self-designated,” and you can read scare-quotes into that all you wish; this is indeed a problem born of elite overproduction, wherein there are increasingly few seats with status left at an overcrowded table during a game of professional musical chairs.)

The antisemitism on the young right comes, despite all of the various guises and poses — I laugh most of all at young sincerely trad Catholic antisemites, who do not understand their own religion — from a much deeper and darker impulse: the reflexive rejection of pieties. For people scolded their entire lives that to think X or Y was “racist” or “sexist” — that boys are girls and vice versa, and white males are the engine of civilizational evil — it is profoundly unsurprising to see a pendulum swinging in backlash, in an equally ignorant opposite direction. Nihilism is contagious, and it spreads quickly.

But there is a reason — more than a mere ephemeral “youth revolt” — why every conservative (or liberal) value seems like it’s on the chopping block nowadays for Zoomers: as far as many of them are concerned, they aren’t working anymore.

It is not my point here to agree or disagree with that, merely to note it. The overwhelming sense I get from talking to younger people as 2025 draws to a close — all manner of folks, from the humane and intellectually reserved to the angriest and most voluble — is a bleak and sincere underlying despair. These young men and women don’t know what the future holds for them; they only know that all the old covenants are being broken. Forget about entitlement programs — everyone under the age of 40 has already internalized the assumption that Social Security isn’t going to be there when they retire.

But it’s far more than that. A hope for “the normal life” is dwindling away as well. A spouse, a house, the comforts of modern domesticity — what their parents’ generation seemed to attain so easily is now priced (and disincentivized) beyond the reach of all but Society’s Winners. And these, whom they inevitably focus on, keep seeming to “win” for the wrong reasons, as the disaffected define them. The blame game is naturally inevitable.

And it’s not just the young, disillusioned right that is looking for scapegoats to blame either. As the Groyper debate has raged during these past weeks, a thought has lurked in the back of the mind: This explains Zohran Mamdani, too. The connective thread between them isn’t antisemitism, though the overlap is obvious. I believe the antisemitism to be symptomatic of a greater disease: a shared generational ferment, society’s have-nots raging against society’s haves, with the same inchoate poison coursing through the veins of both radical wings of our modern politics.

The Groypers are merely one instantiation of an oceanic atmosphere of discontent and disintegration among the Zoomer generation writ large; when that angle is channeled through progressive sensibilities, you get Mamdani’s shocking performance among young and newer New York City dwellers, or even the unexpected (and underreported) likely toppling of Seattle’s mayor. These people cannot pay their bills, cannot save, see all of their expected career paths being swiftly foreclosed on, and have little optimism about the future.

Tell them it’s their own fault. Tell them, as Ben Shapiro has, to move somewhere else. However solid that advice might be, it is destined to fall on unpersuadable ears. Maybe an entire generation should have “dreamed more realistically.” But their dreams are turning to dust before their eyes regardless.

I end with thoughts on Donald Trump, whose economic actions seem inevitably destined to seal a coffin lid down upon this entire younger generation’s frustrated hopes. It is impossible not to notice that Trump was elected primarily on a wave of massive economic discontent yet has made things worse. (The No. 1 issue cited by voters in last Tuesday’s exit polls was the economy. Democrats won those voters overwhelmingly.) The tariff regime — and Trump’s insistence on dangling the world economy on his strings like an Italianate rod puppet — has been a disastrous brake on an economy already in flux. Inflation has continued to rise as it did during the latter half of the Biden era.

“There is no affordability crisis,” insists Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as your grocery bills skyrocket. There is no jobs crisis, Trump insists, as he takes his cues from Silicon Valley and argues for flooding the country with Indian and Chinese H-1B visa holders. There is a housing crisis — Trump concedes that much — and his proud solution is to pressure banks to create the 50-year mortgage, an unimaginably toxic debt instrument. Increase housing supply? Reduce the costs of building materials? Nonsense. Instead, Trump offers Zoomers interest-laden long-term debt slavery!

If the last half century of American history has taught us anything, it is that presidencies rise and fall on economics. No matter what people might think of the social policy achievements of Trump’s second administration, if he leaves the younger generation as destitute of future prospects as it was when he retook office, he will forfeit their loyalties regardless of how he tries to “brand” his way out of it. And if he treats them with contempt — as he is now doing, by falling back on his oldest and worst instincts and doing a “Baghdad Bob” act with the public — they will do far worse: They will rebel against his legacy. Trump is in his final term; perhaps he might not care. You should.