Our Reactionary (Bear With Me) Moment

To my fellow millennials looking for something real.

I come from the post–Pod Save America generation. A sort of “right in the middle” of the millennial-aged. Too young to work on Obama’s campaigns, we came up during Me Too, Trump, and COVID. We entered politics in the thick of the Hillary vs. Bernie vs. Trump wars, when every choice felt existential and every institution claimed the moral high ground. We were taught that defending the system—choosing Hillary—was the only rational response in the “real world.”

Like so many who worked in politics, wrote about politics, or lived in adjacent cultures—New York’s elusive (and, at the time, very cool) literary scene, D.C. think tanks, elite journalism—we had gone to good schools. We had been dealt a generous hand in life’s lottery. We believed in institutions because they had, more or less, worked for us.

But for many of us, left, right, or somewhere in between, that belief has since crumbled. Right now, we are living through a reactionary moment—not just in the political sense, but in the emotional one. A generation reckoning with the promises that didn’t hold, the institutions that stopped working, and the hunger for something more honest, more grounded, more human. The question now is not whether to react—but how.

When I call this a reactionary inclination, I don’t mean a longing to go back—I mean a refusal to keep going forward on a path that so clearly isn’t working. It’s not nostalgia. It’s a moral and emotional response to a system that’s run its course.

When I was twenty-five at the height of this, you could not have convinced me that I wasn’t living my best life. I had internalized society’s demands on me so deeply, I had finally proven myself—with a high-status job and enough money to live comfortably in a big city. I thought a serious relationship would bring me down, tie me to one place like the people I’d sought so hard to distance myself from, so I forwent that for most of my twenties.

I was fully bought into the promise of what modern capital-L Liberalism had become—highly individualistic, professionalized, and market-driven. Many of us were. We believed that if you got the right job, lived in the right city, kept up with the news, and stayed on the right side of history, you were doing your part. It wasn’t just a political identity—it was a worldview. We performed these roles around productivity and prestige. We reaped the benefits at swanky happy hours, shared Ubers on the way home, tipsy not just from the booze but from our proximity to power. Many of us would get home to empty apartments and scroll for hours, watching other people live variations of the same life.

We thought we were building something meaningful. Instead, we were just optimizing ourselves for a system that never gave us permission to ask what any of it was for.

This worldview among my generation was everywhere—scattered across tech, consulting, corporate media, and philanthropy. We built pitch decks about social change, branded care work, turned suffering at home and in faraway lands into slides. We lived in apartments designed for transience and the pursuit of pleasure—pools, game rooms, and gyms, all places to optimize and flaunt what you had.

In these ways, liberalism gave us opportunity. It gave us content, but the relationships were often more transactional than authentic. It promised freedom but offered no real guidance for how to live—with one another, in community, with care.

Eventually, it wasn’t burnout I felt. It was emptiness. I had to leave in search of something else so I moved back West.

When I say “liberalism,” I’m talking about the dominant political mode of the past few decades—elite-centered, professionalized, and wedded to market logic. It worships technocratic progress as the highest good, promising opportunity and stability, but too often delivering alienation and stagnation.

Now it’s all come to a screeching halt. Sure, many of us still live in a variation of the fancy building, still go to the happy hours—but more of us are waking up. Trump’s rise has forever altered the institutions of Washington. It’s forced many of us to confront what we believed. Some have found a certain permission—a culture to belong to—in taking the red pill.

By that I mean: this generation—my generation—is searching for meaning in a void. We’re wrestling with the wreckage of a system we inherited. Not just the climate or the economy, but the social and moral systems too. The frameworks that once helped people make sense of their lives—religion, community, labor, public service—have atrophied or been made optional. What replaced them was hollow.

Many of us are no longer satisfied with the old binaries of left and right, socialism or nationalism, liberalism or authoritarianism. We’re asking something deeper: What is politics actually for? What kind of society are we trying to build? And how should we live?

Some of the clearest answers today aren’t coming from the left. They’re coming from the New Right.

And here’s the thing: many of the most visible New Right intellectuals aren’t religious traditionalists or rural populists. They’re disaffected urbanites—highly educated, culturally fluent, and often products of the very institutions they now critique. They are my counterparts, my former peers of the same era. They felt alienated by liberal cultural orthodoxy during Me Too, COVID, and the peak of progressive moralism. For some, that alienation became a gateway into a reactionary moral vision—one that promised meaning, order, and redemption for those who felt culturally sidelined.

What’s made the New Right potent—and dangerous—is that it doesn’t operate like a traditional political movement. It’s a scene. A network of podcasts, Substacks, publishing houses, and think tanks. It offers a mix of nationalism, post-liberalism, aesthetic rebellion, and moral certainty. It rejects progress in the traditional sense in favor of purpose.

It gives people something liberalism hasn’t: a place to belong. A worldview that insists there are higher goods than self-expression. That families matter, traditions matter, roots matter. It doesn’t always lead to justice—but it almost always feels like conviction.

Meanwhile, liberalism asks people to believe in institutions that haven’t delivered. It asks for participation but offers little in return. It asks for belief in democracy while sidestepping the material and emotional crises that make belief so hard to sustain.

And yet, many in the center seem unwilling to wrestle with this. Perhaps because doing so requires a reckoning with their own place in the system—the structures of power from which they’ve reaped the benefits. It’s easier to mock New Right thinkers as trolls, grifters, or pseudo-intellectuals. It’s much harder to ask: What need are they speaking to? What are they offering that we’re not?

Maybe this is the deeper problem: we’ve been taught that to be “reactionary” is inherently wrong. That to react—to express anger, grief, even moral disgust at the trajectory of our institutions—is anti-intellectual or anti-progress. But what if reaction is exactly what this moment demands?

Not the right-wing variety, built on grievance and hierarchy. But a left reaction: one that says no to the moral exhaustion of late liberalism. No to the idea that optimizing your life for productivity and performance is a substitute for purpose. No to a political class that presides over decline while offering process, not vision.

Liberalism, in its current form, has hollowed out so much of what gave life shape: shared institutions, a sense of public good, a vision of moral responsibility to one another. We lost churches, unions, local journalism, and civic space—and in their place we got personal branding, consumer politics, and the idea that the market would sort it all out.

So yes, the left should be reactionary. It should react to the cultural and economic violence of the past 40 years. To the disintegration of public life. To the lie that individual freedom was all we ever needed.

Just to be perfectly clear, I’m not using “reactionary” in the nostalgic or regressive sense. I don’t mean a return to some imagined golden past. I mean reaction as a moral and political stance: a clear-eyed refusal to accept what we’ve been told is inevitable. A refusal to accept that this is the best we can do.

We don’t need a new ideology. We need to ask better questions. What kind of lives are we offering people? What kind of relationships? What kind of responsibility should we have toward one another?

We may not have all the answers. But we do know this: the alternative to cynicism is not blind belief. It’s building something new—out of the grief, out of the void, out of the deep and difficult conviction that a better way of life must still be possible.

I’m proud of my generation for speaking out, for demanding something better. The hope I have is genuine. I want to believe what comes next can be a better politics—one that brings all of us along, that embraces the differences we bring to the movement. Whether we get out of this is yet to be written. But if we do, I think we’ll look back and realize: this was our reactionary moment.

Let’s not waste it.