Jacob Savage is a writer and ticket scalper.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jacob Savage discuss whether the “Great Awokening” had lasting material effects beyond culture, how diversity initiatives changed hiring patterns in academia and Hollywood, and why these changes primarily affected one generation of white men rather than older cohorts already established in their careers.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I think it’s really hard to know what to make of what Matthew Yglesias a number of years ago called the Great Awokening. While we were living through it, it felt at times as though the foundations of American culture were changing in a pretty fundamental way. In a very rapid manner, we were embracing institutional practices, language, and norms that were very different from what the country had looked like 15 or 20 years earlier. A lot of mainstream institutions just got on board with a whole set of ideas without examining them very deeply. It felt as though there was a permanent change.
There’s something weird that’s happened, I think, where there was a vibe shift, and Donald Trump was elected. Not only are progressives much less ascendant in American politics than they seemed to be a few years ago, but a lot of the people who had paid lip service to these ideas have now disowned them or even claimed that they never believed any of those things. When there’s a political scandal where Zohran Mamdani appoints somebody who had said these crazy things on Twitter a few years ago, it just feels like that language is out of a different world because it has disappeared a little bit from the public, or at least from the more mainstream parts of it.
So it would be tempting to say this is all a kind of slightly surreal dream. We’ve woken up, it’s over, and there’s no lingering effect. But I take it that you would disagree with that. You would say that at least there is a particular generation of young white men who have been deeply impacted, whose careers have been deeply impacted by some of those institutional practices, particularly in the more artistic professions and so on. Tell us why you think this was a profound moment that had a transformative impact.
Jacob Savage: I don’t think it was limited to the Great Awokening, and I think you can see the roots of the Great Awokening going back to 2013, 2014. I think there’s a tendency for people to think that this was cultural overreach that had no material effects on anyone in any way.
What drove me in part to write the article was to say this wasn’t just a vibe shift one way and a vibe shift the other way, and people being annoyed over pronouns or the way that people talked about America. There were actual material effects in the real world on actual people that these policies had, and I think that has largely gone ignored by the institutions.
There was a real change in the ability of younger white men to ascend in various fields. I don’t think those fields are necessarily limited to what I wrote about specifically, academia, media, and Hollywood. Those were some of the worst of it and some of the fields that documented most in depth what they were doing. But it wasn’t exclusive to those fields. I think that beyond the vibe shift of it all, there really are material effects that need to be grappled with in some way. Diversity was billed as a win-win, and there is a loser in it. It was younger white men. There’s no way around it.
Mounk: The way it’s sold, as you were saying, is as a win-win. There’s this cartoon, which a number of people have written about very well, advocating equity. What you see in the cartoon is a baseball game going on in the background. There’s a very short child, a child of medium height, and an adult trying to watch the baseball game over a fence.
There’s equality and there’s equity. There are two panels. In the equality panel, there are boxes of the same height for everybody. The adult, who could already see over the fence, can now see over the fence even more, while the two children can’t see over the fence at all. In the other panel, the world of equity, there’s the biggest box for the shortest child, and he’s just able to see the game, and a medium box for the medium-height child, who’s also able to see the game. There’s no box for the adult, because the adult is already seeing the game, so there’s no need.
Leave aside the fact that you could make arguments, as an economist, that perhaps the baseball team needs ticket revenue in order to sustain itself, and that even this picture of equity is not as costless as it appears. Leave that to one side. You might say that this indicates a world in which we can just expand the pie, in which now everybody is able to see the baseball game where previously they were not able to.
But a lot of things are rival in the world. In order to get into college, because colleges really haven’t expanded their enrollment very much for a very long time, it’s either this kid or that kid. It’s rival in a very different kind of way. Of course, the rhetoric of universities and a lot of these other institutions has always been that we’re leaving talent out there because we don’t have the right recruitment pipelines, because there’s been prejudice against them historically. All that these diversity initiatives are doing, they say, is finding highly qualified candidates that we previously overlooked, to make sure that the most meritorious are now able to access these institutions.
What is wrong with that famous cartoon of equity as a picture of what happened, or with those claims that colleges and others made that all they were doing was going out and finding real talent that had previously been overlooked?
Savage: I would say, for one, that the cartoon of equity, if you are using it as a full analogy, is incredibly racist. It suggests that the non-white man is incapable of seeing the field without an incredible amount of help. I think that is infantilizing and wrong. We do not live in the segregated South anymore. That is not the situation we are in as a country.
So I think, fundamentally, that cartoon assumes that anyone who is not a white man is so beleaguered and belabored that they cannot possibly see the field without all of these extra steps. I do not think that reflects the actually existing world that we grew up in.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about the actual stats here. If a lot of these institutions were saying, look, historically we have discriminated, which is certainly true of many of these institutions, they were saying that now perhaps, if you are a business, there are recruitment pipelines. The easiest way to find new employees is to ask existing employees for recommendations. That is going to run within certain kinds of communities that have been privileged for a longer time. All that we are doing is expanding opportunity.
Savage: I think that, for instance, in the Hollywood context, there was obviously an old boys’ network going as late as the 2000s. There were fellowship programs designed to get around that, to give people who did not have access to someone’s uncle or brother-in-law a way in. I do not think anyone really objected to those programs at the time.
What ended up happening, though, is that those programs stuck around after hiring became exclusively non-white men at the lower levels. So instead of being a way to get people in from the side, people were being let in through the front door, and there was still a side entrance. Then there was just no room for anyone else.
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I do not think anyone really had a problem at first. Some people obviously did, but my sense is that our generation did not object to these minor rectification ideas: there was a pipeline problem, and we should try to expand the pipeline. The issue was that once those actions had been going on for a while, before 2015, they not only continued, but the pipeline for everyone else was shut down.
Mounk: One way these debates tend to go is that people say this never happened, and also that it was good that it happened. When you were saying that a lot of these younger white men just were not being hired at all, in your Compact article you go through these numbers in pretty impressive detail. This is from an earlier article, I think, but one really striking fact is that I believe there is not a single white man who has published fiction in The New Yorker who was born after 1984.
Savage: There has recently been one, after the article was published. But basically, things became next to impossible in a lot of fields for the old objective metrics of success to carry weight. I think this was, interestingly, both a top-down and bottom-up cultural phenomenon.
From the top, you had vague mandates. From the bottom, you had people reading the stories, or people in HR, who wanted to do the right thing, so to speak. There was never a quota, but from both ends you were seeing these preferences.
A career is made up of many yes-or-no decisions. Do you get that job? Does that job lead to the next job? Does that job lead to the next job? If the dice are weighted against you pretty severely at each of those decision points, eventually the outcomes are going to start looking the way that they do. You can really only see that after time. In the moment, any individual decision seems ambiguous. Maybe it was me, maybe it was not the system. But when you look at it over the space of ten years, you can see that this culture change had very material effects.
Mounk: For those who might be skeptical about what you are saying and who have not had a chance to read the article, go read the article. It is really interesting. But tell us about some of those numbers. That stat about The New Yorker is striking, but that is one magazine, or one section of the magazine. What are some of the numbers that are going to move at least some of the way toward convincing a skeptical person that this effect was as large as you are saying, and that this is a real thing?
Savage: When I moved to Los Angeles to try to be a screenwriter in 2011, the number of lower-level writers on TV who were white men was, I think, around 48 or 49 percent. Last year, the number of lower-level white male writers was 11 percent. I spoke to an anonymous showrunner who contacted me, and he told me that the 11 percent number is not even real. That number consists of pure nepo hires who get sent down by the network, or someone’s star child.
So basically that 11 percent is, sure, still white men, but they are the ultra-connected ones who never quite deserved the job to begin with. You go from 48 percent to 11 percent without the pipeline changing that much, and without the population changing that much. It seems fairly obvious what the cause of all that was.
Mounk: Part of the background here is that 48 percent may be slightly overrepresented as a share of the overall population. Obviously, there are other background factors about who gets the kind of education that probably makes you better at screenwriting, et cetera. But when you look at things in purely demographic terms, 48 percent of men is overrepresentative, while 11 percent is definitely underrepresentative relative to the share that white men make up of those age cohorts in the United States.
Savage: Right, the age cohort is probably around 30 percent. So you are going from basically a slight overrepresentation, which I would partially argue is a question of what the pipeline was at the time, to being a third underrepresented. Women of color are now 36 percent of lower-level staff writers. The preferences are very clear in that context. I think in academia, too, you can see some of those numbers.
Mounk: I know that we are only establishing the basics right now, but I think that is an important part of the conversation. Tell me about some of those numbers in academia and in other fields beyond Hollywood as well.
Savage: Academia varies college by college, and it is difficult to get a complete sense of how bad things were overall. But even ten years ago, if you looked at cohorts graduating from graduate school with PhDs versus the cohorts receiving tenure-track offers, the outcomes already did not favor white men.
Something like 50 percent of PhD holders were white men, while they accounted for only around thirty-something percent of tenure-track offers. If you go further and look, especially at elite colleges, you see between 2015 and 2024 a drop-off that is striking. Humanities departments might hire sixty assistant professors and only three of them are white men, even though the graduate school cohort is around 30 to 40 percent. You see this pretty much across the board.
There is an interesting corollary that I found, which is that this seemed not to apply as much to non-American white men, for several reasons. One is that they exist somewhat outside American culture-war dynamics and seem less threatening to tenure committees, according to a couple of academics I spoke to. Another is that the federal government does not classify foreign academics on work visas as having a race. So for schools eager to trumpet the diversity of their new hires, these hires did not count against them. As a result, many of the white men who did get jobs ended up being European, Canadian, or Australian.
Mounk: There is an interesting corollary to that, which is that non-white people who were not born and raised U.S. citizens often did not count for purposes of diversity either. I know a number of stories where highly qualified non-white candidates were passed over, and they were often told, very openly, if not officially, that the dean would not let them be hired because they would not count toward the diversity quota. There is something strange about the way non-Americans existed outside of this system.
One of the arguments you make is that some of the effects of this were hidden because of a generational effect. One obvious counterargument to what you are saying is to point to university presidents, heads of studios, showrunners, and many people at the top of these fields, a lot of whom continue to be white men. Explain your argument for why this affected one generation so strongly, but did not affect people in the same way if they already had their foot in the door by 2013 or 2014 and were already part of the system.
Savage: I think it seems fairly obvious, but this was my central insight that had not really been talked about before. This diversity stuff was not entirely costless, but it was mostly costless to older white men who had already existed within these institutions. Most institutions are not trying to hire full professors or deans without experience. You are not suddenly going to get a pipeline that looks much different for people who are 55, 60, or 65 years old. That is the pipeline that exists, and you are going to hire out of it.
What is actually happening is a lot of hiring at the lower levels, and that is where the bulk of the preferences end up going. The fact that Martin Scorsese is still working does not get me a job in Hollywood. It does not even make me feel seen. He is almost 90 years old. No one is going to tell him to stop making movies because he is a white man. That spot is simply used as a way of saying, look at all the white men who are still at the top, and they are still at the top.
This was not something that evenly affected cohorts. You can only really see who it affected when you dig into the younger, more hirable people.
Mounk: That is what is fascinating about some of the numbers you present. One of the weird upshots of that is that each group can find reasons to feel aggrieved. I am not saying that means each group has equally good reason to feel aggrieved. But young white men can say, look, I am being systematically disfavored in a lot of these job applications. You can think, if it were just me, then I would have doubts about how good I am at this. But if I see that none of my white cohort members in this fellowship program, or this PhD program, or this kind of incubator for an arts job are getting jobs, while all of the other ones are getting jobs, then perhaps there is a very strong set of preferences operating here.
Of course, the people who want to say that there continues to be extreme discrimination against minority groups will say, look at the people who are at the top, this is all made up. One of the strange things, which I think helps explain some of the racial polarization over the last ten years and some of the deep rancor in our society, is that everybody can retreat to a narrative in which they are the aggrieved party.
The downstream effect of these schemes is that everything shifts from individual, merit-based decisions into group-based claims of having been disfavored, and into the sense that the only way to get a fair shake is to organize at the level of the group in order to fight for better treatment for members of that group.
Savage: I think that is definitely fair. I think the thing is that people do look at these institutions and still see a lot of white male faces. I do not know a way around that short of a guillotine and a revolution. So you are left with a situation where you can say, okay, we are going to stop discriminating now. We are going to do our best to be fair, knowing full well that this can only ever be imperfect at best, but we should try. Or you are left saying that we should just continue this cycle ad infinitum forever.
I obviously come down on the side of trying. I think millennials, at least for the most part, really believed in racial and gender-based equality. We believed we were all going to be given equal chances. We understood that some people had a leg up and some people did not. But overall, I think we believed it in a way that I am not sure previous generations did. I think what the DEI stuff did was disabuse us of that belief in a way that has ultimately been pretty poisonous for our politics.
Mounk: What do you think has happened to the people who were impacted by that? I assume there is a huge range of responses, depending on personality, political predilection, and other factors in people’s lives. But you could imagine this going all the way from denial and the sense that you have to keep being a good ally, up to the idea that if you need to be sacrificed for the sake of a broader good, then so be it.
Then there are people who have presumably turned pretty strongly to the right because they feel that they were up for creating equal opportunities and up for giving up any other advantages. But if this has turned into outright discrimination against them, and they no longer stand a fair chance, they are going to grab onto anybody who promises to give them a fair shake. How do you think this has influenced the politics of the younger generation?
Savage: I think it has certainly affected the politics of younger white men. You can see that in the polling. You can see it if you look at who many of the alt-right anons were. They were often disaffected academics who could not get jobs. If you had given Bronze Age Pervert a chair at the University of Chicago, I do not think he would be writing what he is writing. That is an extreme example, but it makes the point.
In terms of my friends, most of whom are still reluctant Democrats, no one really believes in it anymore. I do not know any white men my age who are into politics in the way we were ten or twenty years ago. There is no idealism left. It is more a matter of reluctantly voting for the party that promises to disadvantage you, or reluctantly voting for the other guy who will not. I see a complete vibe shift in the way formerly liberal white men interact with the political world.
Mounk: What is interesting, by the way, is that the vibe shift has broadened in the younger generation. It is obviously particularly strong for specific reasons among white men. Many of the white men you are talking about are probably in their thirties or early forties, people who were hopeful about breaking into those professions and have now perhaps recognized that they are unlikely to do so, and are figuring out how to deal with the disappointment and resentment that can come with that.
I teach a lot of younger students, a very diverse group, and I am finding in the classroom that a term we used to use has fallen out of favor. Part of that is because it started to sound like an angry uncle shouting at the Thanksgiving table. But part of it is that I think the underlying phenomenon has actually gone away. That term is social justice warrior. There was a moment when a cohort of young people thought of themselves as warriors in the cause of social justice. This was their cause. They saw themselves as revolutionaries. They wanted to impose this on society.
When you were teaching, you always felt that there were at least a couple of students, though many were lovely, who were there as social justice warriors. They were going to say something that broke the ethos of the class, or try to make life difficult for you. I am struck by the extent to which that has evaporated over the last few years. For many students now, these ideas feel like what their elementary school teachers taught them, what their middle school teachers taught them, and what their high school teachers taught them. They know they are supposed to parrot them a little bit on college applications.
But it is not something they really own. They have a kind of cynicism about it, the way students tend to have cynicism about what they are taught. That does not mean they have a fully developed systemic critique of it. Some do, but many do not. It feels more like, yes, these are the talking points, this is what we are supposed to say. That fervor has gone away more broadly. Do you think this reflects a larger cultural shift, the downstream effect of the much-cited vibe shift? Or does it have a different timbre for the white men in their thirties and forties you are mostly writing about, compared with this broader generation of young people who no longer share the fervor of a great awakening?
Savage: I cannot really speak to what Gen Z or younger people think, because I do not interact with them that much. But I think there are still plenty of true believers among millennials. There are still people for whom it is always white men who are bad. I remember being at a party in Los Angeles shortly after the fires, talking with a couple of gay men about how terrible Karen Bass had been, when a white woman our age started shouting at us, asking how dare we attack a Black woman.
It felt like she was fighting an insane rear-guard action from 2020, but it is still there. It is still ambient in the atmosphere. I do not think it is over, especially among millennials. I think millennials are bifurcating in how they think about these things.
Mounk: So you are saying it is still there. What about the actual institutions? Some woman shouting at a party can still be a true believer. Institutions are slow to change. Once something has become an ingrained set of practices, with particular vehicles for it, particular fellowship programs that are implicitly or quite explicitly reserved for particular groups, those things tend to persist.
But as we have seen over the last ten years, when the wind shifts, American elites can also be pretty fast in changing their sails. I was struck by the fact that I happened to glance at The New York Times list of best books of 2025. Eyeballing it, four or five of the ten books were written by white men. I am pretty sure, though I have not done the exercise and perhaps you have, that if you go through the last ten years of The New York Times lists, you would not see that high a share of white men.
I do not think it is a coincidence that this came after the victory of Donald Trump, even though The New York Times does not like Donald Trump. I doubt that anyone involved in this decision has any particular liking for him. And yet his election plausibly changed things. It made it possible to put people on that list whom previously someone might have said, well, we can have one or two, but four seems a little much. Why do we not drop a couple? Is that an indication of real change, or do you think that change is not actually happening?
Savage: I think there is some vibe-shifty change. For instance, the showrunner I spoke to basically said Hollywood is more or less pretending the last ten years did not happen. The policy now is sort of back to 2012 rules, which is hire who you want, do not make it an all-white mailroom and embarrass us, but other than that, fine, do whatever you want.
I think in the media, a friend who has a friend at The New York Times told me that the sense is they went too hard on the wokeness stuff and are dialing it back, and are ready to hire white men again. They are not obsessed with their diversity statistics. I think they will soon return to some form of more meritocratic hiring.
I think the media has also been self-correcting in a way, because a lot of people who did not get jobs have started their own things and have been able to move on and create new things. The one holdout that I think will be very difficult to dislodge is academia. I am getting sent job ads all the time, and I think academia might be completely lost.
There are still job ads in 2026. Someone sent me an ad from Mount Holyoke that was basically three paragraphs saying white men need not apply, using all of the traditional language about wanting diverse candidates who have experience teaching diversity. Ideally, if you are teaching literature, you will have experience with Latinx literature or women’s literature. They are hiring an adjunct professor to teach creative writing, but they clearly do not want it to be a white man, and they are advertising it as such.
I think academia is full, at this point, given the people who got tenure over the last ten years, of true believers. I think it will be very difficult to reinstall anything like a normal pipeline there. The other industries, I think, are slowly going to try to pretend nothing happened while inching back toward normalcy.
Mounk: A couple of thoughts on academia, which is obviously the field I know best in this conversation. The first is that there undoubtedly were illegal hiring processes over the last ten or fifteen years. I have never been involved in one, thankfully, and I have never been involved in a hiring process where I had to fight against doing illegal things. But I have heard things mentioned casually by friends and colleagues at other institutions that make that very clear. These were not just illegal under the standards that apply after the recent Supreme Court ruling about affirmative action. They would have been illegal at any point in American history in the last fifty years, just straight out saying we are not going to consider white candidates, and so on, as well as gender or other preferences in some fields.
I would argue that in academia it really depends on what institutions you are looking at and what fields you are looking at. In humanities departments at liberal arts colleges, which is implicitly what you were talking about with writing and Mount Holyoke, I am very willing to believe that you are right, both that this is continuing to happen and that the people in those positions are such true believers that it will be very hard to course-correct. My hunch would be that in a lot of the hard sciences, people went along to get along, and there were probably illegal hiring processes there as well. But the moment the imperative went away, a lot of people thought, thank God, now we can go back to hiring the most competent engineer.
In the social sciences, which I know best, there are a few true believers, but I think the disciplinary standards, especially at research universities, have held. I could imagine there being some real improvement there as well. The other thing I will say, which is a broader point I have been thinking about, is that it is really good to have a market. This is obvious, but one of the problems with an academic journal, when there is really strong ideological pressure, is that there is no end customer that can force a course correction. It is all one community. Your tenure depends on being able to publish in these journals. It is a small community of people who do peer review and a small number of editors. They all select each other through complicated mechanisms. Once it goes off the rails, there is really no way to force it back.
With The New York Times, I was very critical of it for a number of years, and I still have my regular complaints. But I think there has been a real course correction. I am much more comfortable trusting The New York Times to convey, on most things, a basically factually correct view of the world and a greater variety of opinion about how to think about it today than I was three or four years ago. Not that everything is perfect now, but it is a difference of night and day. I think a lot of that is because The New York Times has readers. Every time they open an article for comments, the predominant view of the commenters, who are center-left liberals, is that they hate Trump but also hate the woke stuff. You see that repeatedly.
I think they realized that when they went too far on the woke stuff, they were losing customers and subscribers. People tuned out. There is a course-correction mechanism in an industry like media that is absent in some other fields, which I think are going to be impacted by this for longer.
Savage: I think that is fair. I think academia has also become a monoculture in other ways in a lot of fields. Until that breaks, I am not sure that any of the rest of it can. Academia has a lot of very tough problems ahead.
One thing I have been thinking about is immigration and migration, which are obviously big issues. Until there is an academic class taught at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton about the pros and cons of immigration that treats Christopher Caldwell with respect, as something to be grappled with, I do not think academia, or the soft sciences, will be past where they are right now.
Mounk: I guess so. I have not taught that class, but I have taught a class on populism in which I certainly assign readings that argue against current immigration regimes and forms of immigration, and that, for example, make the argument that the gap in cultural representation between popular views and what political elites want is one of the big reasons for why there is backlash. I have been struck by two things. First, none of my colleagues have made trouble for me over that. Second, some students agree, many students disagree, but it did not feel like I was going out on a limb by teaching this. They engaged with it respectfully.
I teach a variety of texts and a variety of opinions in the classroom. I always hope that some people will agree with a text and some people will disagree with it. That is true of this text as much as of any other text.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jacob discuss how to tackle discrimination without the toxicity of DEI, why the Democrats should promote national unity, and how it feels to have been held back professionally due to identity. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
