In his new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, Robby Soave examines the activism of millennials and Gen Z — a combined cohort he refers to as “Zillennials” — and finds it worryingly illiberal, caustic, and “fundamentally unlike the fondly remembered activist movements of decades past.”
Soave tells “the story of two extremes: woke intersectional safe-space progressivism and red-pilled identitarian right-wing populism — where they come from, what happens when they clash, and why they ultimately depend upon each other.” Though their political views differ, activists on the progressive Left and white nationalist alt-right share similar hostilities to free speech, established authorities and “elites,” and classical liberal ideals of tolerance and open debate. Neither group is adept at, or much concerned with, bridge building. In fact, they are often directly opposed to the concept. Without drawing moral equivalence between the two, Soave notes the insidious symbiosis: “The right’s extremism fuels the left, and the extreme left responds in a way that makes the extreme right feel vindicated. And vice versa.”
It’s an excellent book, made even more so by the fact it is Soave’s first. An associate editor at Reason magazine, the 29-year-old, elder-millennial libertarian is able both to empathize with peer-group activists and to hold them at appropriate critical distance. The result is a mostly evenhanded, thoroughly informative study that combines first-person interviews, scholarly literature, and current events reportage to construct “a psychological profile” of Zillennial activists. Black Lives Matter, antifa, #MeToo feminists, trans activists, Parkland students, and the alt-right are all considered at length, among other “social change agents” and activist movements.
According to Soave, two developments were critical in shaping Zillennial activism. First, these young people came of age in conjunction “with a number of inauspicious cultural phenomena — the rise of helicopter parenting, zero-tolerance school disciplinary measures, and safety paranoia in general — that might have made kids more frightened and less resilient.” It is not Zillennials but the older generation who are responsible for this culture, Soave correctly points out. And it is a short step from a learned posture of harm avoidance to branding other things, such as unpleasant speech or discomfort itself, as harmful as well.
Second, the intellectual theory and framework of intersectionality simultaneously grew to dominate the academy, providing a common language and operating system for the progressive Left. “Put simply,” Soave explains, “intersectionality means that various kinds of oppression — racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic inequality, and others — are simultaneously distinct from each other and inherently linked.” In other words, someone can be oppressed on several grounds at the same time: for instance, a black woman is held to suffer from two kinds of oppression (racism and sexism) but a white woman from only one (sexism). Since all oppression is interrelated, and all forms of oppression must be opposed, every new iteration of oppression that is added to the list, such as “sizeism” and, of course, capitalism, must also be uniformly denounced by intersectionality’s “woke” adherents.
Soave traces how these two factors — safety culture and intersectionality — undergird a host of leftist phenomena on campus and off, from microaggressions and bias response teams to trigger warnings and the rise of self-diagnosed “trauma” and mental health problems.
He stresses how intersectionality, in particular, sabotages activists’ causes. If everyone is the authority on their own oppression, for example, and someone’s lived experience should not be questioned — to do so can be considered oppressive and thus harmful — you’re going to have a difficult time winning converts among even well-meaning people. And because every item on the oppression list must be opposed wholesale, it becomes almost impossible to form single-issue coalitions with those who may not agree with every tenet of the dogma. It’s this facet of intersectionality that led pro-life groups to be dropped from the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., and second wave feminists not entirely on board with the modern transgender agenda to be branded apostates.
Soave’s book is deeply sourced and at times highly contextual, but it is approachable nonetheless. He provides considerable introductory background for readers who may not be familiar with the various federal statutes or academic theories at play, including basic overtures of Marx and Hegel, Title IX, critical theory, and so on. This slows the book for those even slightly familiar with these items, but this is a minor quibble.
The only real section of the book that drags is the chapter discussing LGBTQ activists, which spends much of its time in the weeds. Soave spends a deal of ink throat-clearing, repeatedly emphasizing that his criticisms of the more militant elements within trans activism are not representative of the broader trans population. But when even RuPaul can be denounced by activists as problematic, I suppose you can’t be too careful. (I also take slight issue with Soave’s identification of “paleoconservatism” as “the intellectual precursor to the alt-right” in the book’s final chapter, as he later notes that “the alt-right has drawn from all corners of the ideological spectrum,” including libertarianism and Marxism. What Soave has put his finger on but not identified is perhaps not an intellectual forerunner so much as it is a particular group disposition: namely, the alt-right movement seems to have an allure among those Americans whom Walter Russell Mead categorized as “Jacksonians.”)
Soave ends his book with an exhortation for liberals to step up against the worst of Zillennial activists’ illiberal tendencies. It’s a daunting prospect after his thorough presentation of the challenge. But for willing defenders of tolerance and free speech, Panic Attack provides considerable insight into where to begin.
J. Grant Addison is deputy editor for the Washington Examiner Magazine.
