Barton Swaim rebrands the status quo as moderation and blames the young for seeing through it. The Wall Street Journal carried the piece on October 1, 2026, under Barton Swaim’s byline and the title “A Suggestion for Young Radicals” — a book-review column about Aurelian Craiutu’s Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals, under a thousand words of it, running in the paper’s politics-and-culture slot. It deploys eight named rhetorical operations across its eleven paragraphs, and it deploys none of them loudly. That is the important thing about it, and it is also the thing I am least comfortable writing, because the operations I spent the cable years building were the loud ones. The gentle ones are more durable precisely because they look like nothing at all. I know the trick because I built versions of it: in the cable years we called it the halo-and-the-strawman — find the decent man, borrow his decency, and stack it against the most extreme version of your opponent you can find. This column walks the piece in document order, one operation at a time.

“The resurgence of totalizing ideologies among the young has a lot of smart people puzzled. Communism on the left, assorted racialist nationalisms on the right. I favor two explanations. First and more obvious: a failed education system. Second, the decadeslong recession of religious belief across the West has produced a generation of young people who long for something more heroic and satisfying than, as they see it, the morally thin lives of their elders.”

— opening paragraph

Attribution of blame — what Bandura published in 1999 as the eighth and final mechanism of his moral-disengagement taxonomy, and what the operator’s catalogue numbers first — operates here in the first four sentences, and it operates by omission rather than by assertion. The two legs need to be read separately. The first is about an institution — the education system — public, sustained by public money, answerable to voters, and the column names its failure as a cause that does not require a remedy. The second is about a culture — religious recession — also a public matter, but the column treats it as a private hunger. In both cases the cause is a deficit of formation, not a condition of the generation’s life, which is why the prescription is a posture (“a suggestion,” “letters”) rather than a change in the world. Neither leg locates the cause in anything that happened to the generation whose radicalism the column is trying to explain. In the operator’s vocabulary this is the load-dock: you don’t argue against the complaint, you relocate it inside the complainer, and then you sell the diagnosis instead of the remedy. The move survives because it is unfalsifiable from inside the column: a failed education system is everywhere and nowhere, and a recession of religious belief can be asserted of any decade you like.

Frame-engineered relabeling — WSJ catalogue §4.1 — operates in the same gesture, and here is the sequence worth watching. Watch the sentence that carries the whole piece’s weight: the young long for something more heroic and satisfying than “the morally thin lives of their elders.” The column concedes the perception — then files it under “as they see it” and explains it away as a failure of schooling and religion. It never once asks whether the perception is accurate. That is the operator’s move. In the trade this is called the why-are-they-angry memo: never ask what the young have seen; ask what’s wrong with them that they can’t be satisfied with what you’re selling. The suppressed variable is the one the column cannot name — what made the elders’ lives morally thin: the financialized order, the hollowed-out public realm, the precarity sold as freedom. The column names the symptom, blames the patient, and protects the cause. In the trade this is called the diagnosis scam: the patient says the water is poisoned, and the column answers that the patient has a bad education and has lost religion.

The cui-bono is worth marking here. The education failure is the column’s own coalition’s own ledger — the system is one that establishment opinion built, funded, and ran, and the column is owned by the establishment. The religious thinning is the column’s own coalition’s own success — the secularization of public life was a project the column’s side endorsed for a half-century before it noticed the harvest. Both causes name a deficit of formation. Neither names a deficit of life. The prescription for an institutional failure the institution does not have to fix is “moderation,” which in this column means whatever the institution already thinks.

The receipt is the column’s own phrase — “the morally thin lives of their elders.” Five words about character, where five numbers about conditions would have done the work. Scanning the piece for material language returns nothing: no wage, no rent, no debt, no premium, no layoff, no hour. The only economic vocabulary used as an economic category is “free-market economics,” and it appears as one half of an intellectual fashion the author is politely declining; “class warfare” is present only as a pejorative label for the enemy’s worldview, which proves the material-elimination thesis rather than undercutting it. A reader who wants to know what happened to these people over the last forty years has been given a reading list and a liturgy instead. This is the move where you tell a person whose hospital bill emptied their savings that their real problem is that they read the wrong books. It is not subtle, and it does not have to be, because the reader who accepts it never has to look at the bill.

“Aurelian Craiutu, a professor of political science at Indiana University, asks his students, especially the ones inclined to radicalism, to ponder the virtues of moderation. In his book ‘Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals,’ published in 2023, Mr. Craiutu responds to two fictional zealots, Lauren and Rob, one an intolerant progressive, the other a hard-leaning rightist. His two interlocutors employ arguments, often verbatim and duly cited, that have appeared in periodicals that might fairly be termed immoderate: the Jacobin and In These Times on the left, and American Greatness and the American Mind on the right.”

— second paragraph

The strawman is built to order — and note the craftsmanship: the radicals are not people, they are “fictional zealots” whose arguments are drawn, “often verbatim,” from magazines. The periodicals named are the rhetorical wings, not the movements they claim to represent: Jacobin and In These Times are not the left, they are the purified left-of-letter essays that survive being lifted out of anyone’s lived experience; American Greatness and the American Mind are not the right, they are the nationalist-populist case stated in its sharpest form. The piece constructs its opponents out of the most extreme available texts, defeats the extreme, and calls the defeat a victory over radicalism. The actual young radical — the one with the student debt and the rent and the job that doesn’t cover either — never gets a line in this column. A real radical’s grievance would survive moderation; it would have to be engaged on the merits. So the piece builds radicals who argue from magazines, because magazine arguments can be refuted by citing a professor. The verbatim-citation is what does the work — it is the moment the column says, in effect, “look, here’s the position, and here is the magazine it came from, so I don’t have to defend engaging with the position as anyone actually holds it.” The position is now a text, and texts can be folded. In the operator’s vocabulary this is the brochure method: you don’t argue with the customer, you argue with the brochure you wrote about the customer.

“The word ‘moderate’ has a messy history in American politics. It can either signify policy centrism or, pejoratively, a tendency to follow the consensus. It’s also unhelpfully relative: Today’s ‘moderate’ Democrats are yesterday’s strident liberals who don’t want to abolish the police.”

— third paragraph

Strawman — Bad-Faith Catalog, representational variety; WSJ catalogue §4.6 — arrives inside the paragraph where the author is conceding that his own word is unstable. That is not an accident and it is not clumsy. The concession is the alibi. He says the word is messy, that it can mean either centrism or cowardice, that it is relative — a genuine admission, and it costs him nothing, because in the very next clause he deploys the same word against an opponent’s imaginary position. No mainstream Democratic officeholder ran on abolishing the police. The slogan that actually defined the 2020 wave was “defund the police” — a different, narrower demand, raised by activists, contested inside the Democratic coalition, and explicitly disowned by its presidential ticket; the column escalates it to “abolish” before quoting it back, the way the operator used to do when an enemy’s modest proposal had to be enlarged to a monstrous one before it could be dismissed. The honest sentence bought the license; the license paid for the shot. Operators used to call this the borrowed alibi — you spend the credibility of a true statement on a false one, and the true statement cannot be repossessed because retracting it would mean retracting the honesty the reader just paid for.

Note also the definitional fence the column builds before it uses the word. Having admitted “moderate” is contested, the column is now free to use it as if it were neutral: every subsequent deployment of “moderation” as the virtue-word looks like it survived scrutiny. The concession is the cover. And the example does the real work: today’s “moderate” Democrats are yesterday’s strident liberals who don’t want to abolish the police. The line’s job is to make “moderate” relative — so that wherever the column’s own politics sit can be called the middle by definition. This is the moving-baseline frame: the center is not a location, it’s a pronoun. In the trade this is called the fence-and-gate: admit the fence is crooked so no one notices you built the gate where you wanted it.

The receipt is the sentence itself, and it is worth quoting in full because the whole trick is inside it: “Today’s ‘moderate’ Democrats are yesterday’s strident liberals who don’t want to abolish the police.” Name the Democrat who ran on abolition. The column does not need to produce one, because the association has already been placed in the reader’s head and now only needs a noun to attach to. This is a cheap shot wearing the author’s honest confession as a coat. The honest sentence is real. The shot is the point of the paragraph, and the honest sentence exists to make the shot survivable.

“‘I grew up in Romania, the wrong side of the Iron Curtain,’ Mr. Craiutu, 60, tells me in his office in July. ‘I was 23 when the Berlin Wall fell. That’s a good time in life to weigh the importance of ideas, good ones and bad ones.’ He came to the U.S. in 1993 as a graduate student and developed a keen appreciation for the American system’s ability to steer away from radicalism and remain in the untidy middle.”

— fourth paragraph

This is the borrowed-halo move — §4.18, the “as a [identity]” credibility structure — and it is the most effective thing in the piece. The man is real. His biography is real. He lived under a real totalitarianism and escaped it. And the column takes that lived authority and transfers it to a phrase: “the untidy middle.” That is the relabel doing its work — the American arrangement is not named as what it is, a financialized order with an extractive top and a precaritized base; it is named “the untidy middle,” which sounds like a place a man who survived Stalinism would be grateful for. The halo is genuine, and the operation is the transfer. The refugee’s gratitude is borrowed to certify the system that produces the very thinness the column’s first paragraph conceded the young can see. The man who escaped one horror is asked to bless the quiet horror of the next generation’s elders. He is sincere. The use of his sincerity is the trick. In the trade this is called the witness chair: the authority of the survivor, rented out to the defense.

“Moderation in his telling has three components. It seeks the mean between extremes (think of Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’). It builds and fortifies institutions that require political actors to reason, argue and compromise with one another—checks and balances, federalism, bicameralism and so on. And it cultivates a certain style or ethos. ‘Moderation is not too sure of itself,’ he says. ‘There’s an openness to learning from others. There’s a skepticism, an acceptance of the fact that you don’t know the answers, though you search for them.’

Mr. Craiutu distinguishes moderation from ‘lukewarm wishy-washiness.’ His hero is the French philosopher and journalist Raymond Aron, who ‘attacked ideas rather than people but expressed his arguments firmly and with conviction.’ When Aron’s fellow intellectuals, chiefly Jean-Paul Sartre, wanted to ignore or lie about the millions murdered in Soviet Russia, Aron refused to keep silent and wrote about Stalin’s crimes with moral clarity. ‘Aron paid a great price for speaking the truth,’ Mr. Craiutu says. ‘Sartre’s disciples savaged him. But his moderation in this way required him to write as he did.’”

— fifth and sixth paragraphs

Advantageous comparison — Bandura’s mechanism, run through the exemplar machine — and the costume is the tell. Aron’s stand against Sartre’s Stalinism was real. He really did write with moral clarity about the murders. And the column takes that real courage and dresses the defense of the status quo in it. Read the transfer closely: “Sartre’s disciples savaged him” is the martyr frame, and it pre-positions the reader — anyone who attacks the moderate is a Sartre’s disciple, an ideologue who would lie about murders. That is the poison set in the well before any actual critic arrives. And note the contradiction the column never sees: moderation “is not too sure of itself,” the piece says, and then deploys complete certainty that moderation is the answer and radicalism is the disease. The humility is a costume too. In the trade this is called the costume change: take a real hero’s coat, put it on the current argument, and the reader feels the hero’s virtue as if the argument had earned it. The reader is asked to feel that disagreeing with the Journal’s untidy middle is the moral equivalent of lying about the Gulag. It is not. It is disagreeing with the Journal.

The martyr move — the credibility structure the WSJ catalogue records at §4.18, run here in reverse: not an identity credential but a suffering credential — operates through a historical example that flatters the reader’s self-image while relocating courage to 1950s Paris. This is the easiest operation in the piece to miss, because it is the most flattering. Aron opposed Sartre. Sartre’s disciples savaged him. Aron “paid a great price.” Every reader of the Journal nods, assigns themselves the courage, and assigns the disciples to people they already dislike.

Now look at the position being borrowed. Aron was opposing the dominant moral consensus of the Western intellectual left — and in Cold War America, occupying roughly the majority position on the question of Soviet crimes, in a country whose governing consensus was anti-communist and whose newspapers ran anti-communist editorials daily. Being savaged by Sartre’s disciples in the early 1950s — around the publication of L’Opium des intellectuels (1955) — was being disliked by a minority of a minority. Set that beside the venue the sentence is now printed in — a national newspaper’s opinion page, which is what the establishment looks like when it has a byline — and the operation becomes legible. The courage is real. The transfer is not. A national newspaper’s opinion page is the establishment; that is what a national newspaper’s opinion page is, and borrowing the aesthetic of dissent for it is a very old and very cheap way to make the reader who already agrees feel like a dissenter while they agree. The receipt is the passage’s own price-list: the price named is being savaged by disciples, and the venue is left unnamed entirely. This is the courage-laundering operation — you sell the feeling of dissent to a reader who holds the majority view in the room, and you do it by pointing at a man who held a minority view in a different one.

“Mr. Craiutu contends that the truest sign of moderation is ‘eclecticism’: the ability to hold views or take attitudes to different parts of life that appear, to those who place a high value on purity, contradictory. He cites the American sociologist Daniel Bell’s memorable self-description as ‘a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture’ and the Polish dissident intellectual Leszek Kolakowski’s essay ‘How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist.’

I express discomfort with his examples—I revere Kolakowski but regard socialism as itself a form of extremism. Mr. Craiutu notes that many people see a grave contradiction between free-market economics and traditionalist views on culture and family. The combination of these stances became known as ‘fusionism’ in the 1960s, so antithetical did some hold them to be. Sympathetic as I am to the fusionist outlook, I take his point.

Mr. Craiutu’s contention about eclecticism aligns with Emerson’s famous line (alluded to in ‘Why Not Moderation?’) that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. ‘The world is very complex,’ Mr. Craiutu says. ‘There is no privileged access to understanding its direction. You need to look through as many windows as possible. We humans are limited and exhausted and can’t comprehend the world in its fullness.’”

— seventh, eighth and ninth paragraphs

Frame-engineered relabeling — WSJ catalogue §4.1 — operates here on the word “eclecticism,” which the piece uses to rename a structural feature of its own coalition’s politics as an intellectual virtue. This is the column’s most valuable move and the one most worth taking apart, because it is not a lie. Eclecticism really is what the piece says it is. Daniel Bell really did describe himself that way. Kolakowski really did write that essay. The operation is not in the definition; it is in what the definition licenses, and the licensing is done by the sentence’s subordinate clause rather than by its main one.

Read that clause again: the contradictory views appear contradictory “to those who place a high value on purity.” The demand for internal consistency has been classified before it can be made — as purity, and therefore as extremism, and therefore as one of the two failure modes the column opened by diagnosing. Call incoherence “eclecticism” and you have made it a credential. Call the demand for consistency “the hobgoblin of little minds” and you have made the demand itself a character defect. And now nobody may ask a fusionist to reconcile his economics with his culture, because asking is purity, and purity is the thing the column has already decided is the young radicals’ disease.

Now the shell game — motte-and-bailey, Shackel’s pattern — and the column’s own hand moves the coin. Eclecticism is the virtue: holding contradictory views is the “truest sign of moderation.” The exemplars are Bell — a socialist in economics — and Kolakowski. Then the column’s own voice enters: “I revere Kolakowski but regard socialism as itself a form of extremism.” Watch the coin. Bell’s socialism is cited as eclecticism’s glory; socialism as a living position is “extremism.” The motte is the definition — moderation is just not being too sure of yourself, openness to learning from others; the world is very complex, no privileged access, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. The bailey is the program — free markets plus traditionalist culture, “fusionism,” which the column confesses it is “sympathetic” to. The word “moderation” moves between the two whenever it is challenged. In the motte, everyone agrees. In the bailey, the fusionist program is the reasonable middle and socialism is extremism. The trick is that the word does the traveling, not the argument. In the trade this is called the moving-window frame: the window of acceptable opinion never moves, but the name for where you are standing inside it does.

The cui-bono disclosure lands here, in the sentence where the author tells you which side he is on, and it lands in the one place where the argument could have gone somewhere. “Sympathetic as I am to the fusionist outlook, I take his point.” Fusionism is not a philosophical school. It is a coalition — the 1960s arrangement in which free-market economics and social conservatism agreed to stop arguing with each other, an arrangement built and maintained by the same institutional infrastructure the rest of this column has just finished describing as the untidy middle. The author names the coalition, discloses his membership in it, and then — in the next sentence — supplies that coalition with a theory of intellectual virtue. All inside three sentences.

So read the column’s definition of moderation again with that in view. Moderation is the mean between extremes. The mean turns out to be fusionism. The extremes turn out to be everything the fusionist coalition opposes. The piece has not described a political virtue; it has described its own side’s prior position and given the description a new name, in a book review, in a column, in a venue where the reader arrived to be informed rather than to be argued with. The cui-bono question answers itself at this point: if moderation means what this page already thinks, then the column is not a suggestion to young radicals at all. It is a description of the reader’s existing position, delivered to the reader as a destination.

The receipt is the passage quoted above, and I want to be precise about what it does and does not do. The disclosure is honest — the author is not hiding his position, and I would rather be answered by a man who names his coalition than by one who pretends to have none. What the disclosure does not do is interrupt anything. It arrives, it is noted, and the definition of moderation goes on unchanged. This is the point of the whole column, and it arrives as a confession of sympathy rather than as an argument, which is exactly the form that lets it survive contact with a reader who might otherwise have asked a question.

“The hard left, from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union, tried to explain life’s complexities in terms of class warfare. That effort has resumed. Lately parts of the right have rejected pluralism, deplored the messiness of constitutionalism and posited the desirability of an all-encompassing metaphysics. Many on both sides dabble in antisemitism, another habit of mind that purports to explain the world’s complexity.”

— tenth paragraph (penultimate)

The asymmetric both-sides — the selection asymmetry the WSJ catalogue records at §4.9, applied here to ideological targets rather than to states — operates through a paragraph in which one side receives a full account and the other receives a subordinate clause. Count it. The column’s left gets a lineage running from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a named explanatory mechanism in class warfare, and a claim that the effort “has resumed.” The column’s right gets “parts of the right,” a clause about pluralism, and a clause about metaphysics. That is not two sides. That is a documented indictment and a gesture, presented in the same paragraph as if the two were commensurate.

Then the last sentence does the work the whole paragraph was assembled for. “Many on both sides dabble in antisemitism, another habit of mind that purports to explain the world’s complexity.” Dabble. Habit of mind. Another. That last word is doing more than any other in the column, because “another” places antisemitism in the same category as the class-analysis sentence above it — an explanatory style, an intellectual tic, a way of managing complexity that the author finds both common and slightly embarrassing. In one clause, a program of persecution has been reclassified as a school of thought, shared evenly across the spectrum, and therefore not the property of anyone in this column’s coalition.

Here is the both-sides rinse — false equivalence, the whataboutism family (§4.17) — and it is the most dishonest paragraph in the piece, because it performs symmetry where the column has already conceded asymmetry. The column’s own first paragraph, quoted above, named “assorted racialist nationalisms on the right” as one of the two resurgent totalizing ideologies. Now, in the antisemitism sentence, it splits the evil evenly: “many on both sides dabble.” The distribution of antisemitism in American politics right now is not even. One side has mainstreamed it into a nationalist-populist coalition; the other keeps it at the margins, where the rest of the coalition treats it as the disgrace it is. The column needs them equal, because the sentence’s real work is to wash the middle clean: antisemitism is a “habit of mind that purports to explain the world’s complexity” — that is, another radicalism — so the moderate center, by definition, is not where the antisemitism lives. The center is pure because the piece defines purity as the center. And this is the same Journal whose opinion pages have made room for the nationalist-populist milieu it now waves at with “assorted racialist nationalisms.” The both-sides rinse is how the house washes its own floor: name the evil, split it evenly between the two radicalisms, and stand — unexamined — in the middle.

The receipts are the sentences themselves, and the second one is a strawman in the Bad-Faith Catalog’s representational sense: “The hard left […] tried to explain life’s complexities in terms of class warfare. That effort has resumed.” Who resumed it? The sentence names nobody, and it does not need to, because in this venue “class warfare” is already functioning as a synonym for unserious, and the reader supplies the target without being asked to. This is the relativization operation — you name one side’s evil with precision and the other side’s evil as a shared bad habit, and the difference in precision is the entire argument, delivered under the caption of even-handedness. Cui bono: the moderate center, which is to say the institutions of the untidy middle, which is to say the people the untidy middle serves. The column never says who that is. That is how you know.

“In a brief note on the origins of his book, Mr. Craiutu mentions scriptwriter and Yiddish scholar Leo Rosten’s ‘A Trumpet for Reason’ (1970). In that very funny tract, Rosten addressed young baby boom radicals: leftists who had lost faith in America because of the war in Vietnam and reactionaries who wanted to ban hippies from college campuses. Change some of the nouns and Rosten’s book reads as if it were published in the 2020s. A fine reminder that the campaign for sense and moderation isn’t new and isn’t hopeless.”

— eleventh paragraph

The timelessness play — the operation that converts a contemporary political phenomenon into a recurring generational temperament, so that no contemporary policy environment can be responsible for it — operates here as the column’s closing gesture, and it closes the loop with Operation 1. Swaim quotes Rosten approvingly: baby-boom radicals and 2020s radicals are the same thing under different nouns; the campaign for sense and moderation is not new and is not hopeless. Read carefully, that sentence does three things at once. It denies that the present radicalism is novel. It denies that anything new has happened to produce it. And it assures the reader that patience will resolve it, because patience has resolved it before.

The move’s structure is identical to the opening’s structure. Both relocate the cause inside the young person’s interior — the first named the interior variables (failed education, lost religion); the closer converts the present pattern into a historical constant. The combination is a closed system: there is no material variable that could change the diagnosis, no policy environment that could be the cause, no event in the actual world between 1970 and 2026 that produced a discontinuity. Radicals have always existed. Moderation has always answered them. The campaign is not hopeless, and therefore nothing about the world the present radicals are responding to requires examination.

The benediction closer — the closing-line cadence, §3.5, in its reassuring register — and notice what it refuses to do. “Change some of the nouns and Rosten’s book reads as if it were published in the 2020s.” The 1970 radical was angry about Vietnam — a real war, with real bodies, documented. The 2026 radical is angry about what, exactly? The column will not say. It cannot say, because saying it would require engaging it. The closer’s function is to send the reader out confirmed: the campaign for sense and moderation isn’t new and isn’t hopeless, and you, reader, are on the side of sense. The reader is never once asked what the young have seen. The column’s own first paragraph conceded the perception — the morally thin lives of the elders. It spent ten paragraphs explaining the perception as a symptom of failed education and lost religion. It ends without ever asking the question its own concession raised: what if the young are right? The benediction exists to make sure the reader never has to. In the trade this is called the send-off: the audience leaves feeling like the good guys, which is the whole job, because the good guys never have to look at what the bad guys are angry about.

The receipt is the passage’s own closing sentence. “The campaign for sense and moderation isn’t new and isn’t hopeless.” New is for novelty — and novelty would be the evidence that something new has happened. Hopeless is for resignation — and resignation would be the honest response to a world that produced the radicals. Both are foreclosed at once. The reader is invited to find this reassuring. A reader who finds it reassuring has been told, by the column’s last word, that no event in the last forty years requires their attention.

So here is what this column actually is, taken together. It is a warning against totalizing ideologies that contains one — and what is totalizing here is the explanation’s closure: no material variable admissible, interior causes jointly sufficient, an all-encompassing metaphysics with no room left for what actually happened to these people. The totalizing ideology is an explanation of an entire generation in which the only variable that matters is the interior life of the young person, and in which the material conditions of that generation’s life are not so much excluded as never considered at all. It warns against all-encompassing metaphysics and then supplies one — a metaphysics in which education failure and religious decline are jointly sufficient to explain a decade of dissent. It describes class analysis as an explanation that “purports to explain the world’s complexity,” which is the sentence’s own description of itself, applied to the sentence’s own subject, and neither the writer nor the reader appears to have noticed. And it tells a generation that its hunger for something heroic is a spiritual illness, and it prescribes as the cure the one political stance that the piece itself defines, in its own quotation, as “not too sure of itself.” A young person who takes this column seriously has been handed a diagnosis they cannot act on and a temperament they are constitutionally incapable of wanting. That is not an argument against totalizing ideologies. It is a very good one for them — the totalizing ideology in this case being the one that says the problem with the world is that the young have not yet learned to accept it. The label was on the door the whole time.

Let me say the rest in plain words. “Moderation” is the name the comfortable give to the order that made them comfortable. “The untidy middle” is the extractive economy with a philosophy degree. “Sense and moderation” is the status quo with good manners — and the status quo has good manners because it can afford them. The morally thin lives the column concedes the young can see are not abstractions: they are the renter who will never own, the graduate with the diploma and the debt, the worker whose wages have not kept pace with what the wages must cover, the family priced out of the childcare the column’s own “traditionalist culture” supposedly prizes. The column will not name any of these. It cannot. Naming them would require the piece to face the mirror it has been holding up to the young.

And the mirror it holds up to the young is backwards. The piece says the young long for something more heroic and satisfying than the morally thin lives of their elders. Yes. That is exactly what they long for. And they are right to. The elders’ lives are morally thin — thin enough that a column can be written defending the thinness as the highest political ideal. I know those rooms. I sat in them. That is the heroism the young are rejecting. That is the moderation this column is selling. The column holds up the mirror to the radical and sees a zealot. Hold it up to the column and you see the thing the radical is angry about.

If radicalism is a failure of education and a deficit of faith, and if the campaign for sense and moderation is not new and not hopeless, then nothing that happened to these people over the last forty years requires reexamination — and that is the sentence this column was written to keep you from reading. The cui-bono question does not need a subpoena here. Follow the benefit and it stops at the same address every time: the arrangement that produces the morally thin lives gets to describe the thinness as the young people’s deficiency, and gets to sell them a posture as the remedy.

The campaign for sense and moderation isn’t new and isn’t hopeless. It’s also not what this column is part of. The campaign this column serves is the one that has been running since the Gilded Age: name the order that concentrates the wealth “moderation,” name the people who notice “radicals,” and call the noticing a failure of education and religion. The column says the young have it backwards. They don’t. The column has it backwards — and the tell is that it never once says what the young are angry about. It can’t. Naming it would require the piece to face the mirror it has been holding up to them.

I am bitter about this piece. I am also right about it. The bitterness is the residue of the recognition, and the recognition took me a long time; the rightness is in the sentences I have quoted, and the reader can verify those without crediting me for anything.

— Phukher Tarlson