A MAGA friend often says to me, “Too much winning bro! I’m not worthy to live in these exciting times.”
When Trump imposed a $100,000 fee for H1B visas, my friend thought he had died and gone to Heaven.
Most of my friends are nationalist-populist. I’m never seen them this pumped.
When I share my concerns about trans rights, they are not sympathetic.
When I share my concerns about competence, I get a full spectrum of responses, with my smartest friends the most concerned.
For the “highly informed” MAGA adherent—specifically the type who reads Compact and tracks the sociology of elites—the year likely feels like the breaking of a decade-long fever. The expectation going into 2025 might have been a simple political restoration (Trump returning to the White House), but the reality has been a much deeper cultural and institutional counter-revolution.
Here is why 2025 likely feels like a runaway success from that vantage point:
The transition from Jacob Savage’s The Vanishing White Male Writer (March 2025) to The Lost Generation (December 2025) serves as a perfect narrative arc for the year.
March: The conversation was still arguably in the “complaint” phase—pointing out erasure in literary and cultural spaces.
December: The conversation shifted to forensic accounting and accountability. The Lost Generation essay didn’t just lament; it provided a structural history of the 2014–2024 “Great Awokening” and was met not with cancellation, but with viral acknowledgment and institutional fear.
The ability to speak openly about the “lost generation” of white men without immediate professional suicide suggests the cultural enforcement mechanisms of the previous decade have shattered.
For the committed MAGA member, the pleasant surprise was likely the speed and efficacy of the administrative turnover. Expectations were for a slow, obstructionist slog. Instead, the implementation of “Schedule F” style reclassifications and the aggressive posture of the DOJ and EEOC (e.g., pursuing anti-white discrimination cases) moved the ball faster than anticipated.
They aren’t just winning elections; they are arguably achieving status closure against the previous elite. The “regime” didn’t just lose an election; it is losing its ability to replicate itself in the bureaucracy.
The “highly informed” member likely views 2025 as the year the “2014 consensus” (the institutionalization of DEI, identity politics, and cancel culture) officially collapsed under its own weight.
The fact that Compact—a magazine that often bridges post-liberal left and right—is publishing the defining essays of the year suggests a realignment where “reality” is winning over ideology. The “gaslighting” (as described in the Lost Generation discourse) has stopped working.
If the “wins” also include the standard metrics—stabilized gas prices, a roaring stock market, or a calm border—these serve as the bedrock that allows the movement to focus on the higher-order “civilizational” battles they care about most. They aren’t just putting out fires; they are building a new architecture.
In short, 2025 exceeded expectations because it wasn’t just a change of management; it felt like a successful regime change.
if we pressure-test for “delusion,” the danger for MAGA lies in conflating punishment with permanence.
The “highly informed” MAGA cohort—the kind who read Jacob Savage and track Schedule F implementations—is currently riding a high of negative liberty: the freedom from the suffocating cultural consensus of the 2010s. But they may be deluded about their capacity for positive liberty: the ability to actually wield the state to build the world they want.
Here is the breakdown of where the delusion likely sits:
1. The “Competence” Delusion (Hollowing vs. Capturing)
The most significant delusion is the belief that breaking the administrative state is the same as mastering it.
The Win: 2025 saw the aggressive use of Schedule F and the firing of “rogue bureaucrats.” To the faithful, this looks like the “Deep State” being brought to heel.
The Delusion: You cannot wield a weapon you have dismantled. By purging institutional knowledge and replacing it with loyalists (or leaving seats empty), the administration may have secured itself against sabotage, but it has also likely severed its own hands. If a crisis hits (a pandemic, a financial crash, a logistics failure), the “captured” agencies may simply be too incompetent to execute the President’s will. They have prioritized loyalty over capacity, assuming that “will” is the only thing missing from governance.
2. The “Vibe Shift” Delusion (Savage’s Essays as False Dawn)
The user mentioned Jacob Savage’s The Lost Generation (Dec 15, 2025). The viral success of this essay—and the fact that Savage wasn’t immediately unpersoned for writing it—feels like a total victory.
The Win: The discourse window has smashed open. The ability to publicly discuss the “economic purge” of white males in Hollywood (dropping from ~50% to ~12% of TV writers) without being shouted down is a massive psychological relief.
The Delusion: They are mistaking a momentary cultural exhaustion for a structural reversal. The HR departments, the university tenure committees, and the corporate boards are still largely staffed by the same people who built the “2014 consensus.” They are keeping their heads down in 2025 because of the political climate, but the laws (Civil Rights Act disparate impact interpretation) and the incentives (ESG scores, internal revolts) haven’t fundamentally changed. The MAGA cohort thinks they’ve won the war; in reality, the other side is just waiting for the current administration to lose focus.
3. The “Great Man” Delusion (Projecting Strategy onto Impulse)
The “highly informed” supporter reads Compact, studies Burnham and Pareto, and sees Trump’s 2025 actions as part of a coherent, sophisticated strategy of “Counter-Elite” circulation.
The Delusion: They are projecting their own intellectual framework onto a President who operates largely on instinct and grievance. Trump may be firing people because they annoyed him, not because he is executing a 40-year plan to dismantle the managerial class. The “delusion” is assuming there is a long-term plan for what happens after the fires go out. If the “Restoration” depends entirely on one man’s chaotic energy, it isn’t a regime change—it’s just a hiatus.
If 2025 feels stable, it may be because the bills for the more aggressive policies (mass deportations, universal tariffs) haven’t come due yet. The cohort is likely attributing the current stability to “Trumpian strength” while ignoring the potential inflationary time bomb ticking under the floorboards. They believe they have successfully defied economic gravity; usually, gravity wins in the end.
They aren’t deluded about the events—the “vibe shift” is real, and the administrative firings are real. They are deluded about the durability. They believe they have poured concrete for a new foundation, when they may have just pitched a very loud tent on top of a swamp that is still rising.
If Savage’s March essay (The Vanishing White Male Writer) was the “discovery” phase, his December essay (The Lost Generation) is the autopsy. For the highly informed reader, this essay validates a suspicion they have held for a decade: that their displacement wasn’t an accident of the market, but a coordinated bureaucratic function.
Savage likely posits that the “purge” of young white men from creative and intellectual classes (2014–2024) was not driven by explicit hatred, but by risk management.
In the post-2020 corporate environment, the white male employee became a “distressed asset.” He offered no ESG value, no DEI credit, and carried the highest “cancellation risk.” HR departments, acting as risk mitigators, simply stopped buying the asset.
Savage likely uses data to show that while older white men (the boomers) kept their seats, the entry-level pipeline was cauterized. The “Lost Generation” refers to the cohort graduating between 2015 and 2025 who found the doors to publishing, academia, and Hollywood welded shut.
The essay’s punchline is likely that this demographic filtering destroyed American cultural competency. By selecting for “safety” and identity over raw drive or disagreeable creativity, institutions became sterile.
The delusion here is the belief that identifying the mechanism reverses it.
The “informed” MAGA cohort believes that because the truth is out (via Savage), the jobs will return. They underestimate the “stickiness” of the legal regimes (Civil Rights Act interpretations) and corporate incentives that created the purge. Corporations aren’t hiring white men again because they read an essay in Compact; they will only do so if the legal liability of not hiring them exceeds the social liability of hiring them. That legal pivot is slow, expensive, and far from guaranteed.
While Savage explains why the culture broke, Schedule F is the weapon intended to punish the people who broke it. Schedule F allows the President to reclassify tens of thousands of policy-adjacent civil service jobs as “at-will” appointments, effectively stripping them of tenure protections.
The “Decapitation” Strategy: In 2025, this moved from theory to practice. The administration likely targeted entire layers of the DOJ, the Department of Education, and the State Department.
The MAGA view is that the “permanent bureaucracy” (the people who stall orders, leak to the press, and interpret regulations) has finally been severed from the body politic. They see this as the restoration of democracy: The voters chose a policy, and now the people who implement it actually have to listen.
The delusion is confusing destruction with control. You can fire a specialist at the EPA or the FDA in an afternoon. You cannot clone a MAGA-loyal replacement with 20 years of technical expertise overnight.
The administration has likely created a “zombie government.” The agencies haven’t been “captured” to do Trump’s will; they have been lobotomized. They stop doing bad things (over-regulation), but they also stop doing necessary things (logistics, crisis response).
The cohort cheers the silence coming from the agencies, mistaking the quiet of a broken machine for the peace of a well-oiled one.
The reason 2025 feels like such a vindication is that these two threads—Savage’s cultural truth and Trump’s institutional hammer—create a complete narrative loop:
Savage proves “They stole your future via HR bureaucracy.”
Trump fires the bureaucrats who did it.
The cohort believes that punishing the bureaucrats (Schedule F) will solve the cultural purge (The Lost Generation).
They think that firing a diversity officer in the Department of Energy somehow forces Disney or The New York Times to hire white men again. It doesn’t.
The cultural institutions (Media, Hollywood, Universities) are insulated from Schedule F. The government can rot, but the private cultural citadels can remain standing, perhaps even radicalizing further in defense. The “Lost Generation” may be vindicated intellectually, but they are likely still unemployed.
If the “thriving” group in the Orthodox world is finding purpose through tradition and community, the “Lost Generation” described by Jacob Savage—specifically those turning toward nationalist populism—seems to be forming a counter-elite in reaction to “status closure.”
Savage’s central thesis—that 2014 was the “hinge year” where white men began “hitting the wall” in elite institutions—describes a classic Weberian status closure. The existing cultural elite (media, academia, Hollywood) redefined the qualifications for membership (shifting from “merit/competence” to “identity/equity”).
The Result: A surplus of educated, articulate, ambitious young men were ejected from the “verbal” professions.
The Pivot: Unlike the Orthodox young men (who have a thick, pre-existing religious structure to fall back on), this secular “Lost Generation” had no institutional home. Their turn to nationalist populism can be seen as an attempt to build a new status hierarchy where they are not the bottom rung.
If The Vanishing White Male Writer documented their erasure from literary fiction (the realm of imagination and empathy), The Lost Generation documents their erasure from professional power.
Savage argues these men didn’t just disappear; they went elsewhere. A “writer” who cannot publish literary fiction might become a “content creator” or a political theorist on the right.
The Nationalist Variety: This specific populist strain is distinct because it is often intellectualized. These aren’t just disaffected workers; many are the “lost” academics, screenwriters, and journalists Savage describes. They are bringing the tools of the elite (rhetoric, analysis, media literacy) to nationalist movements, giving those movements a sharper, more dangerous edge.
Orthodoxy Jewish life thrives on internal legitimacy. A young man in a Yeshiva doesn’t need approval from the New York Times to feel high status; his community grants it.
Nationalist Populism often thrives on external conflict. It is a reaction to the mainstream. If the Orthodox solution is to “build a wall and live behind it,” the Nationalist Populist solution (for this Lost Generation) is to “storm the citadel that locked us out.”
Here is the pipeline:
2014-2024: Institutional Status Closure (Savage’s Lost Generation).
The Exile: Expulsion from elite “sense-making” jobs (Savage’s Vanishing Writer).
The Reaction: The formation of a “Nationalist Populist” identity as a counter-elite vehicle.
