Escaping the Dissident Right’s Resentment Trap

How the politics of resentment traps young men—and how both secular wisdom and Christianity can offer a pathway out.

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About the author

Julian is a columnist for Reality’s Last Stand and a member of the Braver Angels media team. He’s also the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to combating illiberalism via spiritual formation and rebuilding the American community.

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Much of the Dissident Right—also known as the “woke right,” “New Right,” or “e-right”—is driven by resentment. As New Right Poast, one of the movement’s standard-bearers, describes it, the movement is a loose coalition of individuals “all united under little more than an antipathy toward the grand liberal project, the Regime, the Cathedral, the Machine that wants to turn us all into drugged up, immiserated, tired, passive, deracinated, mindkilled, impotent, spiritually inert, atomized, gray goo’d, pod-dwelling, bug-eating, childless, individual consumers with no community from which to draw enough strength to oppose its inexorable march.”

These people feel that society has failed them—and in many ways, I understand why. The world often feels chaotic and out of control. We’re living through a loneliness epidemic. In early 2020, then-Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy reported that fully half of Americans feel lonely. He noted that countless people shared some version of the same sentiment: “I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,” or “If I disappeared tomorrow, no one would even notice.”

But it’s not just that we’re lonely. Many feel that work, which once offered stability and meaning, has become yet another source of anxiety and disorder. In the 1940s, it was common to stay with one company for an entire career. IBM, like many postwar corporate giants, encouraged new hires to consult with their families before accepting a job, since “once you came aboard you were a member of the corporate family for life.” That era is long gone. A 2021 poll found that 52 percent of employees considered changing jobs in that year alone. Over the course of a lifetime, most Americans now switch careers 5–7 times. In the gig economy, we’ve traded security for flexibility—and the bargain often feels like a bad one.

The Dissident Right is largely composed of young people, and society has done a particularly poor job of helping them grow into healthy, prosperous adults. Forty-two percent of Gen Z has been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Just 45 percent report that their mental health is “very good” or “excellent.” A staggering 84 percent of young Americans believe the U.S. is facing a mental health crisis—and they might be right. Sixty percent of them are taking at least one medication to manage their mental health.

It would be easy for young Americans (I’m 34) to adopt a narrative of failure—failed by schools, by parents, by capitalism, by the world. And to some extent, there’s some truth to that narrative. But even so, I don’t believe resentment is the right response to the hand we’ve been dealt.