The Rise of the Twerps

How much of the intra-left fissure is due to age differences?

“We find you problematic.”

They’re in your office. They’re at your school. They’re a major presence in media, non-profit advocacy, and business. They’re on Slack, lurking in a channel that you’re not a part of. They’re downtown right now doing something ironic. They use apps you’ve never heard of, and they always will; if you figured out what app they’re on, they’d scatter before you got there - you’d end up like the sheriff in a Western walking through the bandits’ abandoned hideout, placing your hands over the fire and reporting: “It’s still warm.”

You know who “they” are: Young people. Generation Z. Recent college graduates. Or my preferred term: twerps. I like “twerps” because it invokes a specific kind of young person: educated, adamant, with more self-confidence than most people would have if they won ten consecutive Super Bowls. The type of person who considers bringing their dog to work to be something close to a human right. A person who would not only start a Google doc called “Big Ideas”; they also wouldn’t be mortified when they came across it a year later. A person who would tweet “OK Boomer” and not realize that it’s a rejoinder so infuriating it would make the Dalai Lama want to come to their house and spank their ass red.

Obviously, I’m generalizing for effect. I don’t actually believe in generational stereotypes, except for the one about the Silent Generation, because I had to get my great uncle drunk before he’d tell me about the time he jumped out of a burning airplane to escape the Nazis. I think it’s probably true that each generation contains basically the same mix of personality types, and circumstances push certain ones to the fore. None of us get to pick who speaks for our generation, and I say that as someone whose generational voice is probably either Fiona Apple or the Aflac duck.

But let’s talk about 20-somethings as they exist in the public imagination, if not necessarily in reality. These twerps are, in a word, terrifying. They strike swiftly and without remorse. Watching 45-year newspaper veteran Don McNeil get defenestrated by the New York Times was like watching that lawyer get eaten off the toilet in Jurassic Park. Practically every week brings a new story - “oh, they got the Reply All people”, “did you hear about the guy at Apple?”, “they tried to get Matt Yglesias but he got away and only lost an arm.” If life was a horror movie, the audio cue signaling twerps' presence would be the faint tap, tap, tapping of fingers on a keyboard. That's the sound of twerps amassing on Slack to denounce you to your boss. That's the sound of a Twerp Putsch. 

The Rise of the Twerps comes at a moment of division within the left. We're being split into "woke" and "not woke" factions (and I hate the word “woke” but it’s the shorthand we have so I’m going with it). Both sides oppose discrimination, but there are big disagreements about what that actually means. Much of the debate is about adamancy; one side talks of a “reckoning” and denounces measures they see as insufficient, the other side warns of overzealousness. Part of the split is ideological; it’s the old liberal/leftist fissure that’s been around at least since French revolutionaries couldn’t agree on exactly how many heads needed to be chopped off in order to achieve liberty. And, indeed, there are endless polls telling us that Generation Z are to the left of previous generations. But I think we underappreciate how much of the divide is the simple product of age differences. I think important parts of the “woke” worldview are common when you’re young but become less tenable as you get older. 

One event that suggested that the age gap might be at least as important as the ideology gap was the ”Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in Harper’s last year. This pro-free speech statement - which so anodyne that it was practically a “water slides are fun”-level missive - drew signatories from across the ideological spectrum. That included people like Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, who are significantly to the left and also significantly old. How old are they? Folks: They’re so old, their favorite thing to build when they were kids was the pyramids! I tell ya - they’re so old, their pre-school growing up was literally pre-school! They’re really old, folks - so old, they didn’t play with Lincoln Logs growing up ‘cause they didn’t have Lincoln Logs, or for that matter...Lincoln! Or for that matter...logs! They’re so old they appreciate these jokes unironically instead of as a riff on the joke structure!

How ‘bout we break the essay off right here and make the rest of the thing “they’re so old” jokes?

No?

Fine. Where was I? Ah yes: The Harper’s letter united geezers of conscience from across the political spectrum. Some people were surprised to see ardent leftists among the signatories. I wasn’t; Chomsky and West are old enough to remember when “free speech” meant “freedom to be really far left.” They remember the Red Scare and the Hays Code and when “people sitting at a lunch counter shouldn't be attacked by police dogs” was a sizzling hot take. They have the perspective that comes with age.

One thing the Harper’s letter criticized was “the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” I think this gets to the heart of the woke/not woke divide. A common idea in woke discourse is the belief that right and wrong are easy to determine and that the main obstacle to progress is a lack of conviction. This idea underpins pleas for aggressive content moderation by Facebook and Twitter, and also Ibram X. Kendi’s call to categorize all actions as either “racist” or “anti-racist”. The question of what’s right is treated as settled; the focus is on what to do about it.

Maybe the purest distillation of this view comes from the journalist Wesley Lowery. Lowery argues for more “moral clarity” in journalism; he believes that “America’s newsrooms too often deprive their readers of plainly stated facts,” and calls for journalism “to abandon the appearance of objectivity as the aspirational journalistic standard, and for reporters instead to focus on being fair and telling the truth.” In practice, that means “politicians who traffic in racist stereotypes and tropes - however cleverly - (should) be labeled such with clear language and unburied evidence.” 

I’m sure Lowery and I could agree on a standard requiring journalists to “be fair and tell the truth.” Of course, I’d imagine that Roger Ailes, Jean-Paul Marat, and the good people at Cannibalism Monthly - which I read for the cartoons - would agree to that standard, too. The point of disagreement, of course, is over what’s “fair” and what’s “true”. And the amount of space within that point is as vast as the universe.

I’m not a moral relativist; I’m not making a “how do we even know what’s true? This could all be a dream in the mind of a robot!” argument. We all make decisions about what’s true and false, right and wrong, and we have to - we can’t start every day thinking “should I shit where I eat? Let me hear the pros and cons of that again.” Debate has to end at some point. And endless equivocation can impede progress; we wouldn’t have Protestantism if Martin Luther had nailed his “Ninety-Five Thoughts That Are Probably Dumb Anyway You Know What Nevermind” to the church door in Wittenberg. My complaint isn’t with certainty; my complaint is with over-certainty.

And I do think young people are prone to over-certainty. There’s an obvious reason for that: They haven’t yet made the eight billion mistakes that they’re going to make in their lives. Though the mistakes, they are a-comin’; by the time I was 25, I had supported the Iraq War, married the wrong person, and experimented with the “Strokes” look. Five years after that, I had purchased a Zune, engaged in a multi-day MySpace argument with a comedy magician, and bought a house on the cusp of the market collapse. I’m a fucking dumbass. The only psychological comfort I’ve achieved comes from the realization that I’ll always be a dumbass and nobody can ever expect anything different. Still: My miscalculations have been staggering. Here are some things that I’ve believed at some point in my adult life:

• It is wise to own a kitchen implement that only cooks eggs.

• The internet will bring the world together.

• Freddy Adu is going to be a superstar.

• John Edwards seems like a swell guy.

• I should carry around a small notepad for when I have important thoughts.

• Established democracies don’t backslide.

• Trump can't possibly win.

• I will eventually use all these Groupons.

• Twitter is a flash in the pan.

• China will not succeed at censoring the internet.

• If I simply explain what happened to the person at the rental car company, this will all turn out okay.

Much of this abysmal record coincided with intense feelings of moral certainty. I’ve written about my history of twerp-ness before - I had it real bad in my early ‘20s (a.k.a. the “Strokes look” period). Here’s a story from that period: When I was in college, my roommate said something racist. 20 years later, I still think what he said was racist; that hasn’t changed. But what has changed is how I view my reaction. I was way too harsh; I trashed him to everyone. I didn’t just mention it once in a conversation with a friend; I practically ran through campus with a bullhorn yelling “RACIST!” I was telling bus drivers and bodega clerks; I would have hired a skywriter if I could have afforded it. Now: I do think it was appropriate to react - I think you should react to something like that in order to signal “I don’t think that’s okay.” But I definitely went overboard trying to inflict punishment. Even though I was certain at the time that I was doing the right thing.

But I was 21; I was yet to earn my black belt in misjudgment, and therefore didn’t have the impulse to think “maybe tread lightly here.” I was like an animal that hadn’t learned to fear humans, bumbling forward, following my impulses without reservation, unaware that my lack of caution was about to get me clubbed and skinned.

And so it’s been with the current generation of twerps; the recent history of twerp-fueled moral certainty is, at best, a mixed bag. Aggressive censorship of social media has gone poorly. A rush to judgement caused much of the media to bungle stories about the ”lab leak” theory, the death of Brian Sicknick, and police action against Lafayette Square protesters in quick succession. Al Franken Remorse Syndrome should practically be in the DSM-5. And the somewhat legitimate - if definitely overblown - tales of “cancel culture” are the greatest gift to Fox News since Bill Clinton’s penis.

And yet: I find it hard to stay mad at the twerps. I did used to be one, so I know that some of their obnoxious zeal comes from a good place. I also suspect that they’ll find possessing large amounts of moral certainty to be unsustainable as they get older, like I did. And - for all the beliefs I held in my 20s that I’ve thrown away - one I’ve held on to is the idea that things generally get better over time. Each generation tends to be an upgrade on the previous one in important ways. For all my reservations about their tendency to get a little Salem Witch Trial-y, I know that Generation Z will probably improve on whatever my generation does. I feel certain about that.

How certain?

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88 percent.