Last Girl at the Beginning of History
Postscript No. 18 | Mana Afsari on the boys and girls of gen z and the New Right
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*In January of 2025, Mana Afsari uncovered the El Dorado of American politics: a new angle. Her essay, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” published in The Point, argued that the army of Trump-worshipping young men, members of the New Right, were not all just flippant misogynists. They were men, or boys, really, hungry for meaning in a political world that dismissed questions of purpose and greatness.
After spending time at both the National Conservatism conference and the liberal “Unpopulist” conference in D.C., Afsari found something missing in liberalism.
“Somehow, the National Conservatism conference — home to a movement emphasizing national loyalty, marriage, civic responsibility, religion — had tapped into energies that felt, to many, fresher, freer, and wilder than the once-natural home of soulful young men and women — the left or liberalism. The NatCons addressed questions of the heart, recognizing that the young need ideals and aspirations — and most of all, a vocation.”
A year later, Afsari wrote a follow-up on dating, “Doomers in Love,” about those young people giving up on the possibility of a happy romantic life and their excuses for being single.
“I am unimpressed with the self-indulgence of the heteropessimists, both male and female. I find first-world heteropessimism to be an insult, if nothing else, to myself and to the women who came before me and who did not have the freedoms that I do.
…Those phantasms of child-despising girlbosses and insensitive male chauvinists are simpler villains than one’s own complicated mistakes, one’s own cowardice or vanity, one’s own halting uncertainty about when to ask for more or settle for what’s given, when to try once again or give in to despair.”
In these two essays, Mana Afsari has announced herself as a pre-eminent gen z intellectual and whisperer of the New Right.
In the following conversation with New Critic founding editor Elan Kluger and assistant editor Owen Yingling, Afsari discusses how her circuitous education facilitated a clearer eye on our political world, the liberal aesthetic, and so much more. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*
*You can access the entirety of Postscript — this conversation in full, new weekly installments, and the complete archive of our gen z interview series — for only $30 a year.*
ELAN How did you come to write the “Last Boys” piece for The Point?
MANA In early to mid-2024, from spring to summer, I started to notice that people my age and younger — on the left and right — used liberalism as a term of abuse. I didn’t come in with an editorial angle so much as pick up on the perceptions and sentiments of the people around me — across the country, but especially in Washington, D.C., where I’d go to mixers and parties and lectures and just listen to the clichés that would pop up in people’s conversations repeatedly — the same phrases, the same ways of thinking, the same frustrations.
One narrative that became especially dominant was the end of liberalism. Having worked at organizations that were classically liberal and defended civil liberties, I found that cultural renunciation of liberalism, whatever it means, was dominant everywhere except inside mainstream liberal institutions. If you’re our age, you take it for granted that liberalism has had problems, that the sort of civil discourse — driven, consensus-driven politics — have not been practiced for some time. But I was working at places like FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) right out of college. I was familiar enough with that world — with the people who organized the liberalism conferences — to know that they were not fully aware of the extent of the crisis. They (I mean the entire ecosystem, not any one specifically) were still putting on conferences, often for only elite people, and not really reaching out to young people and asking why they were so frustrated.
OWEN I’m curious about the blindness in a lot of these classical liberal institutions. I’ve been to the FIRE conference on free speech, I’ve worked at Mercatus, and I’ve seen it, too. There’s a sort of blindness, even to the fact that many of the interns at these places are much farther to the right than the organizations themselves. Could you speak to that?
MANA I think blindness is a fair word. I think of it as a willful blindness, or maybe a paralysis and shock — an illegibility problem. This is something Mark Lilla and I have discussed. Youth culture, its sentiments, and the world we’re living in are increasingly illegible to people who are older. I’ve spoken to a few other liberal intellectuals who’ve told me their gen z students are aliens. If you’re three to five years younger than me and spent high school in lockdown, your cultural world shifts so much more rapidly every single year. The ethos of gen z is accelerating and evolving at a rate that’s very hard to relate to. It’s always been a trope that older generations can’t understand younger ones. But across the essays I’ve written, the feedback I constantly receive from older people is, “This is just so illegible to me. I can understand the nature of ideology, of true believers, and having romantic visions, but this entire world is beyond me.”
There are some sensitive, thoughtful liberal defenders — Mark Lilla is the apex here. Francis Fukuyama, in personal conversation and obviously with his original “End of History” essay, does a great job of really understanding what’s going on, and is open about what he doesn’t understand. But there’s still a resistance faction that completely misapprehends gen z’s political and digital rebellions as only a superficial, bigoted, reactionary, thoughtless trend.
What my first essay did — and what I still believe to be true — is that despite the fact that there absolutely is a portion of this reaction, on the right and left, that is reactionary, prejudicial, knee-jerk, there are deeper moral aspirations beneath all of it. A lot of these people have a hard time wrapping their head around how hard it must be to be a young person facing a culture in which you feel you have no role. Mark Lilla, in his excellent new book of essays Ignorance and Bliss, which I think is very underrated, has a paragraph where he says young people today awake every morning in a new Potemkin village. Unlike Odysseus, life is not about firmly planting your feet and figuring out where you ought to be. It’s waking up every morning in a completely new world.
Many of us could choose to disconnect from the internet that perpetuates this world of disconnect and alienation, but the reality remains that everything feels much more anarchic and fluid than that. I don’t even think it’s liberalism that is the problem — “liberalism,” to [its young critics], is just a shorthand for the previous era’s pretenses. Those commitments are going to be collateral damage if this instability continues.
OWEN So do you think the task of gen z is just reconstructive? We were given a framework for what life should be by boomers and millennials and Gen X to some extent, and many of their precepts and assumptions have crashed over the last 10 years. So we need to go down to the wreck, salvage what we can, and rebuild the framework for life in this flowing river. Is that a fair way to conceive of gen z? This is not how I conceive of it, so I am curious to hear what you think.
MANA Yes, I think that’s well put. It returns agency, and restoration through personal discernment, to gen z because we are not as limited as we think. We have the freedom and opportunity to restore what we want to. Things are not remotely as bad as they could be. They’re not even close — maybe with the exception of love and dating, but I’ll set that aside.
Overall, I do think gen z has an inertia problem, a paralysis problem, and a fear problem. I think a lot of these illegible and dizzying trends and phenomena — looksmaxxing, groypers, the identity obsession on parts of the left that ultimately amounts to role-playing — are crises of self-fashioning that would be largely unintelligible to someone like Mark Lilla, who I guess will become a metaphor in this entire conversation. If you’re a boomer, you grew up against a bunch of residual “shoulds” in a more morally uniform culture, and it’s satisfying to chart your own course. Whereas now, we have nothing. There is no good and evil, so we can’t really go “beyond good and evil” as a generation. There’s nothing to rebel against, and so there’s a paralysis, a crisis of self-trust, an inability to make our own decisions. Seeking our own self-made limitations of various kinds allows us the form we need in a fluid world.
You’re a great example, Owen, of someone who goes back into the tradition, engages with it on its own terms, actually has an interior experience with it, and fashions something new into the culture. That’s a fantastic template for gen z. It’s what every successful generation has done. And it only requires 10 to 20 thoughtful people in a country like ours to actually push the culture forward and keep something of that sacred spring alive for the next generation.
ELAN You have referenced that you were more interested in exploring certain ideas than being a writer. What are those ideas?
MANA I generally want to avoid living in a failed state, and that’s not glib — I know it sounds like that. With my family background, with family members coming from Iran, I think classical liberalism — not John Stuart Mill, go-and-cuckold-somebody classical liberalism, but the actual simple principles in English common law and those that emerged from European nation-states like due process or the rule of law. Just the fundamental conviction that the democratic age has allowed us to become a full person rather than only a condition — not just a brother, a sister, a sheikh, a duke, a peasant with only obligations, a Catholic, an atheist, a Sunni, a Jew, but an individuated person who has responsibilities, can make their own decisions in the culture, and live with those decisions. That conviction is extremely attractive to me. That’s the thing I fundamentally want to defend.
Of course, people want conditions — they want obligations, they want identities, and those need to be fulfilled. My sort of allegiance to classical liberalism is that it’s frankly idiotic to consider other political regimes without thinking about how we avoid a failed state, sectarianism, and zeroed-out social trust. If we don’t have a pre-political commitment to being against violence, then we’re on a very bad track. And that has very little to do with vibe shifts or what Mamdani says or whether Trump will win the midterms — it’s an epochal problem.
The ideas that interested me in college were largely those from classical antiquity — classical rhetoric, for instance. I have always been obsessed with words. Now while I wasn’t obsessed with the image of becoming a writer, I was really interested in words and etymology. I was really interested in the theory of the sublime. I can sum this up by saying that having a nonlinear professional or intellectual background is a huge benefit to writers, or indeed just as a person.
My education has been dedicated to trying to help myself have a mind that’s an interesting place to live for the rest of my life. Some of my insights in the “Last Boys” piece came from my biography, but they were also the result of irrationally following things that struck my interest over the years, without prejudice and without instrumentalizing any of it. Every single interesting person has self-trust. This is why eccentric intellectuals on the left and right attract so much attention. The people who are fully self-fashioned and have a high degree of self-trust, even if they miss the mark, are highly compelling now, because we live in a time that is completely risk-averse and self-abnegating.
ELAN What was the origin of your interest in the sublime?
MANA I think I have a lofty personality — a personality given to grand, lofty inclinations. I’m not sure of the psychological origins. I’ve had a few experiences with the sublime. Once was when I was living in Athens working as a translator. I went to the coast by the Aegean, and it was pitch black at night and the entire sea was entirely around me. I was frankly just terrified. Typically when I thought about the sublime, I would think about something uplifting. But that was fear. And I immediately thought of Thales saying “everything is water” — all the references in classical antiquity to “thalassa” and the wine-dark sea. I love having this tapestry of connections and intertextual allusions to connect what I’ve read with experiences in the world. I was just speaking to somebody yesterday about Henry Longfellow’s “Evangeline” poem which is in dactylic hexameter — “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring hemlocks” — apparently it features a forest in Michigan, and I would love to go visit it. My interest in the sublime actually predates my becoming Catholic. I think it was just a numinous tendency in me.
One final thing to note — I am very grateful for my classics education, especially the Ancient Greek instruction, which I couldn’t have done on my own, but almost all of this is autodidactic. I just read books, whether biographies of great men or theories of history, poetry. All the ideas that went into the piece, I read on my own. There is no ideal course of study that’s going to hand this to you, especially in the academies we have now. People ought to feel completely empowered to get lost in the stacks or follow internet links until they get where they want to go.
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