A popular YouTube discussion show called” Surrounded” places a pundit of some kind in a room full of young social media aficionados who all disagree with the speaker. This is typically an older person with some reputation and expertise. One by one, they all take goes arguing with the visitor. A round-robin debate with a group of college-age students is generally the Dante-esque assault for the reason you think it is, as you might expect, but it also yields plenty of popular moments that can be filmed and shared on social media.
In any event, the most recent host was comedian-turned-liberal talk radio man Sam Seder. In all respects, Seder appears to be a genuine clever man; if we could steer clear of elections, I’m sure I do enjoy spending time with him. I furthermore didn’t see the whole 90-minute discussion because I’m not a masochist, so I’m certain he had some great times along the way.
However, a young Hispanic man asks Seder about his objections to alleged religious fundamentalists in the conversation tape that was most popular, and as the kids say, he declares he owns Seder without question. Basically, the problem put before Seder is this: If he objects to traditional religious beliefs as a basis for guiding America’s social political and legal decisions, what does he believe should be the basis for conscience?
The Pundit Test
It’s a little superfluous, but still noteworthy that Seder’s first disappointment was hearing an apparent artist utter the words,” I’m a Transformation Jew, I don’t have a solid belief in the existence of God” without so much as a smile. The New Judaism, a comedy-filled essay about the differences between Catholic, Conservative, and Reform Judaism, is written by yet proud liberal Jon Stewart, who frequently jokes that Transformation Jews don’t actually believe anything to be sin.
But Seder’s complete truth is so much worse than that. Seder second suggests a vague “humanist perspective” of what’s best for the most is what’s social, and then shifts to a more obscure edition of collectivism when he struggles to be labeled a utilitarian or consequentialist. When his interlocutor then asks what he would think if the small-d democratic collective came together and undermined trans rights, he says that wouldn’t be moral. Then he contends that biological distinctions, such as being gay, might influence morality. Then when the young guy points out that some people think pedophilia is an innate biological orientation, we see more backpedaling, and Seder then argues that there also has to be consent for relationships to be moral. Then, when he asks whether it’s moral for a father and daughter to engage in sexual activity while both of them are consenting adults, he replies,” I think society has determined …” and we return to secular collectivism as a moral foundation. It’s just a mess.
Seder appears to have been aware that this discussion would be hostile, but he seems genuinely shocked that a young person would veer off into first principles and question the moral assumptions that underlie bog standard boomer liberalism. But this shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. There’s a pretty basic test for whether or not you take someone seriously when it comes to political punditry: How does that person justify using political power to carry out the policies they favor?
What Seder was asked was far from a trick question, rather, it’s basic American civics. The founders knew that any attempt to legitimize the rejection of their current government would begin with establishing why the government they were proposing was more just and morally superior, which is exactly the question that the Declaration of Independence addresses. In that sense, it wasn’t just a declaration — it’s an explanation of the basis of morality, and how England’s governance was illegitimate for not respecting it. Our founding document serves as a fairly succinct and compelling natural law case for a government that acknowledges that all men were created equal and given inalienable rights by our creator, not to mention a king who asserts the “divine right” to levy taxes on whim.
Of course, the actual structure of American governance is more complicated than that because we have to define and apply those rights, and the most just way to do that involves consent of the governed. Our system therefore depends on allowing a certain degree of democracy while establishing sufficient checks to prevent the majority’s tyranny from overriding the individual’s God-given rights. We don’t always get the balance right, but that’s the basic idea. And there is no denying that our entire system is based on objective notions of morality, which are typically represented by a belief in God. You may not like the structure of American governance, but you’d think a guy who’s been doing liberal talk radio and podcasts for over twenty years would recognize why the question he was asked was so important and have a coherent way to answer it.
The remarkable thing here is that the Left’s “debate champ” doesn’t see the entire setup, which means he is ignorant of the fundamental Christian theology, the American founders ‘ natural rights theory, and the criticism from Nietzsche, Weber, and Foucault, as Chris Rufo observes. Just doesn’t know any of it”. There is also a hint of blatant hypocrisy present. ” Seder objects to religion because it’ imposes’ values on everyone”, notes professor and First Things editor Mark Bauerlein. However, it is a dream come true to believe that imposition of values is not a necessary criterion for every social order. ( Foucault’s prime critique of liberalism is that it presumes such. )”
Seder spent his entire life watching American liberals virtually snooze out every major institution, including the federal and state bureaucracies, academia, the media, Hollywood, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, where he was born in 1966. Heck, for a guy so worried about Christian Nationalism, he can take heart in the fact that Christianity is far less of a threat to our current liberal order because liberals took over almost all of the mainline Protestant churches and proceeded gut these denominations of their traditional biblical beliefs to the point they’re all more or less indistinguishable from … Reform Jews.
In other words, it’s safe to assume that Seder is defending the dominant liberal order, which imposes its values on everyone based on what he knows and prefers rather than on how he can justify it as justifiably moral. Nor is our current liberal order necessarily a matter of consent or democracy. This is clearly demonstrated by how the left views social issues. Gay marriage flailed in nearly every referendum it faced, and only became legal after the Supreme Court made it legal by decree, using a decision that has all the defensible legal and moral rubric one would expect to find on the back of a cereal box. The left screamed in unison when a more conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, saying that they actually preferred it when nine unelected judges created a new right to kill children in the womb, which half the nation found morally repugnant, rather than allowing such a contentious issue to be decided by democratic means.
And when liberals couldn’t exercise raw power to get their way in courtrooms and legislative chambers, they leveraged the economic might of corporate America to enforce their agenda. Even as the movement burned cities to the ground, corporations were verbally abused and praised for giving BLM and related causes$ 83 billion even though it was a scam allegedly carried out by communists who had explicitly stated that the nuclear family was an obstacle to” social justice.”
The problem is that you can only arbitrarily impose values on people from the top down for so long before there’s political and cultural backlash. Interesting is that he claimed in an interview with Seder that he participated in the debate because his 19-year-old daughter had suggested that” Surrounded” was well-liked by kids her age. Seder is almost certainly aware that there’s increasing amounts of data showing Gen Z shifting rightward, and this is especially true of young men — between the presidential elections in 2020 and 2024, there was a shocking 29 percent move right in men aged 18-29.
Youth In Revolt
This is a full-blown crisis for the future of liberalism, and in that respect, Seder deserves props from his fellow liberals for entering the octagon here with a bunch of conservative kids. I’m not sure whether Seder’s appearance is what liberals should take away. In a column for The Daily Beast, Michael Ian Black— yet another comedian who has spent the last couple of decades dabbling in liberal politics — unintentionally amuses us with the thought that the growing ranks of right-leaning kids are” not anchored by a cogent philosophy”. As a fan of Black, I’m not happy to report that a minor Gen X icon with credits like The State and Wet Hot American Summer has some very boomer politics:
Time and again in the video, the young conservatives platformed in the video expressed a lack of faith in that pluralistic society. They don’t trust our institutions at all. They have no faith in science. They don’t believe in Americans who choose the best course of action based on their own religious convictions.
There’s no point in combing through the conservatives ‘ claims, they were almost all incorrect, as fact-checked by Jubilee during the video. The MAGA worldview is, however, informed by feelings rather than facts, as the t-shirts claim. They feel that Social Security is a disaster despite the fact that, as Sam pointed out, it keeps 2/3 of our senior citizens out of poverty. Despite the fact that, as Sam correctly stated, a small number of children actually receive such care, they believe that gender-affirming care for minors is” a huge problem.”
Hmmmm. Can you think of a possible reason why COVID students who were in high school at the time of the conflict might not believe in institutions or “science”? Or why kids who won’t collect social security for 40 years are looking at a program such as Social Security, which has somewhere north of$ 25 trillion in unfunded liabilities even as their grandparents continue to extract far more money from the program than they put in, and have doubts about whether it will still be around to keep them out of poverty? I won’t even attempt to explain the numerous ways that including Gender Affirming Care Is Good Actually in every blue state curriculum might not be wise. By all means, keep telling people it’s not a big deal and it only affects a few confused and regretful adolescents you’ve permanently sterilized and cut the breasts off of.
After all, these kids are ultimately beyond hope because, as Black points out, “what we’re dealing with is a wholesale dismissal of data because, as Stephen Colbert once famously said,” Reality has a liberal bias.” Ah yes, noted political sage Stephen Colbert. The American left should seriously think about shutting down this entire comedian-doing-liberal-commentary industry until they can figure out what the heck is going on.
Of course, it’s normal for up-and-coming generations to question societal foundations, and at least since the sixties, we’ve seen the American left weaponize this tendency. They have repeatedly asserted explicitly that no matter how incoherent these youth politics are, the political energy and preferences of the youth have a unique moral force that must be heeded. It was not that long ago we were supposed to stop driving or whatever because a teenage Swedish autist with grossly irresponsible parents let her gallivant around the world yelling” HOW DARE YOU” at various climate conferences.
The left taking the standard conservative get-off-my-lawn position of arguing kids don’t know what they’re talking about, especially since nobody is doing much self-reflection about why the left has abruptly lost its hold on the youth vote makes it pretty funny. ( Though they’re still a bit schizo about all this, even as they lament Gen Z getting more conservative, we’re also being told with a straight face that the pockets of lefty students defending Hamas terrorists and harassing Jewish kids on campus are somehow the conscience of American foreign policy. )
Despite decades of failing liberal institutions and identity politics that actively discriminated against diverse groups of people, it is obvious that kids are not wrong to believe that they are, uh, surrounded by a cultural and political order that they don’t like and can’t be justified. Maybe they can’t always articulate their perceived problems as well as they should — and to the extent they’re not as articulate as they should be, you can chalk up the state of public education as another massive L for progressives who overwhelmingly control our schools— but the sooner Seder and his fellow travelers take the failures of liberalism seriously, the better off they’ll be. Generational discontent is not a MAGA mind virus; rather, it is a justifiable response to an absurd presumption of liberal moral superiority that has always been difficult to prove and is currently indistinguishable.
