Politically, I like a lot of what Donald Trump does, but I would never hire him as an employee — Anonymous Conservative Marketing Guy
Young George Washington wanted to be a sailor in the Royal Navy after learning about seafaring from his older brother Lawrence Washington who had served as a marine under Admiral Edward Vernon. Lawrence named his estate after his old commander, you know it as Mount Vernon. George inherited it in 1761 and the rest is history.
George Washington never got his commission in the king’s navy. Though Washington’s early years were typical for a Virginia youth in the planter class, his time at Lawrence’s Mount Vernon exposed him to culture and the promise of adventure. Lawrence was 14 years older, and married into the important Fairfax family; he could show George how the world works in the absence of their father, Augustine Washington, who died in 1743 when George was eleven. Little brothers without fathers need their older brothers then and now to help be that role model and Lawrence did his best. Lawrence’s stories fascinated George; ships, navigation, and war, so much so that George Washington wanted to join and Lawrence encouraged him. However, his mother, Mary Ball Washington, after consulting friends and family including hearing from George’s uncle in England, who warned of the dangers of naval service, refused him. Her word was final and incontrovertible, ending his pathway to the fleet. How would history have been different if he had gotten his wish? Would Admiral Washington have driven the French from the Western Atlantic and won the war for King George III?
Pathways are important, the best thing for youths is to have guided pathways, to give them options with direction rather than to shut them down or leave them wandering. Failure to do so contributes to the failure to launch for many young men, their fears of adulthood and chronic immaturity.
Lack of Roadmaps
This past year I had conversations with young men, my students trying to make their way as they approach the end of college. I am struck by how little their actual struggles match the culture war rhetoric. These young men, mostly white Americans, are feeling left out and more than a little afraid to really grow up. And it is not their fault.
The trouble with many young men today is not rebellion. It is ignorance—an absence of instruction in how the world works and how one grows within it. They want stability, honor, and competence, but have never been shown the routes by which those things are earned. It is not that they reject discipline or purpose. They have simply never seen it modeled. Worse, the models they do see—trust fund entrepreneurs, celebrity athletes, social media stars—only work if one is born wealthy or becomes famous, and for anyone else would be catastrophically self-destructive.1 Society’s rewarding of such behavior is misleading for young men.
In one sense it is a good time to be a well-put-together young man—less competition—but in other more important ways it is the worst time because society provides fewer examples and road maps for young men to become well-put-together in the first place, and they have fewer peers to help them along. It is not good to be the lone civilized man when you are trying to stem the tide of barbarism, you need your friends who are able to sharpen you.
For generations, boys could look outward and see examples. A father, an uncle, a coach, a neighbor—men who did not need to explain what work, duty, or mastery meant, because their lives displayed it. Those patterns created an intuitive sense of sequence: how to start, what to learn, when to persevere, whom to emulate. Today that sequence has been broken. Young men live amid immense technological and social complexity, yet lack the simplest cultural map of how a man becomes competent, useful, and good. The result is confusion and fear. Many young men think success is a matter of luck or personality, not craft and discipline. They do not understand how the pathways of life actually function—how institutions reward reliability, how small reputations build into large ones, how service opens doors that talent alone cannot. They are told they can “be anything,” but rarely shown what anything requires.
Take the military. For many young men, it remains one of the best pathways to adulthood—structured, demanding, and developmental. It offers education, leadership, and skills that translate: cybersecurity, logistics, intelligence, engineering. Service opens doors to federal work, law enforcement, and technology sectors that reward discipline and clearances. It is a proven road to stability and lifelong employability. Yet few schools or advisors present it that way. Instead, the military is mentioned vaguely, or not at all, as if it were an archaic or desperate option. Young men who might thrive there are quietly steered elsewhere, often into universities that cannot deliver what they seek. Given the need of these young men for what the service offers there should never be a recruiting crisis.
The pathways did not vanish by accident. Deindustrialization and wage stagnation destroyed the 1950s single-breadwinner model, after earlier changes had destroyed the extended family network; forcing both parents into the workforce and fracturing the home as a site of formation. Too many socioeconomic shifts in a short space of time. Geographic mobility for jobs scattered extended families—boys no longer grow up near uncles and grandfathers who once formed a network of masculine example. With smaller families, youths have fewer uncles, older siblings and cousins. It all contributes to fewer models.
Then divorce became the norm: 24% of American families are now single-parent households, the statistic hides the fact that many of the “fathers” are not their dads, but their mothers’ new husbands. In the majority of cases we are not talking about widowhood or marriages ended due to domestic abuse. I am not talking hypotheticals. I know young men who have to live with their mother and the man their mother cheated on their father with, while their dad pays child support from an apartment somewhere. What lessons should these young men draw from their father’s losing their homes to another man when he did not choose to end the marriage? We want these men to be brave adults who pursue healthy relationships, but what have the adults in their lives modeled for them? What has the state told them about their value? About fairness? There are consequences to operating this way.
Sociologists call this path dependence: the way early choices lock in later outcomes. The choices of society and parents removing the old networks has led to pathway deprivation—the loss of visible, honorable routes into manhood. Economic necessity broke the family structure. Mobility scattered the extended family. Divorce removed the father. And with them went the men who showed the way. Once a society dismantles its ladders of advancement, it becomes hard to rebuild them.
The good news is that the hunger is still there. Talk to young men candidly and you will hear not cynicism but a kind of aching seriousness. They want to know what work is for. They want to know how to love, how to build, how to belong. They are waiting for adults to stop diagnosing them and start showing them the way. The question is not how to rescue them, but how to rebuild the conditions under which they can rescue themselves. That means restoring visible pathways—through service, through skill, through local institutions that actually take an interest in their futures. It means elders who will mentor, not lecture; schools that will orient, not teach a rigid scolding conformity.
We owe young men a map—not because they cannot find their way without it, but because they should not have to walk alone.
This applies as much to the GOP leadership as to the gangsta rap celebrities who do nothing for their communities https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/donald-trump-hiphop.html