Radicalisation is not a fringe concern—it’s the frontline of cultural reaction. And the Left has yet to show up.
There’s a moment in Adolescence, halfway through episode three, though the show’s real-time structure makes ‘halfway’ feel like a fiction, when Briony Ariston, the psychologist assessing thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller for sentencing, gently asks what he thinks would happen on a date. He doesn’t know. He fumbles, retreats, shrinks. Minutes earlier, he’d been parroting the pornographic aggression of incel culture with almost comic swagger. But faced with something human, his bravado collapses. He is a child performing masculinity like a school play, only the script has been written by Andrew Tate and directed by Jordan Peterson.
That’s the tragedy. Jamie is not a monster. He is a mirror. Adolescence—unflinching, claustrophobic—insists that what happened to him is not exceptional but typical. This is not the story of one bad boy. It is the portrait of a generation abandoned to the market, the internet, and their own unmediated rage. A generation raised not into adulthood, but into algorithm. When the only answers they’re given come wrapped in hyper-masculine hustle grifts and pseudo-psychological sermons dressed up as “responsibility,” what emerges is not political consciousness but a consumer identity. Masculinity has become something you subscribe to, like a YouTube channel.
If the Tates weaponise misogyny as theatre, Peterson legitimises it as doctrine. With his lectures on order, hierarchy, and the biological destiny of men, Peterson offers disoriented boys not just an identity but a cosmology. He doesn’t scream. He professes. He pauses theatrically, furrows his brow, as though shouldering the unbearable weight of masculine truth. The effect is a kind of ersatz gravitas: slow enough to sound wise, vague enough to sound profound. But the message is reaction through and through, a defence of inequality as natural law, of suffering as virtue, of hierarchy as redemption.
Both figures, Tate and Peterson, are often dismissed by liberal commentators as fringe or clownish. But this is to mistake aesthetics for marginality. They are not marginal. They are dominant cultural forces. Their reach is measured not in followers, but in worldview. They function not only as ideologues, but as entrepreneurs of affect—micro-capitalists of despair. Their wealth is built not only on merch and clicks, but on the extraction of emotional surplus: converting adolescent anxiety, humiliation, and alienation into a marketable brand of rage.
“Both figures, Tate and Peterson…function not only as ideologues, but as entrepreneurs of affect—micro-capitalists of despair.”
This is not ideology in the abstract. It is monetised affect. And the audience is global.
There is a risk, particularly among progressives, of treating these influencers as the problem, rather than symptoms of a deeper social logic. Peterson and the Tates do not invent alienation. They channel it. They are middlemen in the emotional economy of neoliberalism. For working-class boys denied secure work, stable housing, or adult respect, reactionary masculinity is not just persuasive, it is seductive. The Tate aesthetic, bare chest, big watch, cigars, luxury cars, perpetual combat, is the neoliberal dream stripped of all its bureaucratic compromise. In the absence of socialism, it looks like freedom.
The liberal centre, true to form, has responded to the radicalisation of boys not with political substance but with symbolic gestures. Starmer has not endorsed the proposal for a “Minister for Men” himself, but the fact that it’s being floated within his party is telling. It reveals a technocratic instinct to manage symptoms without naming causes. The assumption is that what boys lack is guidance, another role model, another motivational talk, rather than the institutions that once gave them meaning: youth clubs, unions, political movements. But role models are not a politics. For every Marcus Rashford using his platform to fight child poverty, there are countless others whose celebrity only reinforces the fantasy of individual escape. Even the good ones function as exceptions that prove the rule: that if you want dignity, you must win the lottery of talent. A Minister for Men cannot rebuild the infrastructures of solidarity that were torn apart by decades of neoliberal consensus. You cannot bureaucratise your way out of a crisis you helped create.
What’s missing from the public discourse is not concern, but conflict. The Right is winning because it is fighting a cultural war the Left refuses to show up for. There was a time, not idyllic, but real, when working-class boys were politicised through the union branch, the youth club, the strike, the picket line. Now they are politicised through YouTube. The Left once made dignity its business. Now it has outsourced that work to the algorithm.
“What’s missing from the public discourse is not concern, but conflict. The Right is winning because it is fighting a cultural war the Left refuses to show up for.”
Adolescence captures this terrain of abandonment with unnerving precision. The school is clueless. The police are procedural. The secure unit is a failing school with locks. Briony, the only adult who seems capable of recognising Jamie’s pain as structural, not merely behavioural, is systematically undermined, not least by Jamie’s own inability to see her as anything other than a woman trying to control him. The misogyny here is not theoretical. It is relational. It arrives not as argument, but reflex.
The show’s aesthetic choices matter. Its single-take episodes, refusal to cut, and claustrophobic focus are not just stylistic. They constitute a theory of ideology. There is no montage, no progress, no space to reflect. The viewer is trapped in Jamie’s temporal loop, where everything accumulates but nothing changes. It is the opposite of the TikTok feed that radicalised him. The Tate video is 30 seconds. Adolescence is just over four hours of dread. The form is the critique.
The family, too, is not spared. Jamie’s father Eddie, played with exhausted fury by Stephen Graham, is no deadbeat. He is present, at least in the way capitalism allows. He runs his own business, works nights because the call-outs pay more, pieces together a life from what’s available. He loves his son. And he still fails. He fails not because he is absent, but because he is part of a masculinity that no longer knows what it is for. Eddie is the tail-end of a working-class manhood that at least once imagined stability—house, wage, role. Jamie is its update: volatility without authority. All anger, no anchor.
In one of the show’s most devastating scenes, Eddie confesses that his own father beat him with a belt. He swore he would never do the same. He kept that promise. And still, somehow, he lost his son. The scene is quietly devastating not just because of its emotional intensity, but because it captures the generational dialectic of failed reform. The violence was renounced. The structure remained. Adolescence understands this perfectly: the family, under capitalism, is not simply a haven in a heartless world. It is the site where failure is privatised and passed down.
What, then, is to be done? The answer isn’t moralism. It isn’t “nicer” influencers. It’s infrastructure. Youth clubs. Unions. Community organising. Militant schooling. Popular culture that speaks of solidarity, not supremacy. The Left must not merely condemn the masculinity on offer. It must offer a competing one, rooted not in domination, but in dignity; not in aspiration, but in collective purpose.
“The answer isn’t moralism. It isn’t “nicer” influencers. It’s infrastructure. Youth clubs. Unions. Community organising. Militant schooling. Popular culture that speaks of solidarity, not supremacy.”
But that also requires us to say clearly what kind of masculinity we are reclaiming. Not a return to the romanticised masculinity of the post-war labourist man, stoic, strong, respectable, and still patriarchal, but a masculinity that can be reimagined as something non-possessive, non-violent, collective. One capable of bearing grief without turning it into vengeance. Of holding vulnerability without collapsing into shame.
If the Left doesn’t do that work, the Right will continue to define manhood in its own image: anxious, violent, performative, and ultimately commodified. The new fascist subject is not in uniform. He’s in your bedroom, your school, your algorithm. A boy with earbuds and a TikTok feed, watching another clip about how to dominate. We are not dealing with the fringe. We are watching the mainstream mutate.
This isn’t about whether we like what boys are becoming. It’s about whether we intend to do anything to stop it.
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