But in the profiles you can also see clear illustrations of two arguments that a certain kind of conservative — the kind who locate their politics somewhere between the Trumpians and the Resistance — is likely to offer in response to liberalism’s explanations. First, that populism is a reaction to the breakdown of community outside the liberal metropole, a breakdown that the fiscally conservative-socially liberal “centrism” of our leaders has worsened or left unaddressed. And second, that far-right personalities attract people by offering an escape from the airlessness of liberalism, a chance to rebel against its cultural hegemony and increasing ideological conformism.

Caleb Cain, Roose’s subject, illustrates the first argument, to the extent that he seems like a character from the pages of Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” or Tim Carney’s “Alienated America” or J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” to cite just the most prominent right-leaning authors who have written about lower-middle-class decay:

The internet was an escape. Mr. Cain grew up in postindustrial Appalachia and was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents. He was smart, but shy and socially awkward, and he carved out an identity during high school as a countercultural punk. He went to community college, but dropped out after three semesters. Broke and depressed, he resolved to get his act together. He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything: YouTube.

In other words, a story about the internet is also a story about the attenuation of non-online forms of community, about fatherlessness and family breakdown, about the travails of the “some college” demographic, about the social crisis of coal country and the Rust Belt. And it’s therefore an example of why attempts to wall off explanations for populism into mutually exclusive “economic anxiety” and “racism” categories are so futile: There is an integrated relationship between socioeconomic conditions in downscale America and the appeal of redpilled YouTube, between changing personal and material conditions and the appeal of virtual white-identitarian “community.”

There is also an integrated relationship between how elite liberalism has evolved and the kind of reactions it provokes. Here is the opening act, from the Washingtonian profile, of the suburban-D.C. episode that sent its 13-year-old subject into the online wilds in search of support and solidarity:

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.” No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested. … In an out-of-body moment, I imagined that this very episode would be cited by some future cultural critic on the limits of liberalism …

And yes, perhaps too predictably, here I am citing it — as a particularly vivid example, from inside the D.C. bubble, of how progressivism fosters alienation and potential rebellion long before any sinister Silicon Valley algorithms get involved. And, going further, as an example of how the alt-right’s promise of “secret knowledge” about gender, race and sexuality finds a ready audience among young people primed by aspects of their own progressive education to suspect that the system is enforcing ideology rather than imparting truth.

Which, let me stress again, doesn’t mean that the far-right YouTubers are actually good or the algorithms actually benign. Nor does it mean that conservatives reacting to liberal critiques of YouTube should automatically leap to the defense of either — on the assumption that as goes the YouTube success of Stefan Molyneux, so goes the non-racist right.

Yes, it’s understandable for conservatives to worry that if Silicon Valley censors the likes of Molyneux, it will end up censoring them. It’s sensible for them to join parts in the left in worrying about the concentrated power over information that the stewards of social-media platforms enjoy. And it’s necessary for them to recognize that the influence of redpillers and white-identitarians reflects their own failure, across the decades of movement-conservative institution building, to create something that seems more compelling to fugitives from liberalism than the Spirit of the Reddit Thread.