Date: 2025-08-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028034
On a coach sits a man in a light blue shirt and dark blue pants, a woman in a red dress
and a man in a blue suit and tie. In a teal chair next to them is a man in a black suit.
Food and drinks are on a table in front of them.
Max Castroparedes, second from right, organized what he called a gathering of “MAGA Youth,”
which met at Centurion New York on Wednesday.Credit...Sara Konradi for The New York Times
Original article:
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I picked up on this article because it is about young people ... 20 somethings ... and their local and world views.
I am now in my mid-80s and in the process of evaluation my knowledge, attitude and behavior from university in the late 1950s to pretty old age in the 2020s! As I remember this time ... these times ... I am surprised in some ways at how much has changed and as well how certain things have hardly changed at all!
I was born in 1940 at the beginning of WWII in the United Kingdom. Our family lived in the suburbs of London and were subject to the bombing associated with the war including the V1 'Doodle Bugs' that were the cruise missiles of the time! Three houses about a hundred years from us were completely demolished when one of thse V1s hit them, and all the houses on our street had holes in the roofs because of being hit by debris falling out of the sky.
By the time I was three years old I had a wooden gun that I could use to protect our house and shoot enemy aircraft out of the sky! Shooting the V1 Doodle Bugs was very rewarding because they would run out of fuel fairly near us, and then drop out of the sky and explode!
As a toddler, I did not understand that these explosions killed people ... and I went on with my play without much concern. I can only imaging, however, what it must have been like for my parents.
My father was a schoolmaster. He had been too young to serve in WWI, and was too old in WWII to be in active service, and his role as a teacher at his age was a priority occupation. My father was responsible for the school sports and especially rugby and cricket. All of the cricket teams and the rugby tesms went dircetly from school into the military ... many into the Royal Air Force (RAF) where more than half were killed with a period of just 6 months ... year after year after year for the 5 year duration of the war!
Sadly ... most Americans don't know that for Britain and Europe, WWII started in 1939 a little more than two years before Pearl Harbour when the US joined the war effort. In that 2 years Am,erica was able to produce and profit on a war footing without very much true sacrifice. After Pearl Harbor, Americans fought and died in battle, but American industry did not suffer much damage and was able to profit mightily for the rest of the war.
In 1939, the British Empire was getting weaker, but Britain was still very rich with huge gold reserves at the Bank of England. Prime Minister Churchill and President Rousevelt collaborated to help Britain get the military supplies it needed to defend against the anticipated invasion by Nazi Germany. Much of this equipment was supplied under a 'lend-lease' agreement ... which was vital for Britain in order to defend itself but super for the USA which got the biggest economic boost for itself in all of history. By the end of the war most of the gold that had been 'British' at tge Bank of England, had been shipped to Fort Knox in the USA and was now American!
Some of America's new wealth came back to Europe in the past-war years under the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery. Britain was a quite modest part of this program, but was also burdened with the repayment of Lend-lease debt. It took almost 10 years for Britains war time debts to be fully repaid, during whih time Britain had very little financial capacity to rebuild and repair its indutrial economy. Britain also had significant responsibilities with respect to its network of colonies around the world that had contributed signficantly to victory. On balance, WWII was a win for the United States, and every other country in the world were losers including Great Britain and the memebers of the British Empire around the world.
Looking back, I am amazed at the gall of American leadership in its behavior relative to Britain in the early post-war years. Clearly, British pride ... or arrogance ... did not help, but it is also pretty clear with the benefit of hindsight that the US leadership was about as opportunistic as it could poossibly be!
This is important ... because some 20 years later ... in the 1970s, specifically 1973 ... there was another major global event. This was the establishment of the Organization of Oil Experting Countries (OPEC) and the implementation of the Arab Oil Boycott.
Europe ... including Great Britain ... were impacted by this Arab Oil Boycott but not by as much as the United States. The European economy was significantly more energy efficient than the US economy. Though consumer prices for energy in Europe were high, it was largely due to high taxes on energy products ... the underlying economy was quite energy efficient.
In the case of the United States ... the cost of using energy was high because the use of energy for production was inefficient and therefore high cost. When world prices for energy were low as they were until 1973, this didn't matter and American business was profitable without much modernisation and energy efficiency investment. In 1973, the United States was still dominated by huge 'gas guzzling' automobiles. I think my two cars in the USA each got about 7 miles per gallon )mpg). Yhe little car I had in the UK ten years before got around 45 mpg! A bigger gallon, but not by that amount!
Starting in 1973, the US economy went into free fall. Initially crude oil was increased by the OPEC oil cartel from $3.00 a barrel to $13.00 a barrel. Within 2 years the OPEC price had increased to $30 a barrel and continued to increase ... and decrease ... in a range from a high of more than $100 a barrel to a low of around $50.00 a barrel. For the United States, this was an industrial catastrophe with no answer that was either quick or easy!.
Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter were faced with a US economic malaise that was ... in my view at the time ... the biggest economic crisis for the established economic powers, and especially the USA, in all of history! I had this view in the mid-1970s and I think I was right 50+ years later.
But in a way it gets worse. President Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 election cycle. By this time China was emerging as a new force in global production ... together with other countries around Asia and the Far East. Wages in these countries were a fraction of what was being paid for labor in the United States and American companies were starting to 'offshore' their US production operations to China and other low wage countries in the area.
About 10 years before this ... and in fact before the 1973 oil shock ... I was involved in profit improvement at Gulton Industries in the USA. Electro-Voice (EV), at the time a Gulton subsidiary had started doing low cost manufacturing in South Korea with terrible results. For two years in a row shipments for the Christmas season arrived in January and February rather than November and December. By ending that initiative, I was able to improve EV's profit performance considerably. Of course. a decade later, the economics of this sort of 'offshoring' had completely changed. With the new high energy prices, production in the USA with US labor and other costs at US levels, almost nothing produced in the USA was cost competitive.
While national economics in the USA, Europe as well as Japan, were at a huge labor cost disadvantage compared to China and a lot of other low wage areas, consumers still wanted goods, and investors still wanted profits.
The role of the 'oil giants' ... Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, EMI, etc ... in enabling OPEC is pretty clear but also not discussed very much. Franly, this is because the oil giants do not want their role in the 1973 crisis to be well understood, nor their role in profit maximization for themselves over a long period of time ... now more than 50 years! I have watched the field operations of many of these oil companies in different very remote parts of the world going back to the early 1970s and their behavior in the field is obnoxious ... and top management of these companies in Europe, the UK or the United States does not care a hoot!
Before the 1970s, being an employed worker in the United States was pretty good. I migrated to North America ... first Canada and then a second step into the United States ... in the 1960s and in the process was able to earn more in 2 months in North America than I could earn in a year in the UK ... even as a top earner in my age group in the UK!
Essentially this changed dramatically in 1973, and the negative impact continues 50+ years later.
I have just read two articles courtesy of the New York Times that are related to the current state of affairs in the USA, the initiatives that the Trump Administration is promoting and related social commentary.
One NYT article is about young people. My impression is that young people in the USA are incredibly badly educated and poorly informaed even though they are by world standards among the wealthiest. This is not new! I grew up and was educated in the UK and visited Canada and the United States twice while I was a student for the summer of 1960 and then 1961. Talking with students of my age group in Canada, it was clear that my university work was essentially a year ahead of my Canadian friends. But then three of us bought a car (for $30) and set off to drive to Florida and Key West (where we hoped to go to Cuba. That did not work out because the Key West bridges were wrecked by a big hurricane!). But we did learn that American students were essentially a year beind the Canadians! This was more than 60 years ago, and if anything. this gap has increased significantly with the US falling further and further behind in pure academic achievement.
This would be bad, if technology, society and the world stood still ... but that has not been the case in all my adult lifetime, and worse, the changes are accelerating. Americans as indiduals are pooorly prepared for the future, and both society and the economy are being managed to make it worse, not better. This is on display 'big time' with the opportunistic growth of corporate profits at the expense of consumers. In the period since 1980 the operating cost of technology has substantially reduced while the price in many or most instances has increased resulting in goor and increasing profits. This is reflected in the market prices of technology stocks which have been at record levels in recent years ... not by a little but by a lot! Meanwhile in the USA, wages have been stagnent for yesrs and for many workers are maybe a half of what they would have earned three or four decades ago.
Back in the early 1980s, about 50% of workers earned less than the average for all worlers and 50% earned more than the average. Over the years this has changed, and in recent years about 80% of workers have had below average income and only 20% have been abover average. But it is really much worse than that, because during this time the millionaire class morphed into a billionaire class with everyone else with wages stuck and cost of living ... prices ... going up all the time.
When I learned some economics at Cambridge at the end of the 1950s it was expected that working people would have a 30 hour work seek in the near future and quality of life for working people would be improved. This never happened either in the UK or in the United States. Rather the 'investor class' have been able to 'game the system' for their own benefit and nobody has been able or willing to take on this issue.
With the arrival of Trump on the political scene for the second time, the risk of a malignant oligarchy might now become recognised by the general public and the voting public ... hopefully ... it is not too late!
Ordinary people ... 80% of us are 'mad as hell' ... and the reality is that the Trump agenda will make it worse for almost all of us. A few will do well ... but most likely 95% or more of the population will see big negative impacts!
Fot 80 years since the end of WWII, the USA has been at the top of the economic pyramid ... but the Trump agenda will end that quite soon. America's economic and social decline will likely be large and swift and take decades to recover. There was a time when the world 'needed' the USA ... but not so much any more. Now, America is going to need the world, and the world may not be interested in being of any help.
I have been based in the USA for more than 60 years ... the golden years of the USA which are now most likely over and probably for ever, and certainly for a long time. The world has never 'loved' America, but have tolerated America because it was a very important economic power ... but sorry ... that is over and Trump is doing all he can to hasten the crash!
Peter Burgess
Feb. 13, 2025
Amid a surge of youthful Republicanism in New York and nationwide, there has been an element of social cachet that has often proved elusive: In blunt terms, the word is “cool.”
Indeed, hamstrung by political beliefs that are often in opposition to those of major cultural figures, conservatives have frequently groused about the depiction of them as squares, including President Trump, whose hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center this week was seemingly led by a desire to make the venerable institution “hot.”
“We made the presidency hot,” Mr. Trump said, speaking to the newly formed board, according to an audio recording obtained by Jake Tapper of CNN. “So this should be easy.”
It was in that spirit that a clutch of Mr. Trump’s younger supporters assembled on Wednesday night at Centurion New York, a members-only club on the 55th floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan, to celebrate the nascent Republican administration, and assert their fashionableness — and their fealty to the new president.
“POTUS is making it sexy to be Republican again,” said Max Castroparedes, 27, a self-described “international, globe-trotting consultant,” who was using the acronym for “president of the United States.” “He’s making it glamorous to be a Republican again. He’s making it great to be Republican again.”
Mr. Castroparedes, a former special assistant at the Department of Homeland Security during Mr. Trump’s first term, now works for Montfort, a company based in Palm Beach, Fla., that calls itself “a specialized strategic advisory firm.” He had invited a dozen or so friends to assemble in a glass-walled room of Centurion, framed by sweeping views of the skyline, a soaring wall of wines and an imposing black chandelier.
A waiter’s hand reaches forward to pour from a wine bottle
at the corner of a table that is set for dinner.
The event involved a cocktail hour and dinner with a guest list of Trump supporters who were all under the age of 30.Credit...Sara Konradi for The New York Times Men wore ties, women toted vintage Dior purses, and the playlist — said to be imported from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s estate in Palm Beach — ran from classic rock (“Don’t Stop Believin’”) to classic Broadway (“Do You Hear the People Sing?” from “Les Miserables”) to something called “The Trump Song,” a salsa-style number with a chorus of “Oh my God, I will vote/I will vote, for Donald Trump.” (Mr. Castroparedes often asked the wait staff to turn the music up.)
Exclusively under the age of 30 the group also, of course, came to drink and meet people, including one attendee who quietly admitted to being a Kamala Harris voter.
That guest, a young gay man in his 20s, said he had noticed a rightward political drift in his social circle, but believed it was “about proximity to power versus ideological conviction.” Of perhaps 100 friends, he said he would describe “maybe a dozen as Trumpy.”
The group is not alone in trying to make it cool to be a youthful G.O.P. fan: The New York Young Republican Club has been an increasingly visible presence on the cocktail circuit, complete with famous — and occasionally formerly incarcerated — guests like Stephen K. Bannon, the podcasting firebrand who was a headliner at a December gala for the group just weeks after being released from federal prison. The group also has less pricey celebrations, like a “champagne, caviar and cocktails” event planned for later this month at a Prohibition-age speakeasy on the Lower East Side.
“But don’t worry,” that invite read. “We conservatives have nothing to hide!”
That said, in the case of Mr. Castroparedes’s party, which he had described as a gathering of “MAGA Youth,” some of the guests were shy, asking a reporter and a photographer to avoid identifying them, and demurring when asked why they were there. One who would speak was Jairo Gonzalez Ward, 28, a consultant whose resemblance to the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau might unsettle some in the Trump administration.
But even Mr. Ward, whose company, Allume Consulting, had helped provide the rented aerie at the Centurion, said he was uncertain whether he would identify as a conservative or even as “entirely political.”
“And I think this would apply to most people in the room,” Mr. Ward said. “I don’t think this room’s a monolith. And I don’t think the quote-unquote, conservative movement today is a monolith.”
A woman in a dark dress is embraced by a man in front
of a wall covered in framed photos.
While a celebration of the Trump administration was a stated goal of the event, the attendees also said they came to drink and meet people.Credit...Sara Konradi for The New York Times Still, Mr. Ward added, “from a business perspective, what’s happening right now is very interesting.”
“If there is a common denominator of people in the room and a sort of fundamental aspect of the administration, it’s that there’s a strict aversion to inertia,” he said. “And that I appreciate.”
Others were less equivocal in their beliefs, including a 29-year-old man, who asked not to be named because of professional concerns but said Mr. Trump was an idol of his.
“I loved him for many, many years,” the young man said, suggesting that he be described as “an affluent Republican.”
Much has been said of the recent inroads made by Republicans with young men — and “bros,” that amorphous, often macho cadre populating “the manoverse” — and the president did far better with young voters in 2024 compared with his loss in 2020. Bearing out that trend, one 23-year-old woman who attended the dinner said she had two friends back home in dependably Democratic California who had voted for Biden in 2020 and then switched to Trump in 2024.
“In 2020, it was considered cool to be a liberal,” she said, mentioning events like the Black Lives Matter protests. “It was cool to be socially woke. And I feel like now people are so sick of it and they’ve seen the repercussions and they don’t like the policies.”
For his part, Mr. Castroparedes, who mentioned a desire to run for the U.S. Senate in his native Texas someday, said he wanted to replicate his dinners in other locations, as a kind of “roadshow” of young Republican dining, in hopes of “making elites comfortable” being openly conservative, which he simultaneously described as “edgy” and “the common-sense thing to do.”
“I think having more young people in politics is a good thing,” he said, gesturing at guests around a table and ticking off their credentials — two journalists, a health care expert, the scion of a famous Hollywood producer. “They don’t have to be political hacks like in Washington.”