This is very well stated, from Theodore Dalrymple:

Youth, as everyone knows who has passed through it some time ago, is the age not of idealism but of self-importance, uncertainty masked by certitude and moral grandiosity untouched by experience of life — or, of course, the age of total insouciance. It is not surprising that ideology makes young men dangerous, for it is in the nature of ideology to answer all the difficult questions of human existence while giving believers the illusion of special understanding and destiny not available to others.

With the downfall of the Soviet Union, Marxism lost almost all of its appeal for hormonally disaffected young men of the West, leaving them bereft of significance and purpose. Except for one group among them, they now had only a potpourri of causes (sexism, racism, the environment, etc.), none of which quite met the need or filled the gap.

To find out what filled the gap, you need to go the article. And then there is this from an article by David Gelernter on Free Speech at Yale:

We all know that true free speech means freedom to shut up, especially if you disagree with your betters. And true free thought means freedom to stop thinking as soon as the official truth is announced by the proper Authorities — and freedom to wait patiently until then.

Now take this Ayaan Hirsi Ali. First of all, she’s a black woman, and they’re not quite ready for prime time, know what I mean? And she’s against the systematic abuse of women in Muslim societies. What about people who are for the systematic abuse of women in Muslim societies? Furthermore, she lacks “representative scholarly qualifications.” Want the whole campus flooded with quacks expressing their so-called opinions based on “experience” and “knowledge” instead of academic authority? And she’s Dutch. More or less. Enough said.

You can read the entire article as well along with this background piece.