'A fatal miscalculation': masculinity researcher on why Democrats lost young men
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you go on left-leaning media, you can find comments that would be considered gross hate speech if it targeted any other group, by the hundreds. And yet, people very rarely call them out on that, if ever. There seems to be an omerta on misandry (and anti-white racism to some extent) amongst the Democrats. More than that, a lot of them seem to even revel in it, proud of it.
Not surprising that some men end up with a mindset "I don't care if the Right wins, I need the Left to lose".
The bottom line being that America really needs a middle/center party, but I fear it might be too late.
I recently came across an “ethical software” movement, concerned about privacy. Right up my alley. Was ready to join up and use their logo, etc. Watched their ted talk for inspiration. I shit you not, he said it was not (just?) for white guys. With a bit of sneer. Found the text on the site as well, not merely an off-hand remark. As if human rights give one shit about that. The whole point, missed.
Closed the tabs and haven’t looked back. Insulting your audience doesn’t garner votes, what a surprise.
You seem to have a habit of slicing out a few words to neutralize them and use that to justify exclusion. I get it, you think we should be "tough" and accept casual racism, sexism, ageism when fashionable.
Nope. I never accepted that shit before—ain't gonna start now.
What does that even mean? What would a middle/center party do, exactly?
I'm getting older (maybe ancient in the tech world), and just during my lifetime I've seen the terms "left", "right", "liberal", "conservative" morph multiple times into things that, if not hopelessly vague, are unrecognizable from previous definitions.
Maybe the particular issues need to be specified. Economic issues are very different from social and cultural issues. And then there's also foreign affairs, if anyone cares about that.
The politicans who are considered "centrists" nowadays, for example Joe Manchin, just seem to me to be sellouts with no principles who go to the highest bidder. Am I wrong about that? I honestly respect a consistent ideologue more than that. In any case, what message do the so-called centrists have for young men?
From what I've seen in the exit polls, if they're to be trusted, economics was the most important issue for voters. Those who felt worse off now voted for Trump, and those who felt better off or the same voted for Harris. For the first time I can remember, the Democrat won the upper income voters, while the Republican won the middle class voters, which is a reversal from 2020.
I remember that Harris's opportunity agenda for black men was like... cryptocurrency and legalizing weed? WTF was the campaign thinking (other than taking donations from crypto advocates)?
Forget the wording 'centrist', parent is trying to describe the need for a party that seeks allies from all angles rather than trying to produce outrage towards specific groups of people in a lazy effort to foment in-party support and credit.
In recent years, I guess due to success of certain parties, everyone has decided that it is in fashion to have a group to demonize - to hate. This (necessarily) creates a group of disenfranchised people that have an axe to grind.
It used to be that political parties demonized far entities that were as far outside the voting American public as was feasible; now it's fashionable to attack people that constitute American voters. Now we have hordes of people that were demonized by one side or the other, and a lot of them want to vote one way or the other out of pure spite rather than political interest.
Fair enough. I'm all for breaking up the duopoly.
However, the strategy of scapegoating and creating enemies is hardly a new phenomenon. It's as old as politics itself. More recently, I'm old enough to remember Reagan railing against "welfare queens". In 1968, George Wallace ran for President, and won 5 states, on a platform of racial segregation. There was also the McCarthy era, of course, where there were supposedly enemies, Communists everywhere in the US. And George W. Bush weaponized patriotism after 9/11, painting anyone opposed to US imperialism as supporting the terrorists. (This same happens today to anyone opposed to US imperialism. They're called antisemites and supporters of Hamas.)
In the end, though, polls usually show that people vote based on their pocketbooks. Economic issues are almost always most important and salient, despite all of the other political commotion.
Well politics is about making choices where consensus is unattainable. By nature of not being consensual, there will be some angles from which these choices are undesirable. So attracting allies "from all angles" is essentially the same as saying "whoever is not my ally comes from no (reasonable) angle", which is precisely what the democrats are being described as doing in the article. They are the utmost "centrist" party in a way.
The answer to the demonization issue is not to pretend everybody must be your ally, it is to acknowledge that one can reasonably disagree with you, and be willing to engage with your political opponents rather than treat them as enemies, to reach an agreement acceptable to most (though not all).
I don't have a party that I agree with 100%, but I can decide what is most important for me and vote for a party that wants it. And most importantly, if I don't like my choice, I can vote for another party next year without making a 180.
I think that's nice.
Agreed. I like the idea of political pluralism much more than the idea of a so-called "centrist" party.
We do have other parties in the US, such as the Libertarian and Green parties, but our system makes it very difficult for them. They have to fight like crazy for ballot access, they're locked out of news coverage, they don't receive public funding, and they are reviled as "spoilers" by the two major parties.
I ran a social co-working space in 2016 in Austin, TX, it was pretty progressive, tech oriented, and socially liberal generally but we had a mix of political viewpoints and focused on GSD, we hosted Obama's young african leaders when they came to town and did a lot politically but not in a polarizing way, a few fresh college/masters grads came in that tried to blame all men, said men should keep their mouth shut. It was very frustrating, a bunch of those dudes went from voting against Trump in 2016 to voting for him by 2020 and now again in 2024.
2016 was like a giant premature celebration that included some pretty frustrating bigotry toward men, that due to proximity, was disproportionatly experienced by the very men who were the closest allies.
None of this bad behavior changed my views one bit because I hold my position based on data, I was dissapointed and did what I could to mitigate the damage but it was awful, throwing away allies in a fragile big tent party just for purity tests and for personal catharsis.
Each person is responsible for their own beliefs but the majority of people will not stay where they don't feel welcome.
Personally our two party system really cooks us, if we had plurality systems we'd probably have ended up with the equivalent of a Christian Social party that would have caucused with the left.
STAR voting would be nice and would help remove this implicit moral compromise people feel in voting, I think the more we can alter our system to enable people to feel like they aren't choosing between the lesser of two evils, the less we'll see people saying fuck it, I'll vote for my evil guy and excuse his behavior because I am choosing between evil and satan. I think people underestimate the damage that explicit moral compromise has had in voting, developmentally some people will always be black and white thinkers.
Isn’t there a saying that republicans aren’t born republican but they are forced that way? Your anecdote rings true with my experience.
That seems like just a rephrasing of the old meme that Trump voters are "delicate snowflakes"
Why? -- because when someone defines hate speech so liberally, one finds it everywhere and against everyone.
I thought the Trump vote was meant to be a protest against that sort of irrational thinking.
There's a difference between telling a dead baby joke to a couple that just had a miscarriage, and telling it to a group of edgy teenagers (perhaps by the couple themselves). That is to say, the problem is "punching down." What's important to understand here is that well-paid politicians and consultants telling people who are struggling that they're the problem - even if it flips historical dynamics of marginalization like gender and race - might be just that.
That doesn't mean that entitlement isn't a factor. It doesn't mean that it's actually harder to be a straight cis white man, in general. It doesn't mean that the normalization of prejudiced and hurtful speech wasn't basically invented and templated by white dudes. It just means that it's entirely predictable that people who are feeling bad aren't going to vote for someone who isn't spending enough time talking about the things they think are the reason that they're feeling bad. Said candidate doesn't even have to agree with such voters; they just have to engage with the issues honestly.
This is spot on. I recently listened to the Trump, Vance and Musk sessions on JRE.
The banter with Vance was interesting, Musk was his usual nerdy self and Trump was ranting a bit, but none of them projected any Dark Lord vibes. They came off as regular people.
Demonization doesn't really work with interviews like that being one click away in your smartphone.
You learn more from 10 mins of JRE than you do from 10 months of the same formulaic, tired coverage you get from the MSM.
Maybe I qualify that if TV news in its current form gets replaced by Joe Rogan. It is basically a wash. But the death of print media is really an awful awful thing, because that's where the death comes from, that is what is served to be the historical record in recent times.
You also gain more misinformation in 10 minutes of Joe Rogan experience than in many other forms. The guy has not met a conspiracy theory that he doesn't love. And he clearly cares above clicks over truth.
CNN isn't much better, but they at least have a journalist standard they have to theoretically align to.
Now if you're going to call MSNBC and Fox News mainstream media, well that's a big problem.
In a democracy, voters tend to vote more for people than for policies. (It is less irrational than it looks: personalities don't change much, while policies can be thrown out at a moment's notice, or never taken seriously in the first place.) In that sense, looking deeper into politicians' minds is a valuable service, a counterweight to the usual photo-op game and wide fake smiles shining on billboards.
Now, don't get me wrong, that is a lot better than the flotsam out there, and admittedly it is even better than the paper thin bullshit CNN and the like trot out, but it isn't smart. It's more not-stupid.
If you have clips that will change my mind, I'll happily watch, and try to get over my Dana White hatred spillover bias.
FYI, here are some better sources of information about public policy issues:
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals
https://www.ashecon.org/american-journal-of-health-economics...
https://www.apha.org/publications/american-journal-of-public...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/annals-of-epidemiology
https://asc41.org/publications/criminology-an-interdisciplin...
"I'd have a beer with him," vibes. Turned out great. Likewise, the actual Darths are just off-camera (Musk's is Thiel, Trump has several, Vance's is temporal, i.e., the Handmaid's Tale parody he'll turn into if Trump kicks the bucket before 2029).
If there was a CNN interview of David Duke being a chill guy and not using the nword, you'd assume his leadership roles in the KKK was just character assassination?
This isn't even cherry-picking, it's and proud willful ignorance, if not also intellectual laziness and gullibility.
Democrats appealed historically to men as the working class party, image that kamala couldnt sell.
The big story is the starkly disparate turnout rates: Trump successfully got most of his 2020 voters to internalize his legal problems as their own, and most of them came back in 2024. There’s a lot of media coverage about the point shift but when you look at the actual turnout it’s striking how much closer the absolute number of votes he got in 2024 is to 2020 versus the sag on the other side.
According to a Silicon Valley funded pro-Harris SuperPAC, her strongest messaging was on economic populism. Kind of strange she didn’t follow through with it…
It seems clear there was a motivation gap with the reduced voter numbers compared to the 2020 election. But for me it is hard to say why, I appear to not exist as a potential voter since the last text I received was somehow related to a Bernie contact list but wasn't even meant for me. Also coming from a state with mail in ballots I don't understand the calculations people do to decide about voting. I drop off my ballot at one of the several locations nearby when it is convenient.
On the motivation issue, yesterday at the store I heard an employee talking to a customer about the election and he said he didn't have money now, and neither of them was going to make a change for him so he saw no reason to vote. The customer agreed and of course they might not have felt their vote would count given where they lived. But I still found it to be interesting to hear so bluntly stated.
The same men they widely claim were racists and misogynists, and current men even young men are still to blame for. The other side is just reacting to this, since it's all fairly new (around 15 years), and it seems the main proponents of this are single liberal women.
Sounds like bog standard indoctrination and party line to me.
Anyway, fast forward to today, 15-20 years later, all of my friends from back home lean right/libertarian, despite different backgrounds and directions. I suspect alot of men in the 30-40 age group have similar stories. Cozying up to neo-cons, the focus on identity politics and hyper sensitivity to not offend people, cringe endorsements from celebs, fear of being patriotic; the list goes on. For people like me, I don't think it has to do with "masculinity" in the traditional sense, its hard to place, but like another comment mentioned, "I don't care if the Right wins, I need the Left to lose", resonates.
I think it was the opposite. If it were a "broad" rebuke of liberalism, Trump would have gotten far more votes than he did.
It was if anything a rebuke by Democrats of Harris positioning to the right in order to cater to Conservative swing voters, and not being liberal enough. All she had to do was come out strongly against Israel's genocide in Gaza, but she literally said she agreed entirely with policy, and wanted to include Trump staffers in her cabinet.
Except, of course, no one in the Trump camp was ever going to vote for her, so that effort was futile. All she accomplished was alienating her own base.
We'll never know.
I think the problem is that this "base" is really seen as the base for Democrats and why quite a few people would never vote for what they stand for.
You might find that naïve or not constructive in certain situations, but their strategy about it was just moronic.
And for some it was enough to say, that these bad ideas need to die first before they can vote for liberals again.
They had similar bad ideas around the topic of free speech as well. Their loudest voices were unpopular sound bites around how we need more social media authorities and surveillance.
All in all their ideas were just bad but reflected the party line. And their popular base was convinced by them.
These are just small puzzles that were so pronounced, that they made Trump almost a reasonable choice.