9 ms·

'A fatal miscalculation': masculinity researcher on why Democrats lost young men

25 points by makerdiety 2y ago

onetokeoverthe 2y ago
Suggestion to Central Casting: Find a 50 year old who looks 40 instead of a 60 year old who looks 75.
kwere 2y ago
Republicans repells educated, single, liberal women for the same reasons Democrats struggle with straight, masculine, traditional males. They demonize and act often hostile to such demographics. Both believe others "wrong" behaviours should be corrected. Democrats appealed historically to men as the working class party, image that kamala couldnt sell.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  The problem is that Harris appealed to some women, but Trump appealed to the majority of men
  - acdha 2y ago
    Yes - white women were within a couple of points of white men voting for Trump, as being a larger chunk of voters made up for a slightly lower percentage share. 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.
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      Lots of discontented liberals who didn’t want to vote for more of the same, and the same politically motivated leftists who went to the polls for Biden in 2020 abandoned Harris after she moved to the right. 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…
      - dendrite9 2y ago
        I have been tossing around thought that her campaign didn't feel like it positioned an opponent/enemy as part of the attempt to appeal to disaffected republicans. I'm not convinced that trotting out officials from the Bush era did enough good among non Trump republicans to make up for how it might have disaffected more left leaning voters. 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.
        DiscourseFan 2y ago
        The less people vote the better. It signals a lack of confidence in the system as a whole. Trump is going to turn out some center-right administration with his New America PAC cabinet; he positioned himself as anti-establishment but I'm starting to doubt it. Hopefully this election broke the illusion of democratic will for the American public.
- proc0 2y ago
  > Democrats appealed historically to men 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.
  - stonethrowaway 2y ago
    But apparently these women are…educated? I don’t know how it all works if the end result of education (or being “liberal”) is being bigoted and clueless and lacking complete empathy towards the opposite sex. Sounds like bog standard indoctrination and party line to me.
inglor_cz 2y ago
* [The Joe Rogan Experience], Trump went on these weird rants but you just got the sense of Trump figuring it out. Sure, he’s got weird views on stuff, but he didn’t come across as a hateful figure.* 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.
- lazyeye 2y ago
  I think this election signified the death of mainstream media and the rise of independent media. Which is fantastic IMO. 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.
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    If it gets replaced by Joe Rogan, then no it isn't an improvement. 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.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      Joe Rogan is not a substitute for news, but he has a knack of "opening up" people he is talking to. 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.
asksomeoneelse 2y ago
I feel that a lot of men voted for Trump, not because they liked him, but because they felt rejected by the Left as a whole. 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.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  I’ve seen quite a few of those kind of comments here as well. Sexism and racism is just that—even when directed at white men. 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.
  - superb_dev 2y ago
    If “not just for white guys” is the kind of comment that turns you away, then you wouldn’t have been a good fit regardless
    - genericone 2y ago
      Interpreting that to mean that the person said 'it's not for white guys' and parent thinks they meant 'not "just" for white guys'. But the damage had been done regardless of original intent behind the words.
      - 2y ago
bokoharambe 2y ago
Can't take this seriously when Trump barely got more votes this time around than he did last time. There has been no loss of young men. People are broadly feeling disenfranchised, and that's why the Democrats lost. If anything, this is a broad rebuke of liberalism without endorsement of the prevailing alternative.
- krapp 2y ago
  > If anything, this is a broad rebuke of liberalism without endorsement of the prevailing alternative. 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.
  - bokoharambe 2y ago
    Trump is not the only/real alternative to liberalism even if he was the option that was given. That's why abstention won: no one wants the liberals, but no one sees Trump as different enough from them for him to earn their support.
    - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
      Maybe abstention won in a landslide and a record number did not vote. IE; +51%. We'll never know.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    I don't think the "genocide" story is very convincing. On the contrary, it would have signaled that the Democrats lost further ground to rather extremist elements. Also, the conflict came later and the polarization was already present. 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.
Eumenes 2y ago
I'm a self taught programmer who didn't go to college. After high school, I stuck around my rural-ish hometown and did tech support for a cable/ISP company. That job exposed to me to scripting/automating tasks and I eventually left the area to move to the Bay area for a much better paycheck (I have since moved away, but not back home). I keep in touch with my high school buddies (all men), whom happen to be quite diverse (gay puerto rican, jewish guy, muslim serb are my 3 best friends). When we were kids, we were anti war (all our parents were super pro Bush post 9/11) and didn't think anything of things like gay marriage. We smoked pot and thought the war on drugs was BS. We looked up to figures like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders (I know, they are different). We were solidly in team blue. I can count on one hand the times I've seen right leaning views expressed in my tech career. Most of my male colleagues come from money, attended elite schools, couldn't change their own oil, and are almost exclusively urbanites. I'm almost certain they are all left leaning. I'm pretty certain this forum demographic falls into that category. Tech workforce is more representative of finance vs the hacker culture it was born out of. 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

25 points by makerdiety 2y ago

Suggestion to Central Casting: Find a 50 year old who looks 40 instead of a 60 year old who looks 75.

Republicans repells educated, single, liberal women for the same reasons Democrats struggle with straight, masculine, traditional males. They demonize and act often hostile to such demographics. Both believe others "wrong" behaviours should be corrected. Democrats appealed historically to men as the working class party, image that kamala couldnt sell.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
The problem is that Harris appealed to some women, but Trump appealed to the majority of men
- acdha 2y ago
  Yes - white women were within a couple of points of white men voting for Trump, as being a larger chunk of voters made up for a slightly lower percentage share. 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.
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    Lots of discontented liberals who didn’t want to vote for more of the same, and the same politically motivated leftists who went to the polls for Biden in 2020 abandoned Harris after she moved to the right. 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…
    - dendrite9 2y ago
      I have been tossing around thought that her campaign didn't feel like it positioned an opponent/enemy as part of the attempt to appeal to disaffected republicans. I'm not convinced that trotting out officials from the Bush era did enough good among non Trump republicans to make up for how it might have disaffected more left leaning voters. 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.
      - DiscourseFan 2y ago
        The less people vote the better. It signals a lack of confidence in the system as a whole. Trump is going to turn out some center-right administration with his New America PAC cabinet; he positioned himself as anti-establishment but I'm starting to doubt it. Hopefully this election broke the illusion of democratic will for the American public.
proc0 2y ago
> Democrats appealed historically to men 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.
- stonethrowaway 2y ago
  But apparently these women are…educated? I don’t know how it all works if the end result of education (or being “liberal”) is being bigoted and clueless and lacking complete empathy towards the opposite sex. Sounds like bog standard indoctrination and party line to me.

inglor_cz 2y ago

* [The Joe Rogan Experience], Trump went on these weird rants but you just got the sense of Trump figuring it out. Sure, he’s got weird views on stuff, but he didn’t come across as a hateful figure.* 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.

lazyeye 2y ago
I think this election signified the death of mainstream media and the rise of independent media. Which is fantastic IMO. 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.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  If it gets replaced by Joe Rogan, then no it isn't an improvement. 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.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Joe Rogan is not a substitute for news, but he has a knack of "opening up" people he is talking to. 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.

asksomeoneelse 2y ago

I feel that a lot of men voted for Trump, not because they liked him, but because they felt rejected by the Left as a whole. 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.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
I’ve seen quite a few of those kind of comments here as well. Sexism and racism is just that—even when directed at white men. 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.
- superb_dev 2y ago
  If “not just for white guys” is the kind of comment that turns you away, then you wouldn’t have been a good fit regardless
  - genericone 2y ago
    Interpreting that to mean that the person said 'it's not for white guys' and parent thinks they meant 'not "just" for white guys'. But the damage had been done regardless of original intent behind the words.
    - 2y ago

bokoharambe 2y ago

Can't take this seriously when Trump barely got more votes this time around than he did last time. There has been no loss of young men. People are broadly feeling disenfranchised, and that's why the Democrats lost. If anything, this is a broad rebuke of liberalism without endorsement of the prevailing alternative.

krapp 2y ago
> If anything, this is a broad rebuke of liberalism without endorsement of the prevailing alternative. 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.
- bokoharambe 2y ago
  Trump is not the only/real alternative to liberalism even if he was the option that was given. That's why abstention won: no one wants the liberals, but no one sees Trump as different enough from them for him to earn their support.
  - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
    Maybe abstention won in a landslide and a record number did not vote. IE; +51%. We'll never know.
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  I don't think the "genocide" story is very convincing. On the contrary, it would have signaled that the Democrats lost further ground to rather extremist elements. Also, the conflict came later and the polarization was already present. 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.

Eumenes 2y ago

I'm a self taught programmer who didn't go to college. After high school, I stuck around my rural-ish hometown and did tech support for a cable/ISP company. That job exposed to me to scripting/automating tasks and I eventually left the area to move to the Bay area for a much better paycheck (I have since moved away, but not back home). I keep in touch with my high school buddies (all men), whom happen to be quite diverse (gay puerto rican, jewish guy, muslim serb are my 3 best friends). When we were kids, we were anti war (all our parents were super pro Bush post 9/11) and didn't think anything of things like gay marriage. We smoked pot and thought the war on drugs was BS. We looked up to figures like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders (I know, they are different). We were solidly in team blue. I can count on one hand the times I've seen right leaning views expressed in my tech career. Most of my male colleagues come from money, attended elite schools, couldn't change their own oil, and are almost exclusively urbanites. I'm almost certain they are all left leaning. I'm pretty certain this forum demographic falls into that category. Tech workforce is more representative of finance vs the hacker culture it was born out of. 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]