A funny thing happened on the way to Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory over Kamala Harris: Many Democrats realized that, somewhere along the way, they had lost the plot not only regarding issues such as border security and inflation but also regarding male voters. Some blamed sexism. “I do think that the country is still sexist and is not ready for a woman president,” former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle told Politico, a sentiment echoed by former President Joe Biden in a post-election appearance on ABC’s The View.
But some Democrats believe the party didn’t reach out enthusiastically enough to men, and they are keen to change this. Democrats have launched a two-year, $20 million listening tour hoping to win back the male vote. Called “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan,” or SAM for short, the project studies “the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality” in male-dominated spaces such as podcasts and gaming platforms. “Most people I talked to, Democratic operatives, have never heard of Red Pill Fitness,” marveled SAM’s creator, Ilyse Hogue, to Politico. In considering how to rebrand the party, Hogue advised, “Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone.”
Well, the problem isn’t tone, which is why it is a mistake for Democrats to view their current unpopularity with men as merely a marketing challenge. Long before the 2024 election, men got the message that the cultural left (and its political arm, the Democratic Party) is hostile to them and to traditional expressions of masculinity. We are more than a decade past the moment when the cultural left literally declared males unnecessary in books with titles such as The End of Men. You can’t rebrand your way back into the good graces of men after such messages by buying more ads on podcasts or supplementing your rhetoric with focus-grouped keywords, like taking a dose of creatine. Democrats don’t need their own Joe Rogan (who only recently became coded right-wing).
When it comes to men, Democrats need an entirely new cultural vocabulary—one that reckons with the enduring power of traditional masculinity.
The fact that liberals have been putting their fingers on the scales of the balance between the genders on the XX side is at least two generations old. When political analysts began discerning a “gender gap” showing that women were more liberal than men, they focused on how politicians needed to court women, as though there weren’t two sides of the gap that needed to be taken into account.
The feminization of educational institutions was long ago complete, so set in stone that the New York Times, which has spent decades hyperventilating about the lack of educational opportunities for girls, recently noted in passing how “girls have been outperforming boys in American schools for decades, from elementary school through college.” This was in an article exploring how boys are now falling behind…in kindergarten. Liberal institutions now acknowledge that men are falling behind in many measures of well-being, including mental health and economic security.
At the same time, popular culture has been making bank for a generation with classically male entertainments, superhero movies especially. When those began to wear thin, Top Gun: Maverick came on the scene and brought people back to theaters after the pandemic with a celebration of martial virtue. Meanwhile, the most successful creator of streaming television is Taylor Sheridan, whose shows from Yellowstone on down exude manliness.
What these movies and shows have in common is men defending traditional values (as well as family and property) against the depredations of modern life. Call it high-T (for testosterone) culture. It revels in hunting, not gathering; in patriotism, guns, sports, and risk-taking.
These things have always been popular among men, of course, but they have not been culturally celebrated by the mainstream left in a very long time. When acknowledged at all, they are usually criticized as evidence of patriarchy or “toxic masculinity.” For example, a writer for New York magazine, describing Yellowstone and its star, Kevin Costner, complained, “So much of the narrative around the plight of the ‘white man,’ as preached by Fox News, is that their country is under attack, that everything is being taken away from them. And in the packaging of Yellowstone, it’s a powerful, charismatic, beautiful actor wearing that grievance—an homage to the idea of white America’s last stand.”
No wonder a “Latino man from Las Vegas,” as Politico described him, offered the following as one explanation for Kamala Harris’s defeat in the last election: “Oh, I got Beyoncé on stage with me. Oh, I got Lady Gaga on stage [and] it just kind of felt like, what does that have to do with me? I’m trying to move up in life.” Indeed. If you go to the Democratic Party’s website and peruse the long list of demographic groups included in the party’s “Who We Serve” section, you will find a perfect storm of inclusion: women, Latinos, LGBTQ+, union members, seniors, and even young people. Not listed? Men.
This is due in part to the long-standing impact of the academic left’s insistence that masculinity and femininity are merely constructs that must be dismantled in the cause of greater individual liberation. When married to the overweening political ambitions of a Democratic administration like Biden’s, this idea generated unpopular policies such as the removal of sex-specific language (including the word “woman”) at the Department of Health and Human Services and the federal government’s endorsement of men in women’s sports.
It also cost the Democrats the White House.
To be sure, the response on the right hasn’t always yielded healthier alternatives: Andrew Tate and other despicable creatures of the right-wing “manosphere” are as invested in their own ridiculous version of performative masculinity as Kamala Harris’s running mate, Governor Tim Walz, was in his efforts to cosplay a real hunter during the last election.
The difference is that the left’s preferred narrative—that boys are “falling down the rabbit hole” of dangerous YouTube videos before they are eventually “captured” by the manosphere—casts men as passive but never reckons with why these men are choosing such avatars of manhood over those on offer on the left. Perhaps it is because the left’s message to men is to “educate themselves” about their misogyny and “check their privilege,” even when they have none. Right-wing bro culture, as noxious as it is, at least encourages individual initiative: Make a fortune (preferably in bit-coin)! Get jacked at the gym (and buy my supplements)! Score with women (ideally, your future tradwife)!
Trump was effective at bringing together many of these themes, striking just the right cultural and political note at just the right moment for many male voters. One of his campaign’s final television ads, “We Fight,” talked about purpose, strength, and courage, and decried those who would label patriotism and similar values “toxic” or “shameful.” “Men could beat up women and win medals, but there was no prize for the guy who got up every day to do his job,” the ad’s narrator noted. What Trump and the right’s podcast bros understand is this: You can’t condescend to your audience if you hope to win them over. As comedian-turned-popular-podcaster Andrew Schulz told the New Yorker, “Democrats are tuned in to what people should feel… . Trump is tuned in to what people actually f—king feel.”
It might be an impossible concept for the left to grasp. Just after Trump recaptured the White House, feminist critic Elizabeth Spiers took to the pages of the New York Times to complain about the new “hegemonic masculinity” that Trump’s victory portended. That’s not going to help, just as imagining that appealing to masculinity is a matter of finding the right podcaster or the right set of words. Simply treating half the population and their concerns with respect is what will help. The fact that this is so difficult for the cultural left to grasp indicates the depth of the rabbit hole into which it has burrowed itself.
Photo: Getty Images
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