I think progressives never thought about this because we banked on immigration and demographic change allowing us to win culturally and electorally but the issue is immigrants tend to be overwhelmingly male, that is how Trump won actually he won over a lot of Hispanic,Black,Asian and indigenous men who feel humiliated by a new culture, economy and world.
So what can we do rhetorically and policy wise to win more young men over ?
What you’ve described is every complaint I’ve had with centrists and neocons in the democratic party. I don’t really know where the progressive part comes in.
Bernie did amazing with men to the point where “bernie bros” were being mocked in media, so has Mamdani in NY in polls.
If anything, I would argue that the Democratic party should be more populist and progressive. Focusing on things that pull up everybody, because everyone is struggling right now.
Man it’s like the majority of people here don’t have ‘regular guy’ friends.
The way to get to regular dudes, is to make them feel fucking included. Yes, diversity is fucking awesome. Yes, having women in leadership roles is fucking awesome. But for your average guy… who do they have to look up to on the left side of things? In the news? In congress? Who is on the national stage for these things? Who is talking to those people?
There isn’t anyone. There are tons of people talking to other groups of people, but there has been flat out no courting of the white dude demographic outside of White Dudes for Harris (which was brilliant but came too late).
Speak to the issues these guys are facing. Talk about dating. Talk about career struggles. Talk about feeling alone, and feeling vulnerable. And then, talk about solution based problem-solving for these things.
Why do you think the right wing latched onto guys who do the whole personal betterment thing? It’s the same shit that white supremacist groups do. They’ll get you with things that anyone can agree with like ‘Hey man if you work hard you’ll succeed. I fucking believe in you when no one else will.’ Then they go into the right wing bullshit because now they have you at an emotional level.
There is no online left presence doing these things, and there are multiple right wing people doing this shit.
Make a left wing Joe Rogan, and bro-dudes will watch that shit like shit on velcro. But it has to be a dude-bro talking to them. It can’t be Rachel Maddow or AOC, it has to be someone who comes from that background.
Why do we need a role model anyway? I’m a straight white married male with no kids and very progressive. I don’t need a role model to not be a piece of shit.
As a white lady I don’t know who the fuck my role model is either
Role models are absolutely important, but it’s more than what the op comment is saying.
Nice for you bro!
But you should also think that a lot of people dont have the luck to see life as you and struggle with much stuff.
I understand. But you also can’t read one sentence about me and describe it as lucky. I had shitty abusive parents. I worked my way through college so it took a little longer. Struggled financially at times. Have lived with suicidal tendencies since my parents divorced when I was 12 and became even more shitty and abusive.
I’m only successful because of myself and the work I’ve put into my life to be where I am today. To me having a role model wouldn’t have done or changed anything. I get that others might need it, but I don’t think every straight white male in America needs a role model and is doomed to be a conservative just because they can’t find one.
There are plenty of straight white males that are progressive or liberal. The ones that are conservative aren’t that way just because of a shitty role model. Many are shitty in plenty of other ways.
I completely understand were you’re coming from. I grew up in an incredibly disfunctional/abusive household and left at 15. I’ve been pretty much completely self-reliant since then. I was mostly self reliant before that. My parents idea of raising children was occasionally popping in to feed us or beat us (sometimes literally) into submission. I don’t need any external input to come to my own non-shitty conclusions on things because I’ve always had to think for myself.
However, I was also extremely lucky to find some good male role models in early adulthood that completely changed a lot of my life, mostly by exposing me to new ideas, skill sets, and opportunities. I think, while you and I have been shaped by hardships in a way that makes us mentally resilient enough to feel like we don’t need that mentorship, most young men don’t have that and they’re really floundering without guidance. I also think that this ultimately stems from homophobic tensions drilled into men of the last few generations that told us that platonic close relationships and brotherly affection between men is unacceptable.
So, while I agree that right wing ideology isn’t the default for young men who lack positive guidance, it’s a completely understandable outcome when the only available guidance they have, in a world that leaves young people with so many important/big questions, is a highly curated machine designed to lure them into a downward spiral towards far right/ fascist ideology.
I think a big part of the issues end up being economic. Things are obviously not great for a vast majority of middle and lower income people. You spend all day working your 1-3 jobs and in the background there’s all the culture war battles going on.
Few regular people have the mental space to even engage with the nuance required to navigate some progressive talking points when they can barely keep a roof over their heads. Toxic masculinity just turns into masculinity = toxic. You’ve lost these people, even if there’s an actually good message in there.
The Right is amazing at drawing a direct line between, “These are the problems we know you’re having” and “This is exactly what you can do about it today”. And for the Right, they actually deliver results. Do the kids turn into insufferable dickheads? Sure. But does the rhetoric sometimes get them what they want? Yeah, it does.
Where does the Left even come close? Almost everything is a delayed effect. Protest for a good cause? Wait to see if the politics catch up. Be nice to people? Great start, but that doesn’t help these guys get people-skills to have good platonic and romantic relationships. Be more open emotionally? What happens when your friends don’t accept that from you?
The Left is full of high risk, upfront demands from people who aren’t already affiliated with potentially little to no reward. Granted, the desired outcome is a better and more just society. But like, carrots and sticks people. You need something that regular people can get behind besides just ideology. Especially when mainstream media has a lock on those that are tuned out of progressive spaces and every now and then see something leak through from the culture war.
We need an actual vision for the future. Not a list of things we don’t like about the present, but what do we see people doing one day. If you don’t have a place for any group of people in your society, they will be indifferent if it burns. You can’t build a progressive future without having an actual, honest to God idea of what opportunities you can provide to legitimately everyone. If your best plan is, “Conservatives get with the program or rot in hell”, don’t be surprised when they take you down with them.
It’s a tricky situation.
I think a lot of men, particularly rural men, want someone in their corner. I think a lot of people are underestimating how angry and hopeless many of these men feel. The study a couple years ago from NPR about how many families are living paycheck to paycheck, have less than like $400 in savings, and have nobody to call in during a financial emergency was astounding.
Most Americans are in a desperate situation. And they aren’t used to it. And they feel they don’t deserve it. And because of that, they’re going to vote for whoever promises to fix it, whether they fix it or not.
The issue is that neither party is willing to fix the wealth desparity and class oriented labor practices that cause it. They’re only interested in playing the same game we are now that keeps them paid, and grinds everyone else into the dirt.
Young men are not some new phenomenon. Their desire, in a word, is agency.
As the world has grown more interconnected, the world has become more visible. This has created a crippling awareness of their place in the grand scheme. Nietzsche’s void has opened beneath them and, in the ignorance expected of youth, they grasp at what is presented to them. Selling hope to the desperate, even false hope, is lucrative, so there is no shortage of hucksters and charlatans offering it to them.
The ultimate problem is that there is no pleasant truth. When faced with the existential horror of being, the truth doesn’t help. You cannot focus on learning to be a better version of yourself when facing raw terror. A comforting lie will get you to tomorrow. Truth will send you to the long, dark night.
So, when offered a pretense of agency, in almost any form, they take it. Some pretend that the problem is simply women. Some say it’s other ‘races.’ Some say it’s this or that ideology, whether economic, social, sexual, psychological, or anything else. They all just want to feel like they can make a difference, just like everyone else.
This is a better expression of what has happened/is happening than “they have no role models”.
The world has been changing faster and faster since the industrial revolution. Our culture seems to be experiencing growing pains from such rapid growth. There is less hope than ever,
“The comforting lie that gets you through to tomorrow” Absolutely, the propaganda has been layed on these men thick.
A lot of fancy words to say nothing
It all has meaning. I used high density language because I didn’t want to spend a long time on the response, which I admit does require a certain level of experience with the concepts to be readable. Was there something you’d like me to expand into simpler language to make it clearer for you?
I can see why you called yourself lazy
The elimination of ghost jobs, for a start. If you have to jump through hoops for a job that doesn’t exist, that instills a strong distrust in society. People need money to make headway in their life, and shit like ghost jobs corrode the feeling of hope.
Once you cannot feel love for living anymore, that is a great deal of space in one’s heart to be filled with hatred.
Young adults needs stronger world frameworks that don’t feel forced on them.
IMO that’s a virtue system!
I’ve been a Stoic for over 20 years now and managed to convert dozens of people to progressive thought just by discussing virtues that are inherit to human nature (justice, courage, wisdom, temperance). People like abstract virtues because they’re easy to incorporate to their personal world models with very little friction and friction is the real thought killer.
Most people are truth seeking but can be very slow learners and some really rebel against strong friction so there’s a need for more abstract approaches like - using “colorblind” instead of arguing race, using “cosmopolitan” when argueing geopolitics, using “secular” when arguing religion etc etc. Every other argument can follow afterwards.
This is the way.
I’m so sorry, genuinely, what? Could you further explain what you mean? I understand your first sentence, and then I got lost
I’ve said it several times on Lemmy. The American left consists of:
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The DNC establishment, the Pelosis and Schumers of the world who are mostly in it for the insider trading. Their stance on issues falls somewhere between Hitler and Nixon, Israel is their #1 priority, and I’m not sure they care about the wellbeing of the average American citizen anymore than a typical seven-armed octopus does. This group holds all the political power of the “left.”
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The rainbow hair collective. The gay trans vegan gender blender ambiguously brown righteous indignation victim complex crowd. Amongst them they agree on very little, there’s actually a significant amount of infighting, basically the only thing that unites them is their mutual hatred of straight white men. This group wields basically no political power; they’re nominally represented by Ocasio-Cortez in the House and Sanders in the Senate and that is literally it. But, this is the cohort has a lot of control over the party’s campaigning and messaging, and they’ve also basically got control of Hollywood.
The result of this is the DNC’s messaging is often centered around identity politics. There was that meme floating around that read:
“Can we have some help?”
🐘 - No.
🫏 - No. #BLM #🌈
Which…sums it up. Neither party will vote to help the citizens at large but the Democrats will pay empty lip service to the non-white and non-male.
During the Harris campaign, there was a pretty big emphasis on finding a straight white preferably Southern male running mate for Harris. My own state’s lame duck governor, Roy Cooper, was mentioned, before it went to midwesterner Tim Walz. They then proceeded to have this straight white man cosplay as…the caricature of a straight white man acceptable to the gender studies majors in charge. Remember the live stream of him doing some repair task to a classic pickup truck?
Everything I heard about Tim Walz was good. I distinctly remember reading about some of the student athletes he coached talking about how much they liked him. Everything they showed me about him was as cringe worthy as Ghostbusters 2016. Harris herself was caught on an open mic acknowledging that they weren’t going to win the election without men, and then they came out with the “I’m man enough to vote for a woman” campaign. Because the people they got to write the commercials just couldn’t fucking help themselves.
I held my nose and voted Harris. Because while I’m unabashedly vocally critical of feminists and the rest of the identity politics left, I’m very much not a Retard Nazi. The Identity Politics left will accuse me of being a Retard Nazi because I score less than a 110% on their purity test, but I’ve voted in every election since 2008 and I haven’t cast a vote for any Republican in my life. That’s not good enough for the voice of the Democrats. Nothing in the universe can be.
Just…keep yelling at teenage boys that the last 300+ years of history which they had no possible way to impact was their personal fault. That’ll start working one of these decades.
there is a cure for political illiteracy
Yawn. Anybody writing anything this long is clearly pushing an agenda so skip
Okay, so men should vote Republican. Got it.
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for most they are very disconnected from reality, just what they see on the internet, being more so raised by it then even their parents. And social media is very good at targeting those more vunrable people becuse social media thrives off of discord
Punching nazis can be nice and masculine if you like.
We could show them the Letter Kenny episode where they beat up the neoNazis.
Or dome old captain america comics. A certain tarentino movie. Biography of any of a hundred oss/sas guys. Like a million soviet films on the subject.
There’s options.
Reclaim patriotism. Republicans love to wrap themselves in the flag, progressives need to do the same thing. It’s just a piece of the whole, but seeing pics of the LA protests with Mexican flags flying - that doesn’t help bring American voters to a cause.
Seeing a lot of flags in the No Kings protests was very satisfying. We have to take genuine patriotism back from MAGA faketriots.
A little out of the blue but I watched an episode of a German cooking show today where strangers are coupled in groups of five for a week and every day one of them has to cook for the rest of them. They then vote who was the best host.
This week was ALL 30-38 year-old straight Dads. Nobody talked about football.
Nobody chestbumped anyone. Nobody was mansplaning anything. Instead, they were all swooning over each others’ cooking skills, making each other cry over how much they love their kids and hugging each other for feeling insecure about their cooking. In other words it was the most realistic and “manly” portrayal of the male reality that I have seen in the media ever.
It’s easy to blame the media and the “culture war” for male alienation but I strongly believe that our perception of ourselves is largely influenced by our peer group’s portrayal in society. In other words: if I feel antagonized, I tend to overreact. If I am being told by Hollywood or social media to “stop being a mansplaning patriarch” I will be imprinted with the very idea to identify as such.
So long story short: non-toxic masculinity needs more representation AND it needs to come from a place of positivity, not judgement or condescension.
what is this cooking show because it sounds delightful. statesians have lost the plot when it comes to cooking shows
It’s called “Das perfekte Dinner”, it’s been on the air for 20 years and is one of those shows that defies the death of classic television.
It can appear quite boring if you come from watching things like chef’s table or hell’s kitchen, as there is little drama, its unscripted and it’s mostly very positive and no-nonsense.
My wife has watched too much great British baking show and this sounds right up our alley
Simple. What do young men care about? Getting laid and getting paid. Promise them that, and you’ll get their votes.
You’ll need to use coded language, of course. But using coded language is politicians’ whole job.
What a childish take.
Excuse the paradox, but if you think that you or anyone else isn’t a just kid that got old then you still need to grow the fuck up. Sex and wealth, the two reasons humans have done anything at all for millennia.
Well yes, you’re trying to reach out to literal non adults.
Literally says “young men” in the title. Do you need a dictionary?
Promote and get behind actual progressive candidates, not corporatist shills like Hillary or Kamala. I like Kshama Sawant because she calls shit like she sees it.
Idk how do you “sell” being a decent fucking person?
Talk about issues that affect the working class. Not the white working class, not working class men, just everyone who makes a living by drawing a wage. Progressive movements are formed by solidarity, and we have more in common with other working class people than any of the politicians or business leaders who set the tone of this debate.
Perfect.
