What is wrong with young men? In recent weeks, many liberal outlets have been puzzling over polling results, some of which show that men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are leaving the Democratic Party. These stories, many of which presume that the center-left is the norm and everyone who moves too far to the right or the left has been led astray, fit within a well-worn genre of political writing, wherein some formerly loyal group of people, usually classified by race or gender, starts to teeter and lean toward the darkness. This election is particularly rife with these would-be prodigal sons: Muslim and Arab American voters in Michigan, who have threatened to remain “uncommitted” this election, owing to the Biden Administration’s support of Israel; Black men, who were recently scolded by Barack Obama for their alleged lack of support for Kamala Harris; and now the men of Gen Z. All three groups have had their audition for the blame spotlight, but, if Harris loses the election to Donald Trump, I imagine the young, disaffected men will ultimately become the focus of a lot of bewilderment and hand-wringing, for the very simple reason that the children are our future and nothing is scarier than angry dudes.
I typically find this type of framing both annoying and incurious because it starts with an assumption that any veering from the liberal, coastal consensus could only come from some underlying dysfunction, brainwashing, or coercion.(In these moments, the liberal commentariat sounds like distraught, absentee parents who, upon discovering a stash of marijuana or pornography in their child’s room, march them straight to a therapist to figure out what went wrong.) In San Francisco, for example, there has been ample evidence that Asian American voters, who make up a third of the electorate, have been trending toward the right. The big-picture explanations for this are quite simple: Progressive, equity-driven school policies and what was perceived as an insufficient response from the city to a rash of horrific hate crimes convinced many Asian American voters that the Democratic Party was not looking out for their interests. Many of these voters made what should be seen as a rational choice to seek out leaders who would promote a merit-based education system and increased policing. One can disagree with these voters or accuse them of naïveté, but it’s far more instructive to simply assume that voters are acting rationally and are not under the spell of “disinformation,” or whatever the magical liberal excuse might be for the failure to reach beyond the core demographic of college-educated people on the coasts.
The other thing to note is that these prodigal-son stories don’t always hold up come Election Day. The polling about young men, for example, is all over the place. One poll shows Republicans with a twenty-six-point advantage in party affiliation for men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. Another shows Democrats with a seventeen-point advantage. Both polls were conducted by reputable outlets and asked similar questions of a seemingly representative sample of respondents. In the face of such polling discrepancies, the smart move is typically to ignore the results. Vibes are likely as reliable as polls with spreads this wide.
Nevertheless, the outlines of what this referendum on young men might look like have already started to reveal themselves. On Monday, the New York Times published an opinion piece by John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, titled, “Trump’s Bro Whispering Could Cost Democrats Too Many Young Men.” Volpe writes that, according to his polls, “since the spring of 2020, the share of young men identifying as registered Democrats has dropped by seven percentage points, while those identifying as Republicans have increased by seven points—a net shift of 14 points in just four years.” Volpe believes that today’s young men are lonely, increasingly single, and depressed. “Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z men report feeling regularly stressed by an uncertain future, stirring painful memories of the Great Recession they witnessed as children,” he writes.
Volpe argues that Trump has deliberately capitalized on all of this through a “master class in bro whispering,” which includes his support of cryptocurrencies, “securing the endorsement of Dave Portnoy—the unapologetically offensive founder of Barstool Sports—and giving the U.F.C. president, Dana White, who embodies the alpha-male archetype that appeals to many young men, a prime spot at the Republican National Convention.” These swaggering figures, all of whom have a large following on social media, have convinced these depressed and hopeless young men that the masculine fulfillment they desire lies in the strongman running for President. To combat these trends, Volpe writes, the Harris campaign should promote something that I’ve advocated for in the past: a national military and service program that would give young men a sense of purpose and “frame national service as a pathway to rebuilding America’s strength from within, addressing growing concerns about military recruitment and bridging political divides with a renewed sense of shared responsibility.”
I agree with Volpe, in the main—a call to national service would give all young people a detour out of the academic rat race and reassure them that there are other pathways to success that don’t involve élite colleges or viral-video fame. It’s clearly too late in this cycle for such a suggestion to be broached, and it probably would be political suicide to promote any idea that sounded like a military draft. But I appreciate that Volpe was willing to give an ambitious prescription in his op-ed, something that’s generally anathema to the form, especially when the author has the word “Harvard” in his bio. If young men are feeling bleak about their future, I believe they should probably get a job that gives them a sense of purpose, one that reconnects them with people in their communities who may be struggling worse than them.
But I am not quite so sure that this shift is, in Volpe’s words, “neither organic nor unexpected.” And I certainly don’t believe that the swing toward the Republican Party has much to do with Trump’s bro-centric media itinerary. Democrats will not erase this deficit by pandering to TikTok influencers or trying to convert the acolytes of hyper-toxic influencers like Andrew Tate. The red-pilling of young men feels far more stubborn and will not likely be fixed with some counter-messaging and an ambitious slate of policies. Harris could be a weekly guest on “The Joe Rogan Experience” and spurn every appearance request on “The View,” and I imagine that the vast majority of these drifting young men would remain unconvinced that liberal-élite America had much to offer them.
More to the point, what does the Democratic Party really offer these angry young men? The obvious answers are better access to health care, a stronger social-safety net in case they do, in fact, find themselves in economically precarious situations, and better schools and public services, but none of those have really been the center of Democratic messaging for the past ten years. Instead, what these young people have heard is a lot of talk about Trump and the threat he poses to something called democracy. As it goes, if they don’t want to see America fall into fascism, they must vote blue no matter who is at the top of the ticket. What I’ve found interesting in the discourse about not only young men but all the potential defectors who will ultimately be blamed if Trump becomes President is just how programmatic and dismissive both politicians and the liberal commentariat have been in their panderings. Addressing Black men who may have left the Democratic Party early this month, Obama seemed to put the blame with the voters themselves, and asked if they might not be showing much enthusiasm for Harris because she is a woman. This, of course, ignores the fact that these trends among Black men started with Joe Biden in office, but it also highlights the liberal problem, not just for Black men but for anyone who might be feeling disillusioned by the state of the country. If they stray from the center-left, they will be castigated as bigots or naïve idiots who are risking the lives of everyone else in the country.
For what I call the “Joker electorate,” those who just want to watch the establishment burn, such messaging has worn quite thin. Young people, in general, are particularly attuned to hypocrisies, which, in turn, kick up a sometimes errant, but oftentimes righteous, desire to rage against the machine. In the recent past, many of these young people could have been shepherded to the Bernie Sanders campaign and the left wing of the Democratic Party, but most of that political infrastructure, which had produced perhaps reluctant but ultimately reliable blue voters, has been dismantled or absorbed. Many liberals like to believe that all these voters, who in Bernie’s case were overwhelmingly young, would have just been ardent Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg supporters if Bernie hadn’t yanked them to the left, but it’s also possible that a decent portion of them would have just gravitated toward Trump and his anti-establishment, faux-populist rhetoric.
Is this rightward shift in young men, then, just what happens when the center of the Democratic Party spends a decade trashing its populist wing? Probably not, at least not entirely. Voters are weird and have all sorts of reasons they sometimes buck expectations. But the Republicans currently have an electoral monopoly on anti-establishment rhetoric, and it’s difficult to see anything in the near future, including a Trump Presidency, loosening that hold. They are the party for people who just want to say what they think, point out sometimes trivial hypocrisies, and not worry about things like Social Security and health care. During the Bernie years, some of those angry young men found that they actually could care about health care while still screaming down the establishment. And, although the Party ultimately went with Biden, most of those young men turned out to vote for him over Trump. Where do those young men go now? Can we really scold them back into the fold? ♦
