What do you think the solution to selling progressive politics to young men is ?
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.
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.
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.
I've said it several times on Lemmy. The American left consists of:
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."
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.
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.
the universalizing ideology of feminism for men is incoherent
and if you react with anger to someone, me, stating this fact, that feminism is and ought to be for women, you're part of the problem, shut up.
feminism is full of lessons on how feminism helps women, men should read feminists
but it's stupid to expect feminism/feminists to advocate for men's issues
and it's insulting to ask men to believe that all they have to do is be good feminists and they'll get what they need.
if you're a man and you want to write about how actually all men need to do is understand patriarchy, seriously shut the fuck up.
if you're a woman and you want to write about how actually feminism is good for men, seriously shut the fuck up:
stop centering a tool for helping women, feminism, stop centering women, when men is the topic. do you understand? can you understand? the topic is men.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Education. You will never be able to explain taxes in a way that can counter propaganda if the person is an idiot. You just won't. And until then it's an uphill battle.
Well it would be a good starting point if we actually had progressive politicians. The Democrats lose because they have no substantive platform for actually helping people because doing that would go against their donors. To be clear, it’s the same for Republicans. There’s a reason why the government just ping pongs between the two parties. The only reliable base either party has is the one that’s more culturally aligned with them, whatever that means at the time.
If they literally ever credibly ran on basic issues like housing, food, healthcare and the elections were fair, they would win. But they don’t, because they can’t, so they will never have consistent support.
You need to make it fun and engaging for them. That is what the far right is doining.
You and I might find it reprehensible, but they het som much traction bu having fun and giving young men a purpose and the feeling that they are doing something to netter themselves and their commuity.
How you go about that I dont know. In my local area we are focusing on having fun partiets and going out together as a group instead of just being political nerds in our own little grottos. Som far it seems to be working.
Tl;dr: Have fun visibly and invite them to join you. It takes forever, but at least you have fun while doing it.
Christ - some of these replies are exactly what a lot of women talk about when we say that Lemmy has a misogyny problem.
Blokes really don't recognize how much harder shit actually is for women, overall. It would be lovely to just sit on a bench for 5 mins without a stranger coming to chat me up, or if people would stop crediting men for my work when they don't even ask for it.
I don't follow the media and the debate where you live, but over here left leaning politicians and media tends to frame it as: women, minorites etc have a problem. Men are the problem.
You're basically pushing any undecided man over to the right.
This is all from the perspective of a non-american from a country where thankfully we are still liberal at heart and only entertain some progressive ideas, instead of buying it wholesale, meaning the right has yet to completely cannibalise the government over the mistakes of the left.
Move away from equity and return to equality of opportunity as the main goal. Equity demands lack of competition, and men love competition.
You can want everyone to receive equal opportunity and dignity, but people are not equal and will not end in the same place once the race is over. You can't demand equality of outcome and onboard the most competitive demographic, there is a reason if the stereotype of leftist men is passive wimps. This is completely compatible with prgressive ideas, but it's incompatible with progressive brains, apparently.
Actually understand what intersectionality looks like, stop treating it like a hierarchy of oppression.
The core idea of intersectionality is that each demographic has its own issues and they manifest differently if more demographics overlap in the same individual (e.g. sexism against white women vs sexism against black women exhibit different tropes and connotations).
This does not mean whoever has the least minoritary traits is the most acceptable target, that is some marxist "oppressor vs oppressed" horseshit and, while it was probably the intended idea, it is massively counterproductive and doesn't have to be the actual application of the issue.
Men have issues that women don't have, women have issues that men don't have. As soon as your movement decides to prioritise one they have lost the other.
The reason this does not happen with race is that no movement in the US can realistically exist politically without white people simply by virtue of how huge the white slice of the demo pie is, and because this whole thing was started by highly educated, economically mobile, overwhelingly white, college grads who live in very specific coastal bubbles, hence the endemic hatred of farmers and factory workers, the actual working class of the US, as hicks and racists, and the lionisation of serving staff like baristas and waiters (the only working class most large city dwellers ever interact with).
Move away from "patriarchy".
It's just a fucking L on its face isn't it? "Yes come join the party that thinks men being in power is the problem" fat fucking chance lol.
I don't care if you think it's "just a name" (especially in light of what progs consistently do over "just a name" and "just a statue" and so on) it's a massive optics L that shows all of the horseshit about microaggressions and non-confrontational language and whatnot are entirely performative.
You have the most obvious othering language in the core ideas of the movement and then complain about microaggressions? And you wonder why people don't take you seriously?
And while we're on that:
Politeness is baseline, respect is earned. Confrontation is necessary and men are more likely to thrive in confrontational spaces.
You can't have a political movement that does not tolerate dissent and confrontation, or only tolerates it in one direction. See the implosion of the "Unfuck america tour" as a good example of this.
The whole point of politics is to create a critical mass of people who align on some goal to push for it, you don't have to agree with them on every point, if you had enough people who agree with you, you would be already in the majority and would not need to participate in politics.
Easy example from the last decade: TERFs.
Now, I don't like TERFs, on account of them being radfems and thus automatically hostile to me due to the circumstances of my birth (i.e. penis), but you know what? I reckon they probably want women to have better salaries and fewer barriers to entry into professional fields.
Let them force themselves into political irrelevance if they refuse to play ball, don't make a big fucking show of kicking them out of the movement, because then you end up on the back foot of having to explain "trans women are women" to the mass population and the TERFs simply need to say "look at these brainwashed biology deniers, they think males and females have no differences" and you end up eating your own ass in public, when the point is that trans women ought to be treated as women for their own good and a more welcoming society.
(side note: if you are in that brainless chunk of progs who do believe there is no difference between the sexes, I highly encourage you to look at the world records in any discipline with easily measured metrics such as 100m dash and freestyle swimming. Not a single
male record is under the women's record, in some cases every historical male record eclipses the current female one. Males and females are different, this should be acknowledged, and it should not be a barrier to equal dignity in treatment.)
A movement that can't include anyone but the most in-line and pure of the ideological adepts is doomed to be irrelevant, and on that the progressives have an almost complete lock.
Look at what men are missing and how the right is selling it to them.
Men aren't doing so hot right now, emotionally and mentally. They feel like they are not manly, and criticized for trying to be manly or liking manly things. There's a lack of transitions into manhood, and the bar that is seen as a successful man with a good career is pretty much impossible.
If you have a poor paying job, you're not manly. If you have a well paying job but it's blue collar you're not manly because you're a dumb working stiff. If you have a white collar job you're not manly because you're not doing anything tough with your body. Maybe if you're a CEO who owns the company but also does rock climbing and bear fighting are you seen as manly enough, maybe.
Then you have these guys, your Andrew Tates and so on, who act very manly and tell you it's ok to be a man and then spout off some of the most toxic, asinine shit saying that's how you be a man. And young guys fall for it because they aren't shown any alternative.
Then on the left you have people who speak ill of men as a whole, and manliness as a whole. Sometimes the criticisms are correct, but a lot of times it's presented as men overall. If you try to say that it's not every man out there who's a monster, you get blasted with criticism for saying "not all men". They also don't provide anything positive or solutions for feeling manly, with the best they can be offered is to be more like women.
So young men, especially young cishet men, are actively pushed away from leftist spaces, leaving them feeling demonized by those spaces, and actively pandered to by the right which are offering mind poison dressed up as solutions.
So what do we do? There's a few things to fix.
leftist media has to stop demonizing men and start demonizing actions. Instead of saying "men are rapists" start saying "rapists are bad". When people start to say things like "cis people are shit" other people need to call them out of it, because if you're supposed to be the side that accepts people's gender identity, it should be for all gender identities. It can feel cathartic to rail against the majority demographic, especially when people of that demographic have hurt you, but if you feel that it's unfair to rail against a group because of the actions of a few members of it, that should apply to all groups. Things like "what's wrong with the straights" doesn't help build bonds with allies, and it turns young men away from leftist spaces.
there needs to be validation and recognition from the left for problems men have, like suicide, workplace death and heavier prison sentencing. The left needs to show that they are trying to fix these problems, too, instead of telling young men to suck it up and be a man about it because they are the oppressor demographic.
there needs to be people who counter toxic masculinity, not with telling men to be more like women, but with positive masculinity. If a man is having emotional or mental problems, toxic masculinity says to push that down. Femininity says it's ok to be soft and vulnerable. Positive masculinity would say that a real man is true to himself and his feelings and expresses then freely, even if others might ridicule him for it. There's a subtle difference, and the end result of femininity's and positive masculinity's tactic might be the same, i.e. the man expresses those feelings, but the way that they get there is very different. The former makes the man feel less validated in his identity, while the latter uplifts it. The memes where they say stuff like "I always tell my homies I love them before they go to bed" actually work.
leftist influencers need to make fighting for the rights of minorities seem manly. Badass. Like a hero. Worthy of praise and celebration.
while they won't get the financial and political backing that the toxic male influencers get, there needs to be positive male influencers who talk about masculinity in a positive way, while promoting the ideas above. There needs to be an alternative, who acts manly but in the fun, positive way, that validates young men's feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and isolation, while promoting an egalitarian perspective.
there needs to be a cultural shift in what makes a man. A shift away from dying in battle or becoming a tycoon, and a resurgence of the working class hero. Mass media itself needs to change and promote positive male figures. It can work and be popular, like in Avatar the Last Airbender. We need to show men that they are still men, and still worthy of love, respect and adoration, even if they aren't a super soldier or a wealthy elite. A lot of this is counter to capitalistic goals, so it may have to be subversive, but eventually it needs to be made the norm.
other men need to continue to step up and speak out about injustice towards minorities and against toxic masculinity behaviors in the day to day, and start decrying those behaviors as unmanly. People need to call Andrew Tate and the like unmanly.
ideally, the men's rights movement should be absorbed by the left and the toxic incels kicked out. It should be done in the name of gender equality. Fixing only woman's problems won't solve the patriarchy (which could be changed to a different term so everyone feels like it's less of an us vs them) and feminists should try to help solve men's problems directly rather than indirectly. Young men would see feminism as more appealing if feminists actually focused on men's problems as well, rather than ignoring or worse, demonizing them. Feminism could be rebranded as an egalitarian movement for all sexes and genders, maybe get a name change. If the patriarchy affects everyone, then the focus should be on everyone. Maybe it would have to be a whole new movement entirely.
So it's a larger problem than just getting more leftist male influencers, and some of those problems are systematic. Some can get worked on today. Talking about masculinity in a positive way, promotive equity, stop both their side and your side from bigotry, and, probably the thing that would get young men on board the most:
Actually trying to solve the problems young men are going through.
Every time there is a conversation regarding men issues, dismiss them as talking about something that clearly DOESN'T EXISTS, demean them, if they are emotionally intelligent enough to defend themselves from the TOTALLY NOT aggressive rhetoric, compare them to something else, preferably, something weaker and less smart than them, bonus points if you attack their sexuality in the same phrase, that always gets them riled up to support you!
Even more so if you treat them like complete imbeciles with a memory span of seconds and assume they forgot about all the years you have been doing this exact same thing!
And whatever you do, don't forget to bring up how women have and keep having BIGGER issues
Help them to break down. Encourage them to be soft and show them that that softness is strength. So many of these young men are like this because they feel alone. We need to bring them together in positive ways.
The same as it always has been. Punk Rock. Conservative shit is so goddamn cringe it's really hard to imagine how it has convinced anyone that it is any kind of counterculture.
The reality of this all is rather complex but I think the greatest issue is fundamentally the empathy gap. Men's issues are not recognized as issues, they're just dismissed out of hand. I'm talking about the easy things like the sentencing and education gaps.
We need to start the discourse that these are very real problems that are worth addressing.
Another problem I personally run into is how it's acceptable to discriminate against men, "kill all men" is acceptable but "kill all race" isn't. Neither should be and we don't recognize it as a problem, instead defaulting to arguments that are considered horrendous in another context.
Do what you say you're going to do when you get elected. Quit finding just enough no votes and making excuses. You promise, we vote, you don't deliver. Then you ask "why does no one want to vote for us? We promised to be marginally less terrible than our opponents!"
Create jobs through a green new deal that allows for upeard mobility for the motivated. Small business grants.
Create tax incentives for, endorse and give loam grants to businesses that provide workers with a share of a company. Whether co-op type thing or convoluted stock share program.
Young men want to matter, and they want to see the results of their effort.
You can't really do anything. Men had privileged position in the society for millennia. Now you're basically asking them to resign this privilege. They will not do it voluntarily. It doesn't make sense for them on any level. They will push back and the harder you attack their special rights the harder they will push back. It's only natural.
I think the only thing you can do is to educate them about democratic values so that while they are regaining power they still respect the rights of other people and don't create authoritarian state. This is what clearly failed in the US.
Legit I think it's to shift the focus away from helping other people for the sake of being nice and onto uniting together to fight a common enemy - the bosses, corporations, etc. Dale the machinist from Alabama isn't going to go to the protest to protect trans latinx PoC out of the kidness of his own heart but he might if he realizes it's part of a larger project to go out to take back his rights from the people fucking him over, and fuck over his boss. Young men are drawn to masculinity and militaristic language right now, and left wing politics can be easily framed in those terms. Yes, being good to other people should be good in its own right but a lot of people don't see it that way and we need to get them on our side too.
Male stereotypes have to be culturally broken first. Men are being taught that showing any emotions other than anger and hate is effeminate. They're being taught that empathy is weakness, that education is stupidity, that freedom is slavery.
Everything that makes men human is being stripped away, leaving a husk of burning hate awaiting marching orders. They need to reconnect to humanity.
As a mom of men, it has always concerned me that, while we were supporting our girls, we left our boys to flounder a bit. We spent so much time telling girls that they could do anything and they could be 'just as good as the boys' and talking to women about glass ceilings and 'don't let the man keep you down.' What did we tell our boys or rather what did they hear?
Maybe like, one day you are gonna need the social safety net, even if you're a very strong cis het guy.
One you're gonna be old. One day you're gonna be fired without notice when your car breaks down. One day your girlfriend might have a surprise pregnancy you can't deal with.
Just brainstorming but I would start with saying, sure this doesn't benefit you right now, cause you got the luck of the draw, but one day we will all need help
IMO it's about saving men from the patriarchy. I was recently on an interview of Judith Butler and I really appreciated its take that the movement needs to show empathy and compassion.
I think instead of focusing on how to sell this product, we focus on the product itself because it's impossible to sell something that Democrats keep pulling off the shelf as "defective." Like any other item that people buy, committing to something only to have the "company" do a 180 and stop supporting it immediately after your "purchase" is just going to drive people away.
Most Democrats only seem interested in pushing progressive policies right up until they get elected and then it's always "not the right time" after the election.
Edit: also the product would sell itself if they actually implemented them and improved people's lives. It's kind of hard to deny things that exist right in front of your face, but we never seem able to get to that point because corporations and genocidal "allies" always take precedence over the American people regardless of which of these two parties hold office.
It's not a rhetorical problem. It's a propaganda problem. People aren't being reasoned into right wing politics. It's being beaten into their heads day and night by talk radio, cable news, local news, and YouTube; and this has been going on very deliberately for decades. The right wing powers-that-be have been busily, patiently, creating a massive, pervasive propaganda machine for a long time while the left sat on their hands. We're now seeing the results: a world where the right can do and say literally anything they want without consequence. Their base is very literally brainwashed through brute force repeated messaging that nobody can compete with.
We needed the Democrats to do something about this propaganda machine before it became unstoppable. They already didn't do that.
The best thing any of us can do is try to steer kids away from the propaganda before they get sucked in.
I honestly don't think progressive politics is the problem. When it comes to the US. The only other party is the democrats and at best they are center at best but really they are just Republicans from 20 years ago. From a fiscal sense.
Both times they sold the American people to pick them just because the other side is worse. The problem is most people don't want to pick the lesser of two evils. They want to pick something that will change their lives for the better.
The problem is when Democrats don't really have a platform or communicate that platform effectively. But the other guy is saying he will fix the problems in people's lives even if they are lies. Most low information voters will roll the dice on the chance he is not lying. Because the other side has brought nothing to the table at all.
The logic i have seen with a man like that broke my heart was this. He said i care about the plate of Trans folks and other minorities but like on an airplane you have to put on your own mask on first before you help others. So when you are out of work or can't afford to live. The culture wars feels like less a priority for those type of people.
When looking with that lense it makes sense how people voted. People with higher education and income voted Dem becase they wanted to help others.
People with lower income voted Republican out of desperation and was easy for Republicans to sell the snake oil of. If we hurt these small group of people. All your problems will be solved. Then those same people are hurt more when they find out it was all a lie.
Read up on history and how Germany was after World War I. It's like having a crystal ball of what's going to happen next.
education, because of centuries of mysogyny, now that women are getting alot of funding and help in thier college careers, and beyond. and men are practically ditching it halfway because they dont see themselves even with thier degrees getting a job in it also a little sexisms plays into it, this makes them extremely bitter and turn to right wing echo chambers, because it gives them validation. an asian ytubers did this, got extremely bitter because his psyche degree had no job , so now hes a trumper, and blames educaiton is useless to thier followers.
also socially women when interviewing are better at getting certain jobs than men, like in biology related fields.
One thing that would probably help a lot is more progressive rolemodels who actually go out proselyzetizing, i.e. a more direct progressive equivalent to the likes of Andrew Tate. Though IDK how to actually make that kind of thing big, the fascist tech bros who rule silicon valley will surely suppress it even if it was gaining some momentum.
Crush patriarchy. That's the system that's failed these men after all. It wasn't progressive values that promised them women to dispose of. It wasn't feminism that promised them easy success and automatic status.
It's the promise of patriarchy that has "been stolen from us". And it's the restoration of patriarchy these men are clamoring for. Men want their privilege back and the Left can accommodate them for the low low price of jettisoning feminist values from the movement.
This is really the most Democrat bullshit ever. Left politics is getting more support than ever, but we're going to get obsessed with pleasing the groups that hate and oppose us instead of championing the issues of those who support us.
My idea, as dumb and probably ineffective as it is, would be one of the tools I hate ( AI ) to start a mass disinformation campaign that claims all the people like Joe Rogan or any of these other bad apples are weaklings that sexually prey on little kids. That, alongside any other way to make them look weak
If they play dirty, I see no reason not to do the same.