The Lives of Men

One man in Georgia told us, “A lot of jobs that used to exist just don’t anymore. Manufacturing, that’s for a while been declining, but all sorts of customer service and white collar jobs are being outsourced, or they have a big push to just replace everything by AI. So there’s not a big pool of jobs available. And then the ones that are, the wages are either going down or they’re not keeping up with inflation.” 

When Fox News runs segments on “Trump’s Manly Tariffs,” they’re doing more than capitalizing on the hyper-masculine profile cultivated by the current president. They’re promising a vision of America that combines the best elements of the past—camaraderie on the factory floor and a living wage with the fulfillment of boyhood dreams of building robots. It’s a seductive, if dishonest, elixir. So much so that when Trump counsels that pain is inevitable on the pathway to this future, some are all in.

As Adrienne Massanari—the author of Gaming Democracy, a book about the relationship between the far right and gaming—explained recently, “These tariffs will be seen in the same way that people talk about purification of the body through weight lifting, through supplements. It’s just this temporary moment of pain, but you will come out greater in the end.” What’s a little more pain to the generation that has soldiered through school shootings and a global pandemic that robbed them of adolescence?

The right has invested in a media and information ecosystem that purports to help these young men make sense of their diminishing prospects. Long before it’s time to vote for any candidates, everywhere these young men are—in their gaming streams and their fitness videos—their confusion is actively being turned into grievance politics. When Donald Trump does a digital town hall with Adin Ross on the streaming platform Kick, or sits for a one-hour interview with Theo Vonn, the audiences have already been steeped in a MAGA view of the world. 

Democrats have ceded this ground unnecessarily. Across race and class, men under 30 are largely aligned with progressive policies: They want affordable housing and childcare, better wages, and dignity in the workplace. They’re mostly pro-choice and they care about climate change more than their older peers. Even where they have some tension with democratic policies—they are more bullish on crypto and think the education system is outdated—they want to help craft better options if invited to help. 

But liberals and democrats can’t win them over without competing for their attention. A recent study showed that the media asymmetry between the right and the left has reached epic proportions, with most of the right-wing investments going to new media and podcasts that dwarf viewership of legacy media. Investment, both financial and emotional, is critical to appeal to these young men. Meeting them in their spaces is step one, but it must be coupled with an authentic acknowledgement that these guys are worthy individuals whose problems are real. 

Liberal culture is rife with sins of commission and omission in relation to men, from the Democratic National Committee’s listing 16 subgroups on their priority list and omitting men, to failing to denounce extreme excesses of online male bashing. No wonder young men do not see themselves as part of a vision for our future, even if they would like to be.

Inclusion and outreach are necessary steps, but without leaders and movements that express the strength to get things done, such entreaties will almost certainly fall on deaf ears. Young men are aligned with voters who see Democrats as too weak to secure a brighter future. 

The compounding impact of falling fortunes and a failing democracy has given this generation a much higher tolerance for strongmen it perceives as effective, even if what they are most effective at is a wholesale destruction of a system it thinks has failed.

While almost all of the members of our focus groups expressed some concern about Trump’s excesses, and the president’s favorability is falling three months into his second term, one man summed it up like this: “I think young men, especially me, we like a warrior, someone who deals with a lot of problems and still gets through it. You saw how they tried shooting him, they tried to stop him in every conceivable human way, and he went through it all.”

Winning back young men doesn’t require backpedaling on a commitment to broad social progress. It doesn’t even really require much rejiggering of policy priorities. What it does require is a willingness to affirm their aspirations and challenges as equal to others, and envisioning and articulating an inclusive vision that escapes the trap of the zero-sum game that the Republicans have laid out.  

Some Democratic lawmakers have taken this challenge seriously and are getting a tremendous response as a result. Governor Wes Moore of Maryland addressed the crisis in his State of the State, promising “targeted solutions to uplift our men and boys.” Although his ideas are still at the drawing-board stage, just the acknowledgement was enough to earn him accolades.

Other leaders, like Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who signed an executive directive to state agencies to close the gender gap in higher education and skills-based learning, prove you don’t have to be a man to appeal to men. Democrats simply need to project strong leadership and emphasize policies that are already staples of their agenda. The number-one priority for young men? Affordable housing, so that they can build a life and start a family, a desire that currently feels out of reach to them. 

Price controls and decent wages are also important to these men, and they trend more strongly in the direction of supporting environmental policies than their older counterparts. But it’s not the core liberal agenda across the board for this crew. They generally view Democrats as too hostile to cryptocurrency and not as forward-thinking about AI or automation. Rather than resisting technological change, these men are looking to leaders who acknowledge that their futures will be filled with technology and want to be assured there’s a place for human dignity as well. 

None of this is rocket science. Democrats can win back this crucial cohort before it’s too late. But it’s going to require investment: taking their concerns seriously, and projecting enough strength to force real change, not defend the status quo. If they succeed at that, Jesse Watters and his Fox News crew will go from telling the jokes to being the butt of them.