Why the Left has no luck with men Trump seduced the #MeToo generation

Imagine an 18-year-old voter filling out his ballot for the first time. Looking back over his childhood and adolescence, this young man would feel his cohort are far from oppressors. Instead, they are drowning in problems.

He would have reached adolescence as the #MeToo movement took hold globally. The legitimate castigation of high-profile sexual abusers would rapidly devolve into widespread call-out culture, in which boys and young men were suspected of perpetuating the patriarchy and rape culture. The ordinary clumsiness of youthful love and teenage romantic inquiry was transformed, overnight, into behaviours that were liable for disciplinary action from school administrators.

The start of high school coincided with liberal bureaucrats locking schools down during the pandemic. Left with no other choices, the youth languished at home with online classes and virtual socialising that amounted to little more than doom scrolling. Last year, a study found that two-thirds of young men believed “no one really knows me” and one in three young men had spent no time with anyone outside their household in the prior week. Surveys show that the number of young men who say they lack a single close friend has soared fivefold since 1990.

As college approached, the women touted as the victims of society did not seem to be doing so poorly. The gap between college enrolment, which had been building for decades, exploded — 3.1 million more American women entered higher education than men by 2021. It’s not even just a yawning education disparity gap. In many American cities, young women are galloping ahead of men in terms of income.

And new vices seem to prey particularly among this crowd. The recent legalisation of marijuana and online sports betting in many states has fuelled a skyrocketing rate of young men addicted to high potency pot and app-based gambling. Other more traditional compulsive habits, such as video games and pornography, similarly afflict young men far more than women.

Wasted time and lost savings, compounded by a profoundly lonely existence, can also give way to deaths of despair. The young male suicide rate has tripled since 2000, according to a new study published this week. In some communities, the magnetic pull of nihilistic violence and gang crime has a particular allure.

In previous generations, young men yearning for transgressive content and open expression had plenty of safe options. There were endless sources of edgy magazines like VICE, or raunchy late-night comics poking fun at the double-standards and absurdities around us. That changed in less than a decade. VICE transformed into a liberal clickbait farm and then bankrupted itself as internal accusations of bigotry tore it apart, while comedians were cancelled over “problematic” jokes.

The search for verboten ideas and thoughtcrime discussions has shifted almost entirely to places like Joe Rogan’s podcast. It is now among the most popular broadcasts of any type in the country. With over 11 million weekly listeners, the show is where young men go if they want to hear critical discussions with independent-minded thinkers.

Not long ago, Rogan’s show was embraced by outsiders of all types. Having previously hosted Bernie Sanders for a thoughtful discussion about political corruption, Rogan soon after endorsed the socialist’s 2020 bid for the presidency.

But the popularity of Rogan’s show angered the Left-leaning cultural order, which pushed to have him removed from Spotify and YouTube. Democratic politicians were warned to not appear over false claims that Rogan harboured racist views.

In this light, Kamala Harris’s refusal to appear on the show in the waning weeks of the campaign was more than a mere tactical mistake. It was an implicit endorsement of the cancellation campaign waged against Rogan — a dogwhistle for young men primed in the cancel culture wars.

And Harris’s rise may have reminded young men that they now compete in a world which at times seems stacked against them. As a presidential candidate in 2020, she received zero delegates, yet became Joe Biden’s running mate. And this year, she faced no competition for the nomination. Democratic powerbrokers, backed by billionaires and much of the party elite, simply coronated her.

On the other hand, Trump, for all his swaggering bravado, humbled himself with intimate, highly emotional appearances on podcasts favoured by young men — for example speaking with the comedian Theo Von about his brother’s struggles with addiction and depression before his suicide.

The Trump campaign, for what’s it worth, carefully cultivated the resentment brewing in this generation, keenly aware of the culture wars and its impact. Its closing television advertisement depicted an America silenced by false accusations of hate speech and humiliated into labelling its values as shameful. “Our patriotism was called toxic,” the narrator intoned. “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.”

In many respects, young men have faced down a liberal cultural order that has reduced them to objects of scorn. For a majority of young male voters, the choice to send a message back was clear. Trump is perfectly suited as an avatar of defiance on the campaign trail.

Yet a more positive, policy-based agenda to shore up the material interests of young men may be more elusive. There are suggestions to reform Title IX, the civil rights code that has been widely accused of expelling men accused of sexual misconduct from college campuses without any semblance of due process. Any broad improvement in the economy can lift the economic prospects of young men. J.D. Vance, in particular, has called for the continued deployment of Biden-era spending programmes on chip factories and electric vehicle plants, albeit with stripping gender and race-based mandates embedded into the funding.

That may not be enough to soothe the souls of young men victimised by a pervasive media culture and academic ideology primed to see them as the enemy. A more fundamental change may require reform instead from the liberal coalition groups that make up the Democratic Party. The same activist class and foundation-funded world that decided to scapegoat men in the first place, now reeling from their electoral loss, must reassess the excesses of gender and racial identity politics.

How to champion the interests of women without seeing identity as a zero sum game in which lifting one group up must come at the expense of the other? How to extend empathy to both young men and women? If the 2024 election results are to signal a permanent realignment, such questions can’t simply be swept away.

---

Lee Fang is an investigative journalist and Contributing Editor at UnHerd. Read his Substack here.

lhfang