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

Young men of the MAGA movement (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Young men of the MAGA movement (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)


November 9, 2024   4 mins

The days when most young voters, whether male or female, would reliably vote Democrat are over. Among the axiomatic election patterns smashed by Donald Trump, young men have swung to the Republicans by nearly 30%.

Cue the scorn. The Left-leaning press has derided the shift as merely the rise of “toxic masculinity” and the hatred of women’s rights. The New York Times described something even more sinister, calling it creeping “hegemonic masculinity”.

This reflexive contempt may unintentionally provide an explanation for the reversal. Many young men believe they live in a liberal-leaning society that actively despises them, treating them with disdain rather than empathy as their struggles have mounted.

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.”

“The Trump campaign carefully cultivated the resentment brewing in this generation.”

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.

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Bernard Brothman
Bernard Brothman
26 days ago

The voting booth or mail in ballot was one place young men could express their views, have them heard and not have to worry about being pulled aside by their (typically woman run) HR department for saying the wrong thing (they often did not even know it was wrong).

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
27 days ago

“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?”
Given there are two sexes its pretty much axiomatic that advancing the interests of one must put the other at a disadvantage. Thats the problem. You can’t make quotas for women (whether in employment or education or anything) without meaning that some men somewhere will then lose out on opportunities they were equally qualified for but didn’t get because of their sex. Once you enter the ‘advancing the interests of X’ game, you are are de facto in the ‘disadvantaging Y’ game as well.

Which is why the game should be ‘Everyone competes on their own personal merit, not what they have between their legs’.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
27 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

The bigger problem is that they are disadvantaging a group Y who we still rely upon to do all the difficult non office jobs that X won’t touch, but are critical for the economy and for society to function – construction, driving trucks, delivery, waste, energy etc etc.

For instance, in the military, all you have after decades of “progressive” and “feminism” is a) a number of ships being sunk in peacetime across various Western navies thanks to “diversity” and b) as UK data shows, increasing shortfall in military recruitment as it turns out working class white lads don’t feel like dying for a society that despises them.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
27 days ago

Who knew that constantly trashing men would push them away.

Mark Phillips
Mark Phillips
28 days ago

Good article, whatever the resident imbecile says.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
28 days ago

Simple, view them as individuals and allow them to make their decisions. And each decision will allow them to make better for the future. Good and bad.

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
28 days ago

Generally a good article but it fell into a nasty habit which belied the soberness of the rest of the article with this sentance: “The Trump campaign carefully cultivated the resentment brewing in this generation.”. Perhaps this could have been rephrased to “empathised with the resentment…”. The resentment (quiet as it had been) was obviously growing despite leftist claims that young men agreed with feminism, LGBT++++ rights, equity rather than equality etc. When even women are rejecting “the agenda” it should make lefties reconsider their positions.
Still, mustn’t let one phrase spoil an otherwise thoughtful piece. More please Unherd.

Kristoffer Laurson
Kristoffer Laurson
27 days ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

Agreed, interestingly I picked up on the same phrase, which gave away that Trumps campaign wasn’t legitimate, which wasn’t what the article was otherwise about.

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
27 days ago

Unherd have taken this article off the main page for the past few hours. Might be a mistake on their part but there is an article from earlier in the week in its place.

William Shaw
William Shaw
27 days ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

If they ever organise, 18 year old men with nothing to lose who have been told by society they are toxic and unnecessary are a civilisation destroying force. Women beware if the anger and resentment of disenfranchised young men is ever unleashed.

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
27 days ago
Reply to  William Shaw

Fortunately, I don’t think this lonely, over-medicated, feminised, porn/video game addicted lot could galvinise or gather in great enough numbers to “unleash” on anything beyond their parents’ front yard.

Laurence Siegel
Laurence Siegel
12 days ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

A sufficiently alienated and large enough group of young men without partners can cause a lot of trouble. Historically they’ve started wars or a crime wave, but every time is different and I don’t know what’s coming.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
27 days ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

This could be because this article is one of a number that is trolling me and my shadow banned Substack. They often lower their standards to get at me, which is embarrassing and disappointing.
I wrote an article about how feminism has reacted since 2016, basically not by reassessing feminism and policy, but by focusing on personality and identity, by making Trump’s personality the symbol of a collective personality, a collective diagnosed with toxic masculinity. I ended it by saying they have demonized half the demos.
So this article has inverted my argument and made the men sound pathetic. The resentment line targets me as a good Nietzschean, because I was once a Nietzsche scholar (the lefty kind).
I always use their trolling to plug my Substack, so here it is:
The Figure of Feminism Since 2016 – interpocula
Or check out my about page to find out why so many people do not want my story to spread:
About – interpocula

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
22 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Why have the like tallies been changed from all these posts, including this one above, that now has no likes whatsoever?

Thomas Wagner
Thomas Wagner
16 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

That sort of thing seems to happen randomly. I’ve liked something, gone away and come back, and now it has no likes — but I get the little red flag if I try to like it.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
25 days ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

Lee Fang has always been open about his political leanings, but still manages to be as objective as possible. Very happy to see his contributions to UnHerd.

Kathryn Hennessy
Kathryn Hennessy
27 days ago

Great article Lee. I only have to look at the young men sprawled around the streets of lower Manhattan to see that something has gone terribly wrong.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
27 days ago

The framing of the issue is wrong. It is not men voting Republican that is the problem it is women voting Democrat

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
27 days ago

Women who don’t care about illegal immigrants, economy, free speech, the warmongering by the “establishment”….

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
26 days ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

But they love virtue signalling

stacy kaditus
stacy kaditus
27 days ago

.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
27 days ago
Reply to  stacy kaditus

It’s also important for women to not parrot men hating narrative.

It takes two sides to make a relationship.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
27 days ago
Reply to  stacy kaditus

The women who “love men” seem to be awfully nonchalant about male suicide and homeless rates, anti male quotas in jobs, etc. And their burning desire for equality seems to vanish where men are discriminated against – family courts, military drafts, legal disparities in domestic violence, universities.

“If you are a man who believes women dont love men in general and you arent loved by at least one woman, the work is on you to figure out why.”
It is amusing how women have no agency or accountability when it’s their own lives, but vociferously demand it if men.
From the pov of a young man today, with the insanely biased legal and divorce system and the general craziness of so many women, I suspect they are just grateful if they aren’t being “loved by at least one woman”….

John Croteau
John Croteau
26 days ago
Reply to  stacy kaditus

No, women love men as long as they don’t vote for Trump. Unfortunately, most institutions in the U.S. have been feminized with the Woke Mind Virus. Even male educators, media personalities, and politicians are feminine (by heterosexual male standards). Not only do they lack empathy for young men, they actively disdain them.
Sure, some young men are suffering from mental health issues as a result. The majority have turned Conservative, voted for Trump, and are having the time of their lives. They have their pick of the minority of young women who have escaped the echo chamber. Tinder makes that efficient.
The remaining cat ladies today are screaming and crying in their social media posts, even more pathetic than guys locked in their parents’ basement playing video games. Early indications are that they’re doubling down on the insanity.
If happiness is any indicator, I’d say men are the winners in this day and age. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

Stephen Lawrence
Stephen Lawrence
26 days ago
Reply to  stacy kaditus

…and don’t forget that there are some mothers and sisters amongst these women. I wonder what the conversations between them and their sons/brothers are like? Both sides have to engage, and for “free speech” it isn’t necessary only to have a platform – you have to speak directly to others, and listen to their reply. And in formal, debating terms, you would be judged by the audience who would then expres how/if they had been persuaded by your arguments.

Jo Brad
Jo Brad
25 days ago
Reply to  stacy kaditus

Women might stop trying to have everything every way and only on their terms

John Lamble
John Lamble
26 days ago

I don’t think rethinking is in the Democrats’ genes any more than it is in European socialists’. Rather doubling down on failed policies has been the invariable response to electoral failure. This stems from their permanent sense that they are the virtuous ones so that whatever they do has virtue. They try to cultivate guilt in those who would naturally disagree with them but eventually that breeds more and more resentment. The West is turning away slowly from ‘woke’ generally but is it going to happen fast enough for it to save itself? Probably not.

Andrew Holmes
Andrew Holmes
26 days ago

Mr Fang missed the fashionable practice of drugging boy behavior into submission by diagnosing it as hyperactivity. I suspect that for each one drugged, many others got the clear message that their normal inclinations were inferior and bad.

H W
H W
26 days ago

The young men and boys need men older than them to be involved in their lives and to know them and care about them and hold them accountable to higher standards than what is typical at school and elsewhere. So guys please step up to the plate, we need you!

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
28 days ago

This article is almost as embarrassingly stupid as the morons who think a fat, orange clown is somehow a symbol of masculinity.
I have no sympathy for these entitled brats.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
28 days ago

Hey Champagne – we meet again! Still not found that real hobby? Don’t worry. It’ll turn up sometime. I’m leaving Unherd in a couple of weeks because my subscription is ending and I’ll gift you with a free tip, in parting; based on your summer prediction that Harris would win in a landslide – don’t take up betting. Farewell and good luck.  

Mark Rinkel
Mark Rinkel
26 days ago

Thanks for reminding us how dangerous you are to us.