The New York Times ran a fawning profile of Hasan Piker yesterday, portraying the millionaire Left-wing Twitch streamer as a sort of muscular antidote to the crisis of masculinity which helped propel Donald Trump back to the White House. With his impressive physique, casual approach to gender expression, and seemingly effortless ability to discuss everything from video games to socialism, Piker appears custom-engineered to draw young men back to progressive politics. The NYT piece describes him as the “Joe Rogan of the Left” — a label which speaks volumes about the party’s desperation to recapture the flagging interest of male voters.

This characterisation raises an obvious question: if the Democrats have their own progressive version of Rogan waiting in the wings, then why did they bomb so badly with men in the 2024 election, in which Trump drew 55% of male votes?

The Democrats’ attempt to elevate Piker is doomed precisely because they’re thinking about this all wrong. Rogan isn’t powerful because he’s a conservative media personality — in fact, he’s anything but. In 2022, he pushed back against claims that he was a Republican, describing himself as a “bleeding-heart liberal” on issues including same-sex marriage. What makes Rogan notable is that he didn’t set out to be a political figure at all: he just followed his genuine interests in martial arts, comedy, and psychedelics, bringing along an audience that trusted him precisely because he wasn’t trying to convert them to anything.

Piker, for all his charm, is too explicitly partisan and ideological to fill a heterodox role like Rogan’s. Having gained prominence on The Young Turks, a progressive YouTube show founded by his uncle Cenk Uygur, Piker delivers Generation-Z-inflected democratic socialist perspectives during his daily eight-hour streams. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s qualitatively different from Rogan’s approach of exploring disparate ideas through lengthy, free-ranging conversations with guests from across the political spectrum.

When Trump appeared on Rogan’s podcast shortly before November’s election, it represented the culmination of a deliberate Republican strategy. This was, according to CBS, about the “hypermasculine tone that has defined much of his 2024 White House bid”, targeting podcasts followed by young male voters. The Harris campaign, meanwhile, never managed to secure a Rogan interview despite rumours of negotiations, a missed opportunity symbolic of a broader failure to connect with the podcaster’s audience.

This trend can be better understood by going back nearly a decade, to the excitement which swirled in the wake of Bernie Sanders’s failed but highly significant 2016 run for the Democratic nomination. At that point, the “dirtbag Leftist” podcast collective Chapo Trap House seemed poised to become a progressive counterweight to figures like Rogan, with a more decidedly male appeal than other anti-conservative media.

Yet Chapo, despite its popularity and influence, never transcended its niche audience the way Rogan did — it was a political show from the outset and the hosts, who were at a minimum ambivalent toward the Democratic mainstream and now appear to be openly hostile, were doing more than just noticing things and asking questions, as Rogan does. They became a fixture of the subscription-funded firmament, pulling in significant sums that Piker would later eclipse, but mainstream recognition proved more elusive.

The NYT profile of Piker unwittingly doubled down on this misunderstanding in the same way that profiles of Chapo did, portraying him as a secret weapon for the Left — a gym-bro socialist conversant with young Millennial and Gen Z audiences. But this approach reduces masculinity to aesthetic signifiers rather than acknowledging the deeper currents of male bonding, risk-taking, and physical challenge that figures like Rogan — a longtime practitioner of martial arts — embody naturally.

After Trump’s victory, Piker himself acknowledged the Left’s permanent Rogan problem, remarking: “You can’t podcast your way out of this problem.” He criticised Democrats for failing to address economic anxieties, arguing that most Americans “just want to stop the hurt”. This goes some way in identifying the problem: rather than sourcing an ersatz Rogan, Democrats should recognise that the gender gap in voting patterns reflects deeper social shifts.

Bernie Sanders’s two primary runs drew millions of disaffected young voters into the party. Perhaps, therefore, its best hope for future success lies in leaning into a younger, female version of him — New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has distanced herself from both gender ideology and the Democratic Socialists of America. For the party of American women, she may be a safer bet than an inorganic masculine role model.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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