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And are you certain that young men will be turned off by that message?
In my experience a lot of young men would actually like to get married, and recognition that excessive porn use or video games are actively emasculating them is pretty common.
They rely on cheap dopamine fixes and are stuck in perpetual adolescence because of structural problems in the economy and the education system, which republicans are the only party actually trying to address.
It’s a key psychological difference between young men & women; addressing these issues are more likely to actually feel supportive & empowering rather than making them feel “under attack”.
Talking to you young men like defective young women is how the Democratic Party got in this mess to begin with.
FWIW, my comment wasn't intended to comment on the actual issue. I just wanted to point out that the DND topic was the least salient point raised by @AlexanderTurok, and that his remark on the othe other points still being relevant on the Motte had merit otherwise. A meta-comment, if you will. I don't know what discourse looks like inside the "Republican Coalition".
Now to comment on the issue itself.
Porn, vidya and DnD are all forms of escapism, and in my view escapism is clearly associated with the "weak men" phase of cyclical history and with the "wireheading ourselves to death" end of linear history. Maybe small doses of escapism can be used for good, but I reckon that most people will be compelled to describe as adequate whichever dose they currently allow for their addiction, going from "playing vidya for an hour a day helps me relax" to "of course I spend all my waking hours playing games, don't you know I'm disabled and thus can't be expected to do anything else, and also playing games is good for you here I cherry-picked a study for you, and also I'm an up-and-coming semi-professional gaming content creator (4 subscribers, one patreon patron who is his mom)". The justifications will scale to the addiction. Porn addicts will blame the feminists or structural androphobia or will just fling themselves off a figurative cliff of self-pity. So at least DnD is a social activity, right? No. If all that a social activity accomplishes is encysting you and a bunch of like-minded degenerates in a bubble of hedonism, then DnD is no better than being a striped-stockinged furry discord moderator on a vidya modding server.
And while we're bashing young (and not so young) men's bad habits, let's not let young (and not so young) women get off unscathed. There are also numerous technologically-enabled anti-social addictions that women dearly love. Infinitely scrolling web content. Social media. Pretending to be an "influencer" but actually just producing content nobody needs. Compulsive online shopping. Eating sweets until they grow so fat they dread leaving the house lest they be rightfully judged. Feeding their neuroticism with ever-new diagnoses and imaginary dangers. While we tell young men to cut the cooming and gaming, man up, make something of yourselves, flourish in actual society! we should also be telling young women to put the phone down, clean up the mess they've made of the house, actually pay undivided attention to the baby for once and stop stuffing their faces with sugary crap. Women can be degenerates entirely without onlyfans pages.
Having this diatribe out on the page, let's get back to your question.
Depends on how far down the rabbit hole they are.
The ones who can't muster the strength to pull themselves far enough out of their hedonism hole to even see the "real" world, the ones who have bought into their own justifications and rationalizations of their degenerate behavior, will probably react defensively to the message that actually, their behavior is bad, will feel "under attack" as you put it. But having those people on your side is bad optics anyways; they're nothing but sad sacks who happen to have a vote. A vote they will certainly use for whichever party promises more gibs for the unproductive - so why bother worrying about what message reaches them?
The more casual hedonists who still interact with society at large, who can hold down a job and can credibly claim that they have their addictions under control, those might be receptive to the message. But what will they do with it? I suppose these are the target audience, and the ones that might appreciate support and empowerment in their daily struggle to balance their addictions and their more pro-social activities.
Young men who do not spend every evening in pursuit of escapism, who aren't at risk, might still appreciate the message as validation.
But really now, for long-term political implications I think that unless you either
the wireheading-ourselves-to-death future is pretty much unavoidable. As technology improves, its ability to put claws into our brains and promote our worst instincts grows faster than its ability to help us get ourselves under control. The last 100 years of rapid economic growth and unceasing social upheaval have seen too much happen in too short a span of time for societies and cultures to learn how to deal with these new situations in sustainable and productive ways. An enormous amount of wealth that keeps most people afloat regardless of their bad habits, public welfare to sustain even the worst wireheads, and multiple generations of atomization and globalization to ensure that people are increasingly left to their own devices with their horizon limited to their personal pleasure, and technology ever evolving to make addictions go harder and faster...well where can it go?
lol i dunno
Also, I play too much vidya lately. Yeah I'm tired in the evenings and I have a cold and I just want to switch off and relax so that I'll be sufficiently re-charged for the next day, but if I take a serious look at myself I have to admit that I could just as well cut this relaxation phase in half and just go to bed earlier, get up earlier, and do something useful in the morning instead. Ask me tomorrow whether I actually did that.
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How do you get women (e.g. an aunt) to address structural issues like TikTok dependency?
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Yes, and they too would be alienated by the tradcon message that puts 100% of the blame for the decline in marriage on men.
The unemployment rate is close to zero.
"100%" is doing a lot of work there. I see a lot of "Women often suck, but you can only work on yourself, so fix that first", and it seems like it's resonating fairly well. There's a reason Peterson blew up with "Clean your room". "Get good" is a message young men are primed to be ready for.
That's good advice for individual men, but it's also a poor response to criticism of systemic issues associated with a promoted lifestyle. If Republicans want men to buy the house, they need to be willing to come up solutions to poor inspection results.
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Where are you getting this? I’ve seen zero conservatives squarely blaming men for not getting married.
Low employment rate by itself doesn’t actually achieve much in terms of upward economic mobility for working class young men, which I do believe has a serious effect on family formation.
For that you need to end the wage stagnation / decline as it relates to the biggest expenses for young people dating, forming relationships and attempting to start a family; housing costs.
How much do you hand around old school church-going (Protestant) conservatives — typically age 50+ — IRL? Because that's the main place I've seen it. Also preacher blogs. (And some younger religious conservatives blogging from the Eastern European or Latin American country they moved to.)
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Unfortunately Republicans have no solution to the problem of marriage. Neither party does, because the Overton Window only contains solutions that don't work.
Agreed, although the old adage comes to mind; “When you’re in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.”
Fixing or at least freezing the decline of the economy for young men without advanced education is the “stop digging” part by at least making the economic landscape not maximally hostile to family formation.
If you’re able to get housing costs to stop rising or even fall, do the same with the asset bubble, and put upward pressure on the lowest quintile or two of wages by creating a tight labor market, and you’re in for a good start.
Deportations, crackdowns on illegal immigration, a robust industrial policy, Reindustrialization, tariffs on China, checking the power of the academy, renegotiating trade deals, all this gestures in the direction of not celebrating open hostility to young working class men.
I live in a deep blue state and I can tell you personally that the accumulated effects of standard deep blue policy preferences on my life has decreased the amount of children I will have had in my life by at least one. And I’m one of the lucky ones; intelligent, healthy, strong, no criminal record, no significant addictions, came from an intact family.
"Family formation" is not an answer to the question of "what do men get out of this". Under present conditions, men are not offered an ownership stake in the families that they form. They are at most leased a family on a month-to-month basis conditional on the wife being kept happy. Republicans have indicated little capital of any kind earmarked for changing this.
I will give credit to Republicans for offering the first non-token resistance against discrimination toward my kind of human being that I've witnessed in my lifetime—and for that they've earned my vote. But if they want further buy-in to the lifestyle, they will need to offer more.
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Do the Republicans have a credible plan for that? I haven't seen one. (No, tariffs aren't going to do that)
The good news is housing costs are set to turn around for demographic reasons. The Silents and older boomers are already dying.
Creating a tight labor market drives up inflation and erases the gains.
No one has a credible plan for that. Because the solution to the problem of 'We need to make young men rich and successful so they can have families and children' is a multi-facet plan that needed to be implemented 20 years ago, not today.
Young men have never been, by the standards of the society in which they live, ‘rich and successful’ those fifties families just married poor.
OK, Boomer.
And if you're not willing to listen to roughly 2 minutes of said video, it basically disproves everything what you're stating. Sorry, no one's buying your entire 'everything was worse in the past' claim any longer.
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You've fallen into a pattern of thinking that prevents solutions. "We need to make young men rich and successful" before they can have families is not really a viable plan. It will always take time to become rich and successful, at least in relative terms; setting up a system where men are most successful in their early 20s seems unlikely (and even if it could happen, would put a crimp in family formation)
US TFR (and teenage pregnancy, as a related metric) hit its highest post-industrial point under that exact system; it's just that to institute such a system you just need to explode half of Europe.
You don't make yourself rich by making other people poor.
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Young people in the fifties married poor and then became successful. They did not marry young because they were successful young.
Sure they did/were. A man in the '50s was wildly successful compared to the older cohort of men, and that success was bestowed just for showing up.
So they started their lives very early: a huge luxury. As the old get disproportionately more successful compared to the young, the average age young men get married increases. (This is part of a feedback mechanism that naturally depresses TFR when a society is overpopulated, though naturally that lags reality a bit.)
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When I feel my radicalism softening, someone always comes in to remind me that winning World War III is more achievable than giving men a birthright buy-in to their own societies.
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I do not think men of the WWII generation (the parents of the Boomers) were most successful in their early 20s. That is, they did not decline in success as they became older.
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The somehow both feminist and red pill take is an important element of this was that independent female status-seeking was much more constrained so the benefits of half of Europe being exploded flowed disproportionately to men.
It seems to me that feminists and red-pillers agree on most ground facts, e.g., men work longer hours and make more money. They simply disagree as to whether the facts are a bad or a good thing.
So no surprise that they should be in agreement about the facts on this topic.
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