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Notes -
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democrats-want-reach-young-male-voters-how-get-them-is-up-debate-2025-10-06/
Reports like these have been an almost weekly occurrence all year. To state the obvious that none of these articles include: The Democratic Party and liberals engage in bulverism and bulverism alienates people. But is the problem purely liberals alienating young men or are conservatives also successfully courting them?
The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”
It’s easy to get bogged-down in policy minutia here. Normies don’t care about that stuff, even if they say they do. Democrats lose because they are lame. Voting for Trump is fun. It’s thrilling. It feels like raiding a WOW dungeon with 77 million of your best buds. Voting Democrat feels like going to church, except you know that God isn’t real.
There is no reason to think that this is a permanent or even semipermanent phenomenon. All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.
Somehow this post feels nearly maximally uncharitable to both parties and young men. Have Democrats become too conformist to be cool? I suppose. Are Republicans a party with an excess of unconstrained young male energy? I suppose. Do young men need an outlet for their energy? Yes.
But its not like the Democrats stumbled into being "lame" (your word). It was part of a calculated electoral strategy that prioritized other things, and necessarily excluded male interests, particularly those of noncriminal working males. That left the GOP with an opening that they seized on and since libertarianism has always been unpopular with voters since the franchise was expanded beyond a few landowning men in New England, discarding that in favor of a little paternalism that sounds more masculine was a winning message.
They aren’t just conformists, in many cases they’re the old church ladies telling you anything you find fun is somehow wrong. You can’t enjoy foreign food, clothing, or music. You can’t like your own either, you can’t like traditionally masculine things, or traditional things in general. It’s just a narrow rather boring and uninteresting slice of things that democrats think are okay to like unironically.
Democrats don't want people to enjoy foreign food? Any time I go to DC all I get is swamped with claims that the locals (all Dems) know the best Ethiopian place in the world (of course all these places inevitably suck because they pick them based on it being a unique choice rather than good).
No no.
There is something I think that is adjacent to what you are talking about which is cultural appropriation, which is frowned upon. But that is basically me, a white guy, starting an Ethiopian food restaurant that is actually good and making profits from it. That is what would be frowned upon.
Calling them old church ladies is pretty unkind to old church ladies. My grandma is an old church lady. She frowns upon premarital sex and excessive drinking. I have found no real evidence that either of those activities are good in the long term. A progressive scold, from my perspective, is a sort of double negative. They frown upon scorning bad things, but rarely have strong opinions on what is actually good. An example is that they might be fit themselves, but are not open to criticizing fat people for being fat. Or they don't steal from retail establishments, but think criminal prosecution of retail theft is wrong.
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