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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?
Democrats are getting it wrong, mostly. It's not about policy or marketing (though the idea that they just need to hire more pro-Democratic TikTok influencers to shill for them reveals a deep and amusing disconnect). It's about the casual contempt they show for men.
For instance, AOC today, saying Miller is a short troll:
So, it's not quite that she's insulting him, which is fine. Trump does similar stuff all the time, although in a funnier way. The difference is the double standard. Say what you will about him, but Trump is equal opportunity: he'll nastily insult anyone he doesn't like. There are no sacred cows. But you will never see AOC calling a woman an obese smelly pig, or implying that a female opponent holds her positions because she needs a good dicking down. And, even if she did, Democratic and liberal antibodies would attack her in retaliation: awhile back when one Democrat called MTG a butch lesbian, there was a lot of pushback for transphobia.
It's not any one individual event, but a pervasive attitude that men and masculinity are worthy of contempt, while everyone else needs to be protected from being triggered. If you're trying to appeal to men, probably encouraging a norm of a free-for-all is better than one of an HR lady who polices everyone, but the worst of all places to be--and this is where Democrats find themselves--is saying that every identity needs to be protected, except for men, who are always fair game to identity-based attacks.
Ezra Klein has been making this point in his interviews recently although phrased more like "It doesn't matter what our policies are if people think we don't like them and I think we've been sending out the message that we don't like a lot of people". He seems to have been doing a lot of soul searching since the loss in 24.
I thought Klein had it mostly right there, and it reminds me of something Dean said on this site a while back, albeit about fictional characters. Do so-and-so feel like they want people like me in their lives? Not just tolerate me, not be civil or 'inclusive', but genuinely want people like me to be happy? Do they want me around?
It's a piece of advice that I would actually generalise to all people. Be the kind of person who is interested in other people. Be the kind of person who wants other people in his life. As this applies to gender, I'm reminded of Eneasz Brodski writing about the same - be the kind of man who genuinely likes women, and look for the kind of woman who genuinely likes men. That doesn't necessarily mean sexually or romantically (here I like Dean's examples of celibate or homosexual women who clearly care deeply about white men in their lives), but you need to like other people.
Obviously policy matters and this is not the one weird trick that will fix all the Democrats' problems, but insofar as attitude or culture can help, I would advise them to start by trying to like - to genuinely like and appreciate - the kind of people they want to vote for them. You cannot say, or even imply, "vote for me you pond scum". Start by training yourself to like them. It's possible. Openness and affection for people is something that can be practiced.
I think this is key. As a young libertarian raised on punk rock and anti-Iraq-War memes, I could have gone either way upon entering adulthood. The conservatives accepted me, and despite my godless libertinism, never once made me feel judged. Meanwhile the progressives expressed casual contempt of me at every opportunity. The people absolutely convinced I am condemned to eternal damnation were happy to welcome me and look for common ground, while the ones who prided themselves on tolerance and empathy openly fantasized about my death because of my opinion on Obamacare.
The Republicans really are terrible in a lot of ways. Trump is legit a narcissistic charlatan manifestly unfit for high office. But his party doesn't hate me. They don't attempt to shame or silence me when I disagree with them. Policy is almost irrelevant to my political leanings at this point. I'm just sick of people I thought were my friends calling me a fascist pig.
I'm not as positive about the right or as tribal as some, and I still hold back from identifying as conservative, but I would say that my experiences with online leftists and rightists in the late 2010s and early 2020s had two common themes.
The first is, as you say, the right was usually more accepting. There's that Hanania line - "the left looks for heretics, and right looks for converts" - and it is basically right. My experience of the time was that the left was looking for differences in order to exclude people from their coalition, and the right was looking for similarities in order to include people. If I disagreed with leftists on one issue, they badgered and hectored me, seeking conformity; if I disagreed with rightists on one issue, they'd probably call me an idiot and then laugh and say that we're still basically on the same team. The only one sort-of-exception to this was Trump. I generally ran into people who were happy to say, "okay, fine, you don't like him, we can still hang out and be friends", but at the time I was conscious of traditional conservatives (e.g. David French or Jonah Goldberg, Dispatch types) being intensely vilified, as far as I can tell only for being anti-Trump. But that one specific issue aside, they were more willing to accept diversity of thought. Notably they were fine if you were pro-choice or pro-gun-control or whatever and could work with you on other issues, whereas admitting to being pro-life or pro-gun-rights in a left-wing crowd was just asking for a bullying.
The second is that the right tended to be more honest and direct. This may be just as simple as having a more masculine communicative culture, but I remember being struck very strongly that, if people on the right disagreed with me, they told me that I was wrong and stupid, and we had it out fiercely in an argument, and then we went right back to being friends. We had the fight and then got on with our lives. On the left, there was much less direct aggression, but a lot more passive-aggression and shunning. It wasn't the stereotype of the blue-haired leftist screaming at me - it was more like the way that a stereotypical clique of popular girls shuns people? I felt like the way they handled disagreement was to go "ew" and then disgust and ostracism did the rest. The times we did have debates there was a lot more pre-emptive dismissal.
I don't mean that in general the right was wonderful and the left was terrible. I am stereotyping large crowds. The worst of the left were conformist bees angrily shunning anyone who doesn't fall into line, and the worst of the right were rage-obsessed idiots fed on a constant diet of grifting misrepresentations. What I did in the end, of course, was make friends with the people I liked most in both camps and spent my time with them, though to my great and lasting unhappiness, many of those people, though friends with me, find it impossible to tolerate each other. Even with close friends, though, I look out for certain kinds of failure mode? With people on the right the failure is "oh no, don't mention X, he'll go off on another rant". With people on the left, I can almost see the ideological blinders descend in real time, as the brain turns off and they go back to smug slogans. I'll spare you any examples. Suffice to say I do find, in a quite immediate sense, that the right's sin is anger or rage, and the left's sin is contempt or pride. The right's response to disagreement is to pick a fight. The left's response to disagreement is to pretend that the fight has already happened, you lost, and now all you need to do is fall into line. I find the latter much more annoying than the former.
So what you're saying is the (current) left is female coded and the right is male coded?
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There is a very large percentage of the Republican base who identify as Christian but don’t go to church or make any attempt to follow Christian morality- Christianity is something they’ll do when they’re old and have to worry about it soon.
These people will not judge you for pot, cohabitation, whatever.
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I don't think he's done any soul searching, he's done whatever is intended to get people like yourself to think he's done a soul searching.
This is the fellow who ran the Journo-List after all. You should require extensive and overwhelming evidence to convince you that he is not a malicious actor, he has not provided such evidence.
Instead, he has a shtick, which is talking in PBS voice, which makes him sound reasonable as he says unreasonable things. The most recent example I am aware of is his podcast episode entitled something like "Trump's Blue Scare". In said episode he scares his listeners into thinking Trump is going to use Charlie Kirk's death to fire half the federal work force for being Democrats, round a bunch of people into cages, etc. What happened after Ezra recorded that pod? Jimmy Kimell got back on air, and ICE facilities were attacked by sniper fire. Basically the opposite of what he predicted. He's completely disconnected from reality in a way that makes me suspect everything he says is simply an attempt to cynically convince suburbanites that the Democrats are worth voting for.
This seems likely to be correct - I'd certainly bet on it if it were possible to rule on it fairly. But it also raises the question, what would Klein need to do to convince people like you or me that he's done a soul searching?
I don't follow Klein enough to say definitively, but I'd say that something that explicitly disavows identity politics as having negative value both for humanity and for the Democrats, while explicitly praising enemies on the right such as Trump for helping to fight against it, in a way that shows that he believes that right-wing electoral gain is a worthy cost to pay for excising this cancer from the left-wing - even when some (or a lot) of the healthy cells around the cancer are excised - would probably meet the bar for me. I don't expect him to meet this bar.
However, I consider his cynical ploy to convince some people in the middle/right that he has done some soul searching on this to be a step in the right direction, instead of the deflection/rationalization game he and people like him have played wrt their more extreme ideological allies.
Just for the record, this is actually my personal position - though I'd actually go further. Yes, Trump destroying the flows of government money that propped up "left wing" activists might impact dems at the polling booth, but it is ultimately better for the left wing that all this propaganda is shut down. The left wing that USAID/NED/USGOV money has created and fed is choking out the birth of an actual authentic left political movement. Trump, to the extent that he is destroying the DNC and the infrastructure that keeps bloated slugs like Pelosi and Schumer well fed with donor/insider trading money, is doing actual left wing politics a service.
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I do think he's definitely a bell weather more than anything but a bell weather does show you which way the wind is blowing.
It's 'bellwether' and has nothing to do with the way the wind is blowing. The bellwether is the lead sheep of a flock ("wether" being the ovine equivalent of "steer"), so named because the shepherd attaches a bell to him.
neat
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I think the phrase he was looking for was "wether vein", the metaphor about how you can tell a sheep is getting ready to follow the flock when its heart starts pumping harder.
Weather Vane.
A weather vane points which way the wind blows. It moves to face the wind.
Crucially, the bellwether precedes the flock, while the weather vane follows the wind. Slight differences.
I think you're replying to a joke.
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As an unrelated aside, it's very interesting to see Klein and especially Yglesias struggle with '24. They both recognize there are real issues in the Democratic Party now, beyond bad marketing and the failure of the deplorable electorate not seeing its obvious superiority. But even they have to carefully avoid triggering those same antibodies I mentioned earlier. I think there's a reasonable chance Yglesias eventually steps on a mine and gets fully excommunicated.
That's already happened. If you go to his subreddit, it's full of people who do nothing but hate him, like Joe Rogan. I think Reddit is a pretty good barometer as to one's current bona fides in the Democrat party.
Why would Reddit be a good barometer?
As a self-admitted partisan, Reddit is a pretty accurate source for what the liberals are currently believing and narrativizing about, ever since Twitter went down. Bluesky is too crazy, Threads is barren, Facebook is full of boomers, Instagram and Tiktok too noisy. Anything else is too small to be relevant.
Reddit is the largest online collection of Democrat partisans online: it's something they're proud of. It didn't use to be that way but it is now firmly enemy territory.
Plausible, I guess.
But something can be wildly biased without being representative. Outside of the Squad, how many members of Congress really care about it?
This is a genuine question.
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The backlash being faced by Klien, Derek, Yglesias and Buttigieg is baffling. Everything they've said has been polite, non-accusatory and measured. Yet, they're being treated like Nazis by left social-media.
I don't have a read on how radicalized the younger democrats are. But, looking at reddit, bluesky or the youtube ...... they're being dogpiled.
Out of the loop: What beef have dems with Buttigieg?
Too gay but also not gay enough.
That's not entirely a joke but I think the current issue is some post-Kirk comments that weren't entirely mealymouthed and immediately walked back. Could be wrong though.
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He was literally a Notre Dame-adjacent mayor. /s
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I'm not sure how this is baffling given the behavior of the "progressive left" over the past 15 years. Responding polite, non-accusatory, and measured constructive criticism for the purpose of self-improvement from their less extreme allies as if they were Nazis has been standard operating procedure for about that long.
The surprising thing to me now is that Klein actually decided to meaningfully criticize them, given how hard he was supporting them until very recently, even while some of his peers like Yglesias had already started doing so years ago. The stuff around Klein and Weiss recently are the only signals I've seen that indicates that the failures of the progressive left to actually support progress is actually facing meaningful backlash.
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It doesn't seem baffling to me. The message from Klein, Thompson and Dunkleman is that an entire branch of left-wing progressivism ( the side whose instinct to devolve responsibility and attack concentrations of power like corporations as opposed to the equally progressive tendency to make them partners in regulation and social engineering) didn't just fail, it won and then failed and is costing Democrats.
Their general argument is that systems in place that, for example, allow left-wing advocacy groups to sue and stop nearly all infrastructure or home building, are bad. Obviously some people like those systems and consider them a triumph of leftism (cynically: since they know how to use them better than the people who don't have houses or aren't educated enough to use environmental protection law to their advantage)
It's a clear broadside against an entire set of Democratic anti-monopoly, anti-government, pro-lawsuit activists.
Finally, all wordcels have is how many people value what they say. Klein is the Drake of the Democratic party: a whole bunch of people believe "They" made him successful because he's a capitalist bootlicker because it's easier than admitting that people simply prefer him. There seems to be a clear element of professional envy here. If the Zephyr Teachouts of the world were actually indigent, they'd have an incentive to listen to a criticism of their policies. But they aren't so it's all status games. It's just rappers jumping on a more successful rapper in the hopes of getting their name out/taking their place.
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It's honestly bizarre to me how much Klein is hated - people here and on the right loathe him, and anyone vaguely left or progressive loathes him, and all he's doing is sitting in the middle politely saying that Trump is bad and maybe Democrats would do better if they were less crazy and built more stuff.
I suppose he's positioned himself somewhere that picks a fight with both the loudest tribe on the right and the loudest tribe on the left.
I hate him for being a blue-tribe brahmin who believes in the progressive shibboleths: the left hates him for not being maximally accelerationist revolutionary Che Guevara. The magnitude of dislike is not equal.
When he goes 'trans issues are not tactically wise for politics, we should get into power and then implement them', I think, 'oh, he's a liar.' They go, 'oh, he's a HERETIC!'
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Is this the same Klein who supported (and probably still supports) the Californian YMY / affirmative consent law? Because yeah, it doesn't seem so bizarre to me.
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Journo List and this would be where I'd start to understand the reaction from Reds.
I am not convinced that right-wingers responding to Klein are today are thinking about, or even necessarily aware of, a Vox column he wrote eleven years ago. I agree that the position in that column is, at best, completely daft, but I also don't think that column is likely to be motivating outside a small, highly atypical tribe of politics-obsessed weirdos. My guess is that @crushedoranges is more correct - it's not this or that column from over a decade ago, it's the way that Klein in general, in his politics and more importantly in his whole affect, symbolises a type of holier-than-thou policy wonk who calmly explains why you're wrong about everything, why your values suck, and why it all needs to be bulldozed.
That would make it very hard for them to take him seriously when he says, "Seriously, we do need to moderate and focus on practical outcomes that will benefit every American". They already think he's a liar.
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