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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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