Democrats have a man problem, and it’s not the one you may think. While yes it’s true that we lose male voters by significant margins, the problem I’m referring to relates to how we talk about men and masculinity in general. On the left, this discourse has been largely dominated by discussions of toxic masculinity, while contributing very little to what models of healthy masculinity might look like.
This in turn has left a dangerous void – as our sons, brothers, and friends cast around for an understanding of their role as boys and men in society, our silence on the left has ceded ownership of male identity to the very toxicity we so often decry. From the so-called manosphere to “men’s rights activists” to those calling for a return to the pre-suffragette era, boys and young men are increasingly internalizing this identity by listening to far right voices.
Nick Fuentes is a good case in point. UNASB members recently listened to a 25 minute video of him ostensibly promoting his vision of “traditional marriage” (traditional in the sense of very conservative Catholicism). In reality, however, it was a platform for Fuentes to normalize the rage that he felt toward women for simply having an opinion and refusing to embrace a thoroughly subservient role in marriage. And he does it all while representing his position as what a “real man” should think.
And I hate to break it to you, but Nick Fuentes is hardly the most extreme voice in this space. In the spring of 2018, a deeply disturbed young man drove a van around Toronto, trying to kill as many people as possible. A New York Times article described him as “a socially troubled computer studies graduate who posted a hostile message toward women on Facebook moments before his deadly rampage.” In response, Jordan Peterson, one of today’s leading “men’s rights” activists, said of this “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him. The cure for that is enforced monogamy.”
In the face of this misogynist onslaught, the left has remained largely silent on the role of men or healthy masculinity in society. We talk about gender being a social construct, or gender assigned at birth, or the need to get beyond the gender binary. Yet these messages have fallen flat with large majorities of young men, as seen by the fact that Gen Z men saw a larger rightward shift than most other demographic groups in the 2024 election.
The stakes are far too high for us to continue turning a blind eye to this large and growing problem – and not just for our electoral chances but for the long term health of our society writ large. So in the spirit of the well-known maxim that “critique without contribution is just noise,” we here at UNASB have some thoughts, based on our experience listening to this right wing content, on how to do just that:
Silence is deadly: We have ceded far too many issues to the right simply by virtue of remaining silent on them. Whether public safety, patriotism, religion, and yes, masculinity, our silence has allowed them to fashion these important concepts in their own image, and then reflect their distorted views to the public as if that was the standard, according to the Merriam-Webster definition. So the first step is to just start engaging with the discourse around masculinity in a much more robust way.
Don’t be afraid of difficult conversations: The left’s commitment to intellectual rigor can sometimes lead to paralysis when we don’t necessarily have the complete or perfect answer to a problem. We can sometimes be so scared of offering partially formed or incomplete ideas that we don’t say anything at all. We need to have the courage to engage with challenging concepts, if for no other reason that such challenges almost always tend to deepen and refine our own understanding of the topic, even if we’re unpersuaded by the other side (or fail to persuade them).
Get out of the university faculty lounge: The opposite problem we often see coming from the left is to bring a highly theoretical, academic framework to a topic that seems pretty simple and straightforward to most people. To make matters worse, we often do it in such a way that is so inaccessible that it’s less often the case that people disagree with us and more often that they just have no idea what the hell we’re talking about. We can simplify our language without being simplistic in our analysis. In other words, we need to start talking like normal people.
Win the common sense war: This is closely related to the above point, but there are a number of positions on important issues coming from the left that are just beyond the boundaries of common sense for normal people. We on the left often go out of the way to make sure that we include the edge cases that we largely disregard conventional wisdoms that remain broadly applicable. For example, in our laudable pursuit of securing fully equal rights for trans people, we try to persuade people that there is no difference between boys and girls. Now, there is no doubt that the science of gender is highly complex, but when we ground ourselves in a position that is so far beyond the lived experience of the vast majority of people, we have lost the argument before we’ve even started. It is absolutely essential that we find a way to achieve the righteous goals that we’re pursuing that are rooted in common sense, not an ivory tower (or activist Twitter community).
Don’t be afraid to criticize BOTH sides: Perhaps there is no lesson that has come through more strongly in our viewing at UNASB than the power of being willing to criticize both sides, aka being willing to criticize your own side. There is an instant credibility you get by demonstrating you’re not just drinking the Kool Aid from your side.
There is a famous adage that politics is downstream of culture, and one of the most significant cultural stories right now is the sense of alienation and isolation that young men are facing. There is a very real cognitive dissonance in making the case that we need to tend more carefully to young men when our society is still largely dominated by patriarchy, but we ignore this important demographic at our peril.
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