I think progressives never thought about this because we banked on immigration and demographic change allowing us to win culturally and electorally but the issue is immigrants tend to be overwhelmingly male, that is how Trump won actually he won over a lot of Hispanic,Black,Asian and indigenous men who feel humiliated by a new culture, economy and world.
So what can we do rhetorically and policy wise to win more young men over ?
This is all from the perspective of a non-american from a country where thankfully we are still liberal at heart and only entertain some progressive ideas, instead of buying it wholesale, meaning the right has yet to completely cannibalise the government over the mistakes of the left.
You can want everyone to receive equal opportunity and dignity, but people are not equal and will not end in the same place once the race is over. You can’t demand equality of outcome and onboard the most competitive demographic, there is a reason if the stereotype of leftist men is passive wimps. This is completely compatible with prgressive ideas, but it’s incompatible with progressive brains, apparently.
The core idea of intersectionality is that each demographic has its own issues and they manifest differently if more demographics overlap in the same individual (e.g. sexism against white women vs sexism against black women exhibit different tropes and connotations).
This does not mean whoever has the least minoritary traits is the most acceptable target, that is some marxist “oppressor vs oppressed” horseshit and, while it was probably the intended idea, it is massively counterproductive and doesn’t have to be the actual application of the issue.
Men have issues that women don’t have, women have issues that men don’t have. As soon as your movement decides to prioritise one they have lost the other.
The reason this does not happen with race is that no movement in the US can realistically exist politically without white people simply by virtue of how huge the white slice of the demo pie is, and because this whole thing was started by highly educated, economically mobile, overwhelingly white, college grads who live in very specific coastal bubbles, hence the endemic hatred of farmers and factory workers, the actual working class of the US, as hicks and racists, and the lionisation of serving staff like baristas and waiters (the only working class most large city dwellers ever interact with).
It’s just a fucking L on its face isn’t it? “Yes come join the party that thinks men being in power is the problem” fat fucking chance lol.
And when they do join, the parodies write themselves.
I don’t care if you think it’s “just a name” (especially in light of what progs consistently do over “just a name” and “just a statue” and so on) it’s a massive optics L that shows all of the horseshit about microaggressions and non-confrontational language and whatnot are entirely performative.
You have the most obvious othering language in the core ideas of the movement and then complain about microaggressions? And you wonder why people don’t take you seriously?
And while we’re on that:
You can’t have a political movement that does not tolerate dissent and confrontation, or only tolerates it in one direction. See the implosion of the “Unfuck america tour” as a good example of this.
The whole point of politics is to create a critical mass of people who align on some goal to push for it, you don’t have to agree with them on every point, if you had enough people who agree with you, you would be already in the majority and would not need to participate in politics.
Easy example from the last decade: TERFs.
Now, I don’t like TERFs, on account of them being radfems and thus automatically hostile to me due to the circumstances of my birth (i.e. penis), but you know what? I reckon they probably want women to have better salaries and fewer barriers to entry into professional fields.
Let them force themselves into political irrelevance if they refuse to play ball, don’t make a big fucking show of kicking them out of the movement, because then you end up on the back foot of having to explain “trans women are women” to the mass population and the TERFs simply need to say “look at these brainwashed biology deniers, they think males and females have no differences” and you end up eating your own ass in public, when the point is that trans women ought to be treated as women for their own good and a more welcoming society.
(side note: if you are in that brainless chunk of progs who do believe there is no difference between the sexes, I highly encourage you to look at the world records in any discipline with easily measured metrics such as 100m dash and freestyle swimming. Not a single male record is under the women’s record, in some cases every historical male record eclipses the current female one. Males and females are different, this should be acknowledged, and it should not be a barrier to equal dignity in treatment.)
A movement that can’t include anyone but the most in-line and pure of the ideological adepts is doomed to be irrelevant, and on that the progressives have an almost complete lock.
Harsh to hear but I believe this perspective to be both true and very important to accept/understand (with the exception of the terf topic)
Keep in mind I’m not saying to accept TERFs, I’m saying to be smart about letting them cut themselves off instead of forcing them out.
Fair. IMO it depends on how much you value being morally correct vs overall effectiveness of the movement. It could be worth it to compromise the integrity slightly if it will be much more effective. Not everyone would make that trade but I’m not here to argue against people who would.
And this entire thought process is why the left gets weaker every round of elections.
See for instance: Abandon Harris, a movement thought by absolute winners at the brain lottery, who thought that undermining the candidate who didn’t ban middle easterners from entering the US was the smart choice because Biden was “too lenient against Israel.”
Politics is about seizing and wielding power, morality has nothing to do with it.
For one, any grifter can pretend to be more morally correct than you or I and once they get in power they will do whatever they want anyway. I would much rather side with someone who disagrees with me on some things but does so in earnest than someone who is suspiciously always somehow more moral and more correct than me or them.
For two, morality is literally incompatible with politics, because it is downstream from the body politic.
For instance: It is considered immoral to own slaves, today. It used to be allowed and to the mores of the time, uncontroversial.
Then enough people who disagreed with that stance pushed to gain power and made it illegal, once that became the status quo for long enough it is now controversial to hold a position that was the default and viceversa.
Something becomes a matter of morality once it is no longer a matter of politics.
In practice, you don’t actually need support for all your ideas, you need enough good ideas to get you enough support that you can then push through your less popular pet issues. Even better if the pet issues themselves are popular, that’s when you get explosive successes like Trump getting re-elected by hammering the inflation button (despite anyone who knows anything about econ knowing he would be literally unable to do anything about it).
As long as people are not actively against your pet issues they’ll re-elect you just fine, that’s how croneyism skates by unnoticed.
Yes, but there is a point at whoch your movement is compromised so much that winning doesn’t matter because the common goals of the movement are no longer desirable. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that-- we’re pretty firmly in “come on guys stop bikeshedding and work together” territory-- but it is important to know that it can swing too far the other way. That’s how we got people saying “violence is bad, you have to hear the nazi out”.
That’s why movements should be built around goals and not allegiance/morality.
“This is the movement to achieve X.”
“X has been achieved.”
“Aight, job well done, time to move on.”
This is what the right does (or tries to, anyway), and they’re eating the left alive, maybe it’s worth taking this very non-partisan strategy from their playbook?
AKA the same provision that protects everyone with an unpopular opinion, yourself included, yes. That’s what liberal democracies do.
The state has a monopoly on violence, you don’t get to decide who doesn’t get rights, nor do the nazis.
The US is a bit of an exception obviously, you guys love your political violence (one could say you are built on it) and who am I to stop you, but Europe does not work that way and thank fuck for that, lol.
So yeah you have to let the nazi speak, that doesn’t mean you can’t talk over them, mock them, goad them into striking first so the cops will crack down on them, etc.
I’m Italian so I guarantee you I know that it’s a complex landscape to navigate, with actual fascists (the roman salute kind, not the “we’re cops and we will do our job” ““fascists””) in a lot of police strike teams, and in the current government (Thankfully I live abroad, shit’s bad at home right now), I know it’s no picnic to actually maintain a liberal society, but other countries consistently succeed, like France and the Netherlands, or the nordics.
It takes effort and a lot of education from early on, and that the population appreciates the importance of that education and the values it is supposed to impart.
Conversely it was “me ne frego” and the widespread apathy towards it that condemned italy to Mussolini’s rule, not civil debate.
Moreover, allowing and embracing political violence doesn’t work when one side is already chomping at the bit and better at it than your side, but that’s a practical consideration rather than an ethical/moral one.
Mind you this does not mean “don’t defend yourself” it means “don’t strike first”
Embrace the Roman doctrine: we will never pick up arms first, but if forced to we will only lay them second.
wow. most of what you write creates culture that completely excludes and alienates women. See: hostility of current male dominated fields towards women. Blows my mind that you consider going backwards, rather than male culture evolving to be better human beings, to be a solution.
A competitive spirit is not morally wrong and calling men worse human beings for having one is so fundamentally wrong that I can only ask you to reread and reconsider the above post.
competitive spirit is very healthy, however we have decades of very well documented evidence of how keeping it unchecked and alienating anyone with emotional intelligence plays out in real life. I also never called men as worse human beings - case in point that anyone pointing out the toxicity in **male only **culture is labeled as hating men
It’s amazing how well he articulated the problem and pointed out potential solutions just for you to give a perfect example of the type of rhetoric he is talking about that drives people away from the left. Like his link, the parody writes itself…
my existence and me wanting to not be oppressed is not “the left”. Men throwing tantrums at not having unchecked control over women in the workplace or not having maids at home is not an “articulated” problem or a solution. I’ve done nothing but give support and love to good men around me who are partners or friends because I hurt for how much harm patriarchy inflicts on them too, and having heard from them how toxic, unjust, and completely devoid of empathy the oppressive environment created by their fellow men is, I have zero tolerance for people advocating to keep subjecting humans to that culture.
I have a bit of a preconceived notion as to why you are saying this, however I would rather ask you to be more specific before jumping to conclusions. Can you give concrete examples as to how my suggestions would alienate women?