amnesia explains that memories formed as toddlers rarely survive intact into adulthood. Consequently, 2006 barely registers in my memories; the only event I can recall is the birth of my younger brother. Four-year-old me, as it turns out, was missing out on a lot: the Montenegrin declaration of independence, Pluto’s infamous demotion to dwarf planet status and coups in both Fiji and Thailand, all while two of the most powerful Americans on the face of the planet today were busy hosting shows on NBC.
Over the past decade, Donald Trump has remade the conservative politics of America in his image. As a result, the Republican Party of today now resembles a traditional European conservative party far more than the economically laissez-faire coalition of Reagan and Bush Senior. However, Trump’s coalition required fresh blood in order to effect such change; as the 2020 election proved, reliance on the voter base he could mobilize was no longer enough to secure electoral victory. The multiracial swath of young men who flocked to Trump in droves last year thus did so for different reasons than the Rust Belt swing voters that first delivered him the presidency. After all, he may lead the Republican Party of today, but it is Joe Rogan who defines its culture.
The Joe Rogan Experience
is a notoriously freeform — or so I am told — exploration of whatever crosses the mind of the titular host and his guests. In spite of this lack of focus, recurring themes of eclecticism, historical nostalgia and distrust of mainstream institutions have established a somewhat cogent worldview that repeatedly draws in an astounding quantities of listeners. Above all else, Roganism offers a definition of manhood that millennials and Gen Z men have evidently found highly appealing: one that prizes physical self-cultivation, sexual conquest and confidence in one’s own inherent virtues as a man. These priorities are not quite identical to those privileged by certain Western patriarchal societies of the past, but they certainly rhyme.
Trump could never have brought these men into the Republican coalition so swiftly. His inherited wealth differentiates him more distinctly in the eyes of younger generations, and he is prone to conceptual incoherence that makes pinning many of his policies down maddeningly difficult. While his 2020 opponent Joe Biden wrestled madly with his stutter and his advanced age, he still managed to articulate sophisticated ideas and plans of action; for all of Trump’s sound and fury, he all too frequently signifies nothing.
No, it is Rogan who remade the cultural makeup of the Republican Party, which has sought to cast off its reputation as a prudish bloc of censorious blowhards. Their attempted reinvention as a bastion of fun, looseness and free thinking, in contrast to the clinical sterility of Democratic spaces, proved wildly successful. Our cultural milieu around masculinity swung back into traditionalist modes of understanding, its sameness obfuscated by Rogan’s fresh coat of paint and the underdog status part and parcel with unpopularity in academic and elite professional circles. Trump consequently used this secondary base to reforge his coalition by linking such views on masculinity to his own perilously nebulous political program.
Ever the sorts to run headlong into their own rakes, the Democratic Party and its institutional functionaries demonstrated they are either incapable of or cannot bother to articulating to young male voters good reasons to support liberal policies. Democratic strategies instead favored appealing to the moral compass, a tactic that loses its efficacy with poorer voters who feel greater pressure to act in their perceived self-interest.
Emboldened by the optimism of the early Obama years, a critical mass of Democrats embraced an early 2010s study proclaiming that ‘demographics is destiny,’ assuming the growth of nonwhite, non-Protestant groups signaled an inevitable sea change toward long-term Democratic dominance. While this prediction did not specifically mention gender dynamics, the underlying assumptions of the study were that the dominant demographic players of American politics were on their ways out, which attitudinally shaped the aggressiveness with which liberal-left actors effected measures to pursue gender egalitarianism.
While noble, there is more to this picture than meets the eye. If American men today were fine and dandy, even as the patriarchal systems that upheld their ill-gotten socioeconomic dominance began to crumble, then the overtures of Roganism would have little foothold in their minds. However, the project of dismantling these systems in American society has been dangerously uneven, seemingly ignorant of issues that might befall those whose unwarranted privileges have begun to disappear. We should not stop, but we must do better.
Economic opportunity has begun to dry up for many young men in the U.S. They are leaving college-level education behind at alarming rates. The gender wage gap is thankfully closing, but we can chalk up too much of this closure to stagnation in and neglect towards male-dominated industries, even as the Biden presidency ushered in high wage gains for working-class jobs.
Apart from a slow trickle of worried op-eds, the media wing of the Democratic Party has been virtually silent on these issues. After all, it is not politically expedient for a movement that defines itself upon raising up the underprivileged to appear sympathetic to a group of people that has traditionally enjoyed some degree of dominance. However, the electoral calculus of such nonchalance is mistaken: there are simply too many young men captive to bitter Republican messaging on these issues for Democrats to ignore.
Voters, on average, find appeals to their own self-interest most compelling of all. Yet the dominant Democratic messages on matters of gender often serve to affirm female security above all else, espousing a false choice between male and female priorities. Slogans such as ‘men should not have control over women’s bodies’ have no underlying misandry to them, but they do imply the liberal-left political movement assigns little value to men’s opinions. Even though this does not hold true for most Democrats, the miscast insinuation embedded within such a slogan is that they prefer men to simply vote blue and then move out of the way. Why, then, would men choose to align themselves with a political movement that appears to espouse their own enfeeblement as desirable, even virtuous? Democrats thereby neglect discussing the benefits men might enjoy from legalized abortion, such as lower crime rates over time. Modern feminist scholars have spilled much ink over how patriarchal systems have deleterious effects on the men they empower, thus indicating that measures aimed at helping women prove beneficial to everyone, but Democrats have inexplicably favored demographic grandstanding instead of pressing this point. Additionally, Democrats seemingly have no interest in indicating the inverse: that policies that benefit men need not cut into women’s increasing socioeconomic parity. Doing so would undoubtedly relieve the societal pressure they feel to neglect the educational woes that have befallen young American men of late.
In short, the ineptitude and disinterest with which the Democratic Party has conducted itself around young men led to many of them capitulate to the Trumpian political program. If Democrats are to rediscover political success on a national level, their current tactics regarding gender issue badly need fixing.
