TFP Article on "How Democrats Lost Men"

Public honour? Heroism? It sounds like a very American, colonial idea of manliness, ie hacking a farm out of the bush and shooting the indigenous owners of said bush. As a man myself I think most men want something much more prosaic: a purpose in life, family, friends, not being thought that they're made of slugs and snails and puppy dog's tails. Not so very different to women I think.

Be careful what you wish for.

My grandad fought in WW2. He never once asked to be "honoured". He mostly just wanted to work on his allotment. Likewise I suspect most serving members of the military would prefer better pay/veteran support/healthcare. I'm proud of family members that served. They'd think I'd lost my mind if I started talking about honouring them or their warrior ethos.

There have been many societies in history which did put male virility and the male warrior on a pedestal. Or that honoured/worshipped a hyper masculine notion of glory, male youth and health. Without exception, every single one of those societies resulted in the mass death of young men in bloody wars. Just as North Korea or Soviet Russia worship(ped) the common man/woman. It's hard to find Soviet artwork that doesn't speak to the inner glory of the ordinary human spirit. Surprisingly, the USSR also presided over the deaths of millions of ordinary people. On a more prosaic level, the owners of Victoria's Secret worshipped female beauty so much they turned them into literal.angels. They were, ahem, not great for the welfare of girls/young women. Even if some men do feel jealous/left out to see the female form seemingly worshipped above men. I guess there was Abercrombie and Fitch of that makes them feel better? Just don't Google the owners

Humans aren't made to be worshipped or put on pedestals. That's why the main thrust of most sensible feminism was for women to be treated as human beings.

That Bari Weiss is pushing this argument suggests the Trump propaganda line is pivoting from the preelection "Trump is the anti war president" to "Trump is giving young men the chance to be real men by finding glory in wars." Yay for America I guess.

Exactly!

I don't pretend to know much about this, but there are many suggesting that Obama is pulling the strings in the background.

I suspect, in reality, the key players are not well known to the public.

And this is one of the things I believe lost Harris the presidency.

There was of course her lack of popularity to start, she totally bombed in the Democrat primaries, and was a massively unpopular VP. So crazy to run her as a candidate under even the best circumstances.

But then you have Biden revealed as completely incapable of carrying on tin the role, something people had suspected for quite some time. And then they can't keep a lid on it, and it's pretty clear that it has been going on for quite some time, and has been covered up by the people around him.

Including Harris.

And then there is the question, who has been making the decisions all this time?

Who chose Harris, since there was no vote, is it the same person who decided to cover up Biden's state?

We now know a lot more of the details of Biden's mental degeneration, but at the time, these were all questions in the minds of the voters. I can easily imagine seven million people who didn't really want to vote for Trump also thinking, no fucking way am I voting for the people who just tried to trick me into voting for a figurehead.

You're a mine of information, lol. There was me thinking that Sleepy really believed in this stuff, or wanted to show how much he identified (sorry for the pun) with the stuff troubling young left activists the most, trans being right up there with racial stuff.
No. Instead he was co-opted by pure emotion.
And this is an older (oldest) politician who as much as anyone cut his teeth in the real cauldron of right/left politics from over a half century ago.
Yet on trans he proved to be an unthinking sap.

Well, firstly he's a true believer in the trans cause via his friendship with Sarah McBride, who worked for Beau Biden and bonded with Joe and Jill over Beau's death.

Secondly, by the time he got to be president, he wasn't really doing much thinking. It would be interesting to know who was making the decisions.

Sow how did he think he could sell a trans activist health secretary to the American people, and trans ideology more widely?

I'm not saying Joe Biden was ever a brilliant politician, but when he was still compos mentis he had two things going for him.

One was that he wasn't very interested in the celebrity culture that too many Democrats are bedazzled by. That went against the persona he'd built up as Blue Collar Joe, the union endorsed candidate. If he had been the candidate in 2016, I don't think he would have been taking time out from the campaign trail to party in the Hamptons with Barbra Streisand.

The other was that, maybe just because he was old and not online, he didn't confuse Lefty Twitter with Democrat voters. If he ever saw Lefty Twitter, he would probably have said "there's no way I can sell these policies to elderly black church ladies in South Carolina", which he knew is the key constituency you need to win the primary.

This kind of common sense isn't a very high bar, but it's become quite rare among centre left politicians.

The right has its own problems with audience capture, but that's a different story.

Didn't she at some point or other float the idea that the taxpayer would fund "gender reassignment" operations for prisoners, or have I got that wrong?

She did say that. Not as part of the 2024 campaign, but before that point.

This is one of the big things that the die hard Dem supporters won't take on board. Some of the polices and attitudes from the party faithful have just lost all connection with ordinary people's values and reality. They come across as unhinged.

Many Dems expected people to ignore that, hold their nose and vote for her regardless, because the alternative was worse.

But many were not prepared to do that - and I completely understand. The party just isn't listening. Voting for them would have given them an even greater mandate for their nonsense.

And in fact, they don't seem to have learnt any lessons from their loss.

If this isn't a recipe for losing people, then I don't know what is.

I don't know if there is life after death, but there are two things that inevitably do come after death - you will be baptised a Mormon and you will become a registered Democrat in Chicago 😄

Of course I suppose the other explanation is those 7 million voters never existed in the first place! 😆

@IwantToRetire - "... So Trump gaining a million votes many of whom unexpectedly were male Latinos still doesn't explain why the Democrats lost 7 million votes.

That is the biggest factor. The non voters..."

I don't understand your point.

Obviously around 7 million voters who previously voted democrat didn't this time.

Why they didn't I don't actually know, but I suspect that they didn't find the democratic offering attractive and didn't want to endorse it, but couldn't bring themselves to vote for Trump.

Maybe they were completely demoralised over the original selection of Biden, who was obviously unfit from the outset to be a candidate, and his last minute replacement by someone who was never going to win, and those 7 million voters just threw in the towel.

Maybe an unexpected number of male Latinos voted for Trump because - surprise surprise - they approved of his approach to illegal immigration over that of the democrats.

Maybe voters in that demographic who are disproportionately the victims of crime thought that the democrats were too soft in their approach to crime and voted for Trump.

I don't know why the democrats lost 7 million votes and neither do you, but if you want to argue that it isn't the fault of the party itself then I think you've got your head stuck in the sand.

"... Also the complete humour by pass.

The comment about Kamala Harris is a joke - honestly what back wood were you living in during the election.

It's actually the Maga machos who came up with the line.

Talk about a head in hands moment."

I was living in the backwoods of the UK but I did try to follow the election pretty closely. I watched several of Kamala Harris' performances on TV and I genuinely came to the conclusion that she was unelectable.

Not because she was black and not because she was a woman. But because she spoke rubbish.

Didn't she at some point or other float the idea that the taxpayer would fund "gender reassignment" operations for prisoners, or have I got that wrong?

If she did it's wasn't going to help her winning an election

Trump is their version of Farage. Both claim problems are simple to solve and that, surprise, immigrants (particularly Muslims) are behind most of them. Both are lying sexist, racists because their "great past" is always when white men ruled everything and everyone else knew their place.

Simple solutions are more appealing than more complex ones. But we're don't live in a simple world and sadly for the believers in our snake oil salesman, we're not the global force of yesteryear (and will never be again) that could have made brexit successful. Anyone who pretends that "if only we did X simple thing, our country would be great again", is unfortunately always going to be wrong because no government wanting reelection (all of them!) will pass up easy wins.

Their cult believers though will never face that reality because it means admitting they were duped. Instead they behave like a cult where every word is true, even if it undermines the words of last week. Epstein and the about face from before/after the election is only one example. Another is the tariffs which are supposed to bring business back to the US that Trump apparently brought back to the US in his first term - but his followers refuse to face that cognitive dissonance. Here we're supposed to celebrate trade deals that account for a tiny fraction of the growth we lost by leaving the EU. Absolutely shameless.

What I'm saying is that I think whether or not he is macho, sexist or woman harming is irrelevant to the question why he won the election.

He won the election because he got more votes.

I think he got more votes because voters preferred what he was offering - whatever that was - to what the democrats offered.

I don't think the men (or women) who voted for him did so because he was macho, sexist or woman harming.

I think Obama is a hinge point. Obama's rhetoric de-emphasised differences and emphasised unity. Many people voted for him because he promised to be the final bump to a post racial society - that with his election we could finally put racism in general and the shadow of slavery in particular into the past. If you read Obama's speeches closely that's not exactly what he promised, but that's what people took away from them, especially in the 2008 election.

But the Obama campaign and his on-line supporters were highly race sensitive with accusation of racism fired indiscriminately 360 degrees. It was the first manifestation of the online woke mob that took hold even before social media was a fully formed thing. Every criticism was framed as a racist attack on a black man, as if Bill Clinton had been granted some kind of deference either from the right or the left.

I still think Obama deserves credit for discipline and not engaging in the race baiting that his supporters did. And it should be noted that Obama did face an extremely unpleasant strain of racial scrutiny - that he wasn't really African American and that his sympathies weren't with Christians. The whole birth-certificate conspiracy was highly embedded in the populist right and its impulses were xenophobic and racist. AND Trump indulged that with gusto. Truly a shameful performance.

But in the end I think it's fair to note that the Obamas backtracked on their perceived promise to remove race from politics once-and-for-all and his legacy was more divisive than unifying. It also set the stage for Clinton's and Biden's extreme form of identity politics which has consumed the party though the control lines are indirect, leading through the DNC and the consultant class. In some respects he's a tragic figure because he clearly saw the dangers of his presidency and yet still wasn't able to avoid them.

Quite.

Its actually a brilliant example in action. No attempt at all to engage with the issues raised. It's straight into 'how can I try to discredit the source'.

Looks like the Dems have no interest in learning and trying to fix mistakes. It's just 'we're right and you're wrong' on rinse and repeat. And getting people to actually vote for them doesn't appear to be a concern.

Zionism being falsely equated Judaism? Is Zionism 101… any right wing man will be only too enthusiastic to tell you. Say goodbye to The house 2026….

The funny thing about your rant post’s laundry list of left wing extremism (along with a good touch of antisemitism that would delight Bluesky) is that Harris may have won if she had chosen Josh Shapiro, a Zionist as her running mate, rather than the dreadfully incompetent Tim Walz.

Exit polls for 2020 & 2024 clearly indicate inflation/the economy as being the overwhelming reason why Biden won by 7 million votes & Trump by 2 million as do most recent elections internationally. And let's not forget Trump's approval rating has plummeted now he hasn't delivered on the economy as promised so it looks blindingly obvious masculinity isn't under threat.

Next.

Example #267849 of Why the Democrats Lost.

The Free Press is a notorious Zionist propagandist arm whose interests are served more by right wing governments hence regular article's that always seem to be premised with 'what's wrong with the left'.

This piece pretending men are fleeing the democratic party because 'the left hates masculinity' is laughable con. The fact is young men have been more prone to leftist scape goat propaganda because of their economic disenfranchisement from society in modern times. Rather than point to the true crony corporate culprits for men's losses in opportunity, blaming leftists for promoting equality has been a more politically expedient vehicle. Trump won is first election primarily because of male economic frustrations.

Appealing to men's natural biases against women, people of colour & queer people has been the right wing go to forever. 'And now they are taking away your ability to express masculinity is why you have no honour' is just another version aimed squarely to create male victim mentalities who will vote accordingly to whatever appeals to their insecurities. Same goes with gender. Gender ideology is particularly threatening to men's sense of masculinity hence the Free Press beating that trans horse over & over.

The Free Press established themselves on pretending left wing censorship was responsible for all of societies woes that appealed particularly to American men…only to be hyper pro censorship of anyone challenging Israeli talking points.

It's no coincidence The Free Press tends to always lean heavily on right wing men's insecurities & their founder/owner Bari Weiss is a Zionist zealot.

Honestly, some are so desperate to cling onto their niche ideas that they cant even cope with accepting normal acceptance of figures.

Irrespective of whether in the UK, the US or anywhere else if in an election one party loses more votes than the winning party gains votes it is seen and is obvious that the "winning" party hasn't signifcantly changed but the loosing party has.

Everyone was happy to crow about Starmer not "winning" but the Tories losing, why this obsession with constructing a false narrative about why this happened.

Unless of course you are aware of survey of democrats who chose not to vote.

Such bonkers and irrational remarks dont give any credibitlity to other comments.

Stretching plausibility to make something a "fact" only undermines the statement.

So Trump gaining a million votes many of whom unexpectedly were male Latinos still doesn't explain why the Democrats lost 7 million votes.

That is the biggest factor. The non voters.

Also the complete humour by pass.

The comment about Kamala Harris is a joke - honestly what back wood were you living in during the election.

It's actually the Maga machos who came up with the line.

Talk about a head in hands moment.

Agree!