The Progressive Quest to Win Back Men Is Going Very Badly

"Exasperating, agitating, maddening, infuriating" lads?

Corisca and the Satyr by Artemisia Gentileschi

In the beloved movie musical My Fair Lady, we watch as Professor Higgins attempts to turn cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle into a Duchess. The process doesn’t run smoothly, mostly because Eliza insists on having a mind of her own. In one of the most famous songs, the Professor blasts Eliza’s kind as “nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating hags!” Getting to the point, he asks: “oh, why can’t a woman be more like a man?” It’s a question that has come to trouble the Professor Higgins analogues of our own age - self-appointed instructors and patrician guardians of all that is good - but this time the sex of the subjects has been swapped. What the fuck is the problem with these men?

In the run-up to the American election it became clear that Donald Trump had a young-male-centric strategy, that the Democratic side had no counter-strategy and that it spelled trouble. The final tally reflected this: across all racial categories men broke decisively in Trump’s direction and were a key factor in his victory. If it was a simple matter of numbers that would be bad enough for his opponents; but the creeping horror that they have lost not just the voters but an entire male-oriented slice of popular culture has triggered what Ezra Klein described as a sort of spiritual crisis amongst Democrats. Listening to activists struggle through questions on Podcasts has been one of Schadenfreude-laced joys of the post-election period. The question is relevant even for those of us who aren’t American as the drift of men away from the left becomes a global trend.

So how is the quest to get the lads back on the reservation going? Not well. A recent episode of Jon Stewart’s “Weekly Show” podcast, titled Man oh Man: Why Male Voters Shifted Right is the sound of wheels spinning in the mud, and offers a neat summary of why this quest is going nowhere. Stewart’s guests included the mainstream’s acceptable face of discussing Men’s issues-

Richard V Reeves

, author of “Of Boys and Men” and the chairman of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

I like Reeves a lot, in part he has the bottle to make concrete suggestions to try to solve the problems he describes rather than resigning himself to being a talking head. He’s one of the few figures commenting on this phenomenon who understands Trump is a fundamentally anti-conservative phenomenon, and whatever caused the male turn from Democrats and towards him it was not a case of traditionalism reasserting itself. The downside of his approach is that in trying to mainstream these issues he entirely accepts the Progressive frame on culture, politics and life and the tension of applying that frame to a group that falls outside it often becomes evident.

At the start of the Podcast, Stewart challenges him to describe what happened with Trump, Harris and male voters. Reeves theory is that men did not turn away from Democrats but Democrats turned away from them; and that Trump made men feel “welcomed, heard and seen”, and that Democrats failed because they weren’t really offering anything to them.

It’s not common to hear men talk about their problems in this way. This is usually seen as an expressive malfunction on their part, but if this kind of emotion-heavy talk was something most men liked, Democrats or other mainstream parties of their type would have no issue since it’s their stock in trade. Men aren’t naturally inclined to describe their problems in comfort- or sympathy-seeking terms, and often suspect acknowledgement that need to “feel seen” implies a desire to micromanage their emotional lives by a type of activist that doesn’t really like them.

Later, when it’s put direct to Reeves what are the sorts of things that Democrats could have spotlighted to attract male voters he highlights “helping young men get access to mental health care”. The American healthcare system seems like a darwinian nightmare and I don’t underrate the difficulty of accessing services, or that lives could be improved if that was easier. The improvement and distribution of government services is a good and normal part of any political programme. But a national platform made only of proposals like this offers no grandeur, no vitality and no sense that there is anything more to public life than feeling sorry for someone. It sorts men into the bucket of another mouth to be fed or another outstretched hand filled, another patient to be managed. And it doesn’t even seem sincere! This isn’t a matter of machismo. Think of the men in your own lives whether they’re wan gamers or swaggering louts or cosy suburban dads; do they enjoy being understood as people with no plans or agency or vigour of their own? So why would you think that would appeal to them in a government?

Jon Stewart scoffs at Reeves’s summary but only because he can’t imagine that Trump could come as a relief to anyone. But he doesn’t scoff at the basic premise, which is that the centre of politics is caressing people’s feelings and giving them things - that a successful politician is some mix of social worker, activist and therapist. In this podcast and in most others of same type that have come out since the election, every suggestion that there might be something about the Progressive way of looking at the world the might be an inherently bad philosophical fit men, or that men (and young men particularly) might be repelled by it, is eventually met with a sneer, or a gasp, or a wry, disbelieving chuckle.

So Democrats (who, here are serving as a placeholder for progressive parties generally) are stuck in a hole. The downside of a technocratic approach to government operated by neurotic and risk-averse strivers is a tendency to see people as being nothing more than passive, grateful recipients of sympathy, aid and protection. Once you accept that approach as true, the only explanations for your failure can be - we aren’t offering you enough stuff, or the right stuff; we aren’t properly communicating how much stuff we’ve already given you; you don’t believe us when we promise you there will be more stuff in the future. There is no room in this philosophy for someone who doesn’t see themselves as an inert mass that exists to be acted upon; or who desire not just to feel strong but to test and expand their strength, literal or figurative.

You can see how true this is by simply turning to Trump's campaign, or the campaign of any insurgent right-wing candidates with implicit male appeal. If the Progressive theory was true, then Trump would have won simply because he promised an increased allocation of state goodies from all other groups to young men. But his campaign wasn’t like that at all. Instead the unifying theme was almost the opposite - rather than increasing government presence in people’s lives it was about reasserting individual or national ownership over the things that belong to you be it through reinforcing literal borders, trade borders, or control over what what you say and think, and control over how you treat your children what ideas you publicly say are true or pay fealty to. Abortion is an obvious outlier here I think it’s interesting that was the only position I can ever remember Trump attempting to moderate, and with a discipline that was very unusual for him.

Trump is a success because he was the embodiment of an individual imposing himself on the world, and against a hateful system, rather than being the subject of it. Quite a lot of men instinctively like that, and by definition you cannot beat it with more social programmes or the promise of a tear-filled struggle session.

It’s true, of course, that feelings are important. At one point Reeves mentions that from a voter point of view “politics isn’t just about who you like, but who likes you.” This is a good articulation of the first problem faced by Progressives pivoting towards men, which is style of communication adopted by government, corporations, the media and activists over the last period explicitly regards men as an oppressor class so even sounding like you sincerely like male voters won’t be easy. But even if they could manage to sound more friendly, what if the male version of liking me means “being willing to let me be”? Well, that’s a problem. The incorrigibly neurotic nature of mainstream left-wing parties means that the one thing they absolutely cannot do under any circumstances is give you some emotional space.

The overall impression from this and other progressive analyses of how they lost the male vote, and how they could win it back, is that they haven’t begun to think about the deeper reasons for that loss, let alone the structural factors that make changing course so hard. There seems to be no understanding that the promise of “transformative” is horrifying if you think that people are going to make that change hate you. There seems to be no understanding that the inaccessibility of male-oriented spaces is a feature not a bug, and was driven specifically by the invasive and spiteful politicisation of the older version of those spaces. There seems to be no understanding of the fact that, if you offer people something and they choose something else, you don’t get to reassure yourself that your offer was obviously better and more substantial. In fact (and this has nothing to do with men) after nearly a decade of Trump they still haven’t figured out that his repulsiveness is not merely part of his appeal but an essential requirement; how else could you be an opponent of a system that enforces itself through policing tone, manners, language?

No humility, no self-awareness, and no sense that another way of looking at the world is valid: this won’t be an easy trap to get out of. The tendency of progressive advocates to present their opinions as inarguable moral demands and to use culture as a bludgeon to enforce those demands has left them in a head-in-the-clouds position - that is, elevated, but also blind. As a result the people (increasingly male) who dissent from liberalism understand one vital thing that its advocates often don’t: which is that the difference between doing something *for* someone and doing something *to* someone is often pretty thin.