Leftists can't shut out Young Men again.

The Left want their own Joe Rogan, but they have a tough time with young men at all.

The online leftist community have not been a driving force since the start of the internet. From the early day rise of manosphere MRA’s, to Gamergate, to right-wing social media censorship, to Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, to Joe Rogan.

This is just a list of L after L of leftists online. So much so that I don’t think the left even knows how to organize through the internet. In fact, I would say we’re pretty bad at it (I very much identify as a leftist).

Now I know what you’re thinking, that leftists have been fighting an uphill battle which I agree. Millionaires and billionaires have been backing online channels for a while now and social media channels in 2024 have considerably boosted right wing content. As Taylor Lorenz puts it:

“There is simply zero equivalent to this massive infrastructure on the left. 

Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors, primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want.”

Why Democrats won't build their own Joe Rogan

It seems from this point of view that right-wingers have been very clear-eyed that once you control the message, you win the battles. In the last 20 years and especially since the start of social media, the Left have both fought a battle against those same social media companies, while also allowing right-wingers to take over the space.

So leftists online wanting to make leftist content just end up fighting a ridiculous uphill battle. There’s only been a handful that has been some sort of popular, and only Hasan Piker has competed with what the right wing brings, but he’s only one guy. Not only that, the Democrats don’t seem to want to embrace the online media as much as the Republicans do

Why do the Democrats care about online spaces so much? Why does the Left care? If you get down to the brass tacks, you realize that online spaces are the spaces where young men live, and learn. And the Dems were awful at courting men, especially online. That hurt them this election.

Ironically, the Dems had a time where it had the energy of young men, and they shut them out, I’ll explain in a bit. But the answer is clear to me that the best way forward is…

*drum roll*

…EMBRACING THE MESSINESS OF YOUNG MEN

*groans*

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This is an excerpt from the acclaimed piece from Christine Emba about Men getting out of the wilderness and in it it interviews men of all kinds. This quote above comes from someone who is a self-described leftist liberal and it speaks volumes.

There isn’t the same room to be proudly masculine.

Interestingly the Democrats at one time recently had young male energy for a bit. The one time it had it, it had a moniker that some people used as an insult, the Bernie Bros. Bernie Sanders’ campaign was not only an energizing stint into radical leftism (as much as radical leftism can be in the U.S.) but it also gave us the star of the Democratic Party right now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the Bernie Bros, the group of young men who energetically supported the campaign of Bernie Sanders, was seen as a problem.

The main complaint from moderates at the time was that the Bernie Bros harassed the supporters of Clinton and Warren at the time with their fervent support of Sanders. The moniker itself caught on even though Sanders support was not majority white or male at all. The main thread was that his base was actually….young. From Vox:

“In the first few primaries this cycle, Sanders cleaned up with Latino voters and Asian voters. He has won outright with young women and young African-Americans, reflecting the fact that age — rather than race or gender — is the biggest determinant of Sanders versus Biden support.”

Man, don’t you wish the Harris campaign had a strong foothold in these demographics huh?

Bernie Bros didn’t come from nothing, it came from an energized front wanting to do the same thing Trump claims to do, fight a system they think is corrupt, broken, and not serving them.

This energy coalesced into the so-called Dirtbag Left, a collection of commentators that would not try to put things lightly, often insulting or making crass jokes about its opponents, led by Chapo Trap House. These antics infuriated the moderates (especially Hillary Clinton and Liz Warren supporters) and made it seem like this campaign even though it was online, young, and energetic was toxic because of its ‘masculine’ nature.

This refrain again was seen in Obama’s early campaign as well, as Salon wrote an article called “Hey, Obama boys: Back off already!” in which Salon interviewed a lot of people about the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nominee, Jessica Valenti a feminist reporter argued that:

"I pinpoint sexism for a living. You'd think I'd be able to find an example. And I hate to rely on this hokey notion that there's some woman's way of knowing, and that I just fucking know. But I do. I just know." When it comes to feminism, she continued, so much proof is required to convince someone that sexism exists, "even when it's explicit and outrageous. So when it's subdued or subtle, you don't want to talk about it.".

It’s funny to hear something like that connected to a campaign (Obama in ‘08) that was hailed as a victory. This Obama Boys history has been almost forgotten. But the feeling here in this sentence is that something was “off” and slightly sexist. This was a mirror of what happened with Sanders in 2020. There wasn’t any space for men to feel energetically…manly. And when it showed up, it came out as somehow “wrong.” Bernie Bros knew this too, and it made it seem like they were not only fighting the Right but fighting people inside who thought their being a “bro” was somehow bad. Here are some quotes from Slate’s reporting on Bernie Bros' gearing up for Sanders 2020 campaign:

And I think this is where the Left and Democrats in general lose young men. I don’t think sexism doesn’t exist, it always does. I do think that the harassment of other supporters is not good, there are lessons to learn about arguments. But yet even with a campaign like Obama’s which was seen as righteous, elegant, and smart, there is a distinct distrust of young men’s energy and enthusiasm. And specifically with the Bernie Bros moniker, it erased a base of people who were not white men:

There is almost a policing of how they’re supposed to interact in these discourses. Especially a policing of how young men should act their excitement. And this policing is in line with what they see in real life. From that policing, they don’t get the guidance, they get isolation. From Emba’s article:

This isolation is exactly what drove men to the Right.

There is a fear from progressives that if we allow these men to be “masculine” then they (people who are not white men) will be left on the sidelines, which is an understandable fear. However, the risk is that if we don’t do something about this, women and minorities will be just left out of the game completely. The Right has no qualms about talking directly to men. The Right also has no problem blaming women and minorities for what’s going on with young men. If we shut them out again young men will reject leftism and progressiveness en masse, more so than now.

If we talk to young men with empathy, and honesty and allow them to use their energy to fight the power in the way that THEY know how? This is where Leftists and Democrats specifically can easily make waves.

Courting young men to support a candidate energetically takes a lot of effort and a lot of patience, and with that energy comes a bit of messiness. Young men are messy; they can be loud, brash, make mistakes, and be angry in ways that people may have a tough time with. But if parties want to even have a shot at turning back Trumpism, they need to do so with their support. What the online right has no problem in doing is welcoming in any type of messiness into their sphere, including and especially the messiness of young men.

Young men know when they are being patronized, and they know all too well when they are being looked down upon. This is how you lose them. You have to see them face to face.

Democrats, Liberals, and Leftists can’t make the same mistakes as what happened with Bernie Bros and what happened with Obama Boys. They should see that base and see them as a benefit, as a gift, rather than something to be derided or sneered at.

Talking is cheap, and I hope they see what happened in 2024 as a major wake-up call.