Spent some time with an old chum last night. We got around to talking about politics, of course.
Like me, my chum’s a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. He’s got a couple of college-age sons in fraternities. He shook his head, sadly. “You wouldn’t believe how Trumpian their frat brothers are,” he said.
“It must be miserable for them,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” he said. He looked down, ashamed. “I can’t even talk with my own two sons anymore.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes,” he said. “I mean my boys are all in for Trump.”
He was crestfallen. I was crestfallen. I like to keep my own spirits up by crossing my fingers and hoping against hope that the American electorate will awaken from its Trump slumber and vote as many of his bastards out as possible in next year’s mid-term elections. The young, who unwisely largely sat out the 2024 election, will see the error of their ways and flock to the polls and we’ll get back to some semblance of sanity.
My chum’s sons, I’d wanted to believe, would be among the cavalry that’d save us from Li’l Duce‘s savage raids on democracy. Apparently, they won’t be.
Funny this exchange should have taken place last night. The day before I got my regular installment from Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin blog. The Dems, Silver writes, have a problem with young males. That demographic went for Li’l Duce in a big way last November, as did males of every age. The Democratic Party, too often oblivious to its own shortcomings, (“We’re on the side of the angels, our philosophy is pure; why should we muck around with strategies and messaging?”) surprisingly has begun to come around on this front. The party is spending some $20M on something called the SAM Project (for Speaking with American Men). The fact that the party even needs to create such an outreach illustrates exactly how far the Dems have had their heads up their asses for far too long. Because, prior to this, thanks to their pristine, unassailable philosophical purity, they’ve perceived no need to reach out to one fucking entire half of the American electorate!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Democratic Party needs a 1st grade math teacher to advise it. Then they may get it into their thick heads that the winning party in any election needs more votes than the other party. Simple math, right?
Anyway, re: those young males, Elena Schneider writes in Politico: “Democrats aren’t taking this disaffected and politically alienated voting bloc seriously enough.” Duh.
Silver, for his part, quotes a commenter who wrote:
Lately I’ve been feeling like a lot of the country’s rejection of the Democratic Party can be traced back to their Village-ness, seeming “fake,” the groupthink they foster in cultural institutions and the media, wokeness (and the forces that created it), generally being insufferable.
Insufferable. Imagine that! An opposition party, tilting against a neo-fascist, authoritarian, death-cult, CEO-King tidal wave that’s totally anathema to our Enlightenment democratic principles, is being given the finger because it’s insufferable. Think, for instance, of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and John Lewis being ignored because they were insufferable pains in the ass. Well, yeah, they were to the troglodytic segregationists of their time, but that was their whole point. They weren’t, though, insufferable to normal folks who didn’t genuflect before the likes of George Wallace or Orval Faubus or Bull Connor.
It can be assumed that my chum’s sons’ frat brethren don’t genuflect before Mussolini, Francisco Franco, or Vladimir Putin. They don’t really want a tyrannical, right-wing dictatorship. But they just can’t abide by the finger-wagging, carping, censorious, accusatory prigs that the Democrats have become. So, aw hell, let’s just vote for the guy who doesn’t hate us for our junk and hope he doesn’t suspend the next presidential election.
Too many young American males see the Dems as buzz-killing, hair-in-a-tight-bun, obsessively prim and proper elderly aunts. Too many young American males have been bombarded with messages that they are bad guys simply because they’re…, well, guys. They’ve been hearing for years all about toxic masculinity and the key word of that slam, to them, is the latter of the two. They hear masculinity as being the evil. They hear too many voices implying that rape, workplace sexism, child molestation, and all the other misogynistic sins are endemic to all males. To them. They hear that they’re not just guys, that they’re sexual predators, that they lure kids into vans, that they all denied some 1990s Hollywood actress that plum movie role because she wouldn’t fuck them. The logical corollary of Me-Too is You-Too.
The Democratic Party, young American males feel, is too mom. And young American males today have spent their entire lives — and I mean every freakin’ minute of every freakin’ day — in the company of Mom. From playdates when they were toddlers; to Mom driving them to school, to play soccer, to every goddamned thing young boys want or have to do; to the smartphones that keep them shackled to Mom in perpetuity; and more, much, much more, today’s young American males haven’t had the slightest chance to err, to makes stupid decisions and realize there’s a price to pay for them, to work out problems among themselves without parental input, to learn how to climb a tree, to dare, to discover.
And now that they’re grown up, here’s the Democratic Party telling them they’re bad boys, go to your room, no supper for you every time they use the wrong pronoun, every time they sit with their knees spread too wide on the bus, or every time they laugh at the wrong joke.
You ain’t my Mom, they say, so screw you.
The Democratic Party’d better figure out how to get young American males back into the fold. And quickly.
