Oh I think the Democratic party absolutely lost the plot when it came to caring at all about men, especially straight white men and I do fully believe that its the leading cause for them to continually get their asses kicked in elections. Take this for example:
And read that message. A patting of the liberals on the back for helping to empower women to be more dominant in the workforce. But look at those charts. Yes, there have been a lot of strides to help out women, but look at that chart for people with a degree and look at how it cratered for men starting around 1980 and only started correcting itself around 2010. Those policies essentially created a generation of men who legitimately feel left behind because they just never got the same help in their lifetime that was afforded to women. And now that generation is out in the workforce competing for jobs in a market where the US government is pushing policies that financially rewards companies for hiring women and people of color. And as I've said before, this job market is brutal right now.
The Dems have to stop playing identity politics. Stop basing your entire political agenda around pushing social issues based on gender or race. The only thing that agenda has done is rile up and give a platform to some of the absolute worst people out there, because they make the controlling majority feel heard.
Upthread I mentioned the ticking time bomb that nobody’s addressing in the future of the public sector.
Another economic time bomb that’s being almost willfully ignored on the left: young men are falling farther and farther behind in educational performance and attainment. I do NOT mean they are equalizing with women. Women passed them in practically every meaningful metric a generation ago. Boys are just failing en masse. Close to nothing is being done to address this, or even understand it.
This is deeply not OK. We can talk about the glass ceiling and wage equality and all the rest of it, but those issues aren’t solved by reversing educational attainment for boys. That’s economic suicide. Our economy is structured around the assumption of two-income households. It’s not like we’re going to gender-reverse and suddenly see men becoming stay at home husbands — what we’re going to see is increasing numbers of men failing to compete economically. Today’s computer programmer is tomorrow’s burger flipper.
This is all happening on top of a bunch of other unsettling trends for men in the workforce. Some of the numbers are striking.
Unemployment among non-disabled, prime-aged men is higher now than it was during the Great Depression. College-educated men today are more likely to be unemployed than high school dropouts were in 1965. The rate of labor force participation among black men in 1965 was higher than the same rate among white men in 2015. A lot of the men who have fallen out of the workforce are the dreaded “parents’ basement dwelling incel” whose failure is chalked up to being an inherent loser. Fifty years ago he would just be a single working guy in an apartment. The generational implications of that negative shift are profound.
These trends are covered up by our tendency to look at the bottom line (“unemployment”, GDP) and by the rise of women, minorities, and immigrant labor in the workforce. The left celebrates women, minorities, and immigrants (and rightfully as equality is important) but they completely ignore the educational and economic reversals that are occurring in that other wedge of the demographic pie.
And it’s not like people haven’t been screaming at the left to wake up about these issues. We were having this same conversation in 2016. But Dems tend to reflexively view the concern for white people or for men as reactionary conservatism (or worse). The summer of 2020 exacerbated that dynamic by mainstreaming the idea that “safe places” involved white men sitting in a corner and shutting up so that others could have a platform. And so Dems keep falling farther behind with groups that used to be unshakably blue, like union workers and young men and Latinos who actually are seeing the right wing as empowering.
If this election didn’t lay out the bare truth to Dem leadership, I don’t know what else could. They're not going to be able to “coalition” their way out of these issues. They need to be able to be authentically liberal while also authentically giving a damn about the future of the entire population, not just target demographics.
