Don’t confuse simplistic with simple. Most of the bullet points in the apology for a rapidly radicalizing GOP are just simplistic stereotypes that is trying to pass off as libertarian maxims.
"In other words, they don’t define themselves by their victimization but by their aspiration. "
Exactly, it aligns with the theory that collectivist academics in the 80s and 90s realized their 'eat the rich' story which worked for much of the 20th century was dieing. Aspirations were trumping victimization. In response these academics created Critical Theory, the oppressor/oppressed story as a replacement for 'eat the rich.' And now their replacement story is failing.
A great framing. It reminds me of how groups take back words like queer, or the n word. Men aspring to be better men and admiring those ahead of them.
I also appreciate the framing around the tribal game. Play it directly, win and help your tribe win. Instead of passive bleeding in cultural stretgh relative to the blue church.
I am not sure the GOP has any independent positive vision of itself. It exists solely in reactive opposition to the left and Democrats. This essentially renders it a second party of grievances, it is just a different set of grievances. If the GOP could forge an identity independent of Trump and grievance based on some kind of traditional ideal it would probably be a more successful party. The problem is we get cartoon characters like Vivek and BAP being referenced here while avoiding the name of the most important name in the GOP; Trump.
Love him or hate him, to talk about the modern GOP without referencing him once is telling. It is to avoid the actual current driving force because it contradicts the desired narrative. I don’t see the GOP offering any kind of healthy masculine framework in practice or rhetoric. It seems to be the home of a lot of hurt egos and wound licking with an unhealthy dose of false machismo.
Simple, you can't just look at the total size of the populations, but how many people actually vote. Only about a third of eligible voters actually vote every 2 years, for instance, and a full third never vote in ANY election.
Women vote in higher numbers than men in every age category, and this is consistent in every election going back 50 years. It's especially true at younger ages, where almost 20% more young women vote than young men. But there are about 10 million more votes from women than men in most elections.
Whites vote inmuch higher percentages than non-white, people with higher education vote in much higher percentages (like double) those without, homeowners have almost doubled the voting rate of renters. So you can never look at just sheer size...if people under 30 and non-whites ever voted at the same rates as white older people,for example, the GOP would get blown out of the water in every election.
Also, the preference of unmarried men and married women for GOP is minor as shown in the graph...only a few percentage points spread (and this fluctuates by election year and candidates, with some years favoring Dems such as 2016 when married women only voted 47% for Trump). The percentage point spread for single women however is enormous and consistent, and dwarfs the others.
So if 25M single women vote in an election...which is about how many you can expect in an off year election...it would take more than 40M married women voting just to outweigh their votes for Democrats, bc the single women have a voting spread that is more than twice as large between GOP and DNC. Simple math.
dems have won the popular vote in 7 of the past 8 presidential elections. Were it not for the electoral college we'd have virtual one party rule. I'm not saying this is a good thing, in fact, it's not. But certainly something to think about.
The question was about votes. Your answer would be an answer to a question about how democrats get more votes, it isn't an answer to how democrats get more votes given those numbers about married/unmarried men/women.
I guess the answer is that the big discrepancy in unmarried women outweighs the smaller discrepancies in the other categories. Also I believe more people are unmarried than married, so the big+ for unmarried women and small- for unmarried men outweighs the bigger- for married men/women.
Biden won the popular vote by a pretty chunky margin.
The supposed reason Biden won the popular vote was due to antipathy to Trump by suburban women, both married and not.
Also, Mr. Carter is correct in that there was a tremendous amount of manipulation of the election by the Left in the last election. From Zuckerberg to Soros to the 51 "intelligence officials letter" on Hunter's laptop to the media to the actual illegal changing of state election laws due to Covid allowing for vote by mail and ballot harvesting--it all combined to a win for Biden in a few swing states by a slim margin.
When we talk about election rigging, it's not just the simplistic notion of voting on behalf of dead people still on the voter rolls (this does happen, too), but all of the things that manipulate minds with false information on behalf of Democrats, like Russia collusion and the coverup of Joe's corruption.
Well sure, but there's a distinctiom between democrats getting votes in a devious way, and democrats not getting votes but claiming to have got them or whatever.
The original question (as I understood it) was about how Biden got more votes despite getting fewer votes in 3 of the 4 categories of married/unmarried men/women.
An election being rigged implies the means of measuring votes is being manipulated. Not just lying in order to get votes. That's bad, obviously, but it is not the election being "rigged".
Come on. Balajis, are these the strong R’s you refer to?? Not victims at all /s. How can a party so delusional and detached from fact be taken seriously.
Republicans are set as clear heroes in this narrative - strong, masculine. Democrats are the antagonists - weak, playing victim.
Then Conn Carroll (article quoted as #2 item and the source of the marital status/gender graph) picks on single women as the main fans of Democrats. The author doesn’t even try to explain why single women vote this way, instead he dives into a very charged topic of the destruction of the nuclear family institution, and congratulates Democrats on this - since more single women mean more voters for Democrats. He isn't attempting to offer any thoughts on the reason of the family institution demise either, but instead chooses to implicate and insinuate with the headline: “No one benefits more from the destruction of the American family than the Democratic Party”. Who had committed the crime? The one who benefits the most.
He then goes on to describe how detrimental single female parenthood is for boys (without male role model they tend to have lower academic performance, more criminal behaviour risk), that in turn per the further extrapolations of the author, produces inferior partners that women don’t find equal and, hence, choosing to not procreate and stay single. Which will make them vote for Democrats (mechanics again not explained).
This focus on single women and their “crimes” - being a worse parent, failing at mating, paired with the very headline of Balaji’s article where women are presented in a strictly supporting role (the party is of strong men, and women are there to love them) does a great job at actually obscuring the role of the superhero men of the Republican party.
For example, asking why the single parenthood is overwhelmingly women? Where are the men who have fathered those children now condemned to lesser opportunities in life due to the absence of a great male figure?
Per the same presented data set we see that the majority of unmarried men vote for Republicans. So do the married ones (remarried?) So the majority of men is republican. Did the strong men leave their children? Or the rates of divorced men, or men abandoning their children is significantly higher among registered Democrats?
A fact that receives absolutely zero attention within this discourse about gender and marital component, yet has a huge importance (and, boy, this omission is so telling): Republican men believe they have the right to control women’s body which is not only incredible insulting and oppressive by sentiment, but also results in a lifetime of implications for women of being a primary caretaker, limited career opportunities, lower income, etc. is a very obvious, elephant size factor, why many women swear off republican agenda.
I agree with most of what you wrote... the last little is where we differ. I think the difference is whether a man is pro-life or pro-choice. A believe most pro-life men are republicans because they believe in protecting the innocent... where as a pro-choice man doesn’t protect what he has help to create. To me, the pro-choice man is usually liberal and votes democrat. They love the fact that they are not held accountable for their part and all the risk is with the woman.
I sense in your assumption the same sentiment of slight for the pro-choice (hence, mostly Democrat) men that is introduced in the original post - the (implied?) lesser, non-alpha men, who do not protect what they helped create and do not protect innocent.
I think there is much more than goes into man's "pro-life" or "pro-choice" than the desire to preserve what man's made. Not to mention that "protecting of the innocent" translates completely differently to those who consider woman's wellbeing more important than of a fetus.
It is quite evident that there are other aspects to the control of women that go beyond this one expressed facet of political opinion. Take the assumption of woman being the primary caretaker - it is hardly unique to "pro-life" men although can be more expressed in religious/conservative households. But still the conscious and subconscious implications of perceived differences within gender roles are many.
And again - this has all the attention of the matter drifting away to the men. While I am still seeing a massive conscious omission, intentional sidelining if not erasing of women. After all it's usually the the supporting characters whose motivations are poorly thought through and are so nominal in the scripts that they don't make much sense at the very first glance if you actually pay it a bit attention.
Some really salient points here, Balaji. For me, this was evidenced during the Trump presidency when many men (and women) "loved" the abject bravado he displayed daily. It was a 180 from the rather measured, high brow, hyper polite Obama presidency and, I believe, spoke directly to the masses of people in the interior states consistently overlooked and maligned by the elites. The perceived "feminization" of men dates back to the metrosexuality trend of the '90s that has morphed into the current, palpable confusion among men about masculinity, specifically, how to act, what's considered acceptable behavior, and when does masculinity cross the line into "toxic." While the #metoo movement started as a great and important tool to weed out predators, it has since become a weapon for many to "take down" any man who doesn't fit a specific archetype...that no one can actually agree upon as acceptable. As such, it has felt like hunting season on men, easily, for the past 5 years and has resulted in a generation of confused, emasculated, anxious men who are isolating from one another, balking at relationships, communicating less as a survival mechanism, and retreating to clandestine practices (e.g., trolling, nefarious hacking, addictions) that feel empowering, don't include judgment or rules of any kind, and that supply enough dopamine hits to fill the psychological and physiological void from lack of masculine connection.
From what I see, I concur that the Republican party has become the party of strong men because it appears to be the only place and outlet where men can be and are expected to be "men." And it's becoming the one place where masculinity, in all its forms, is low-key celebrated. We've all seen how dangerous this can be in practice without some form of sane, strong leadership, and direction. Sadly, we're about to experience it again.
I believe for us to survive as a society, we're going to have to shirk all of these labels for a bit and, as you suggest, bench together and find some commonalities again, as men, so that we can extract ourselves from this weird-ass vortex we've fallen into and build one another back up to some form of masculinity that's "easy" and serves society as a whole. Then, we can go back to celebrating our differences and (ugh) weaponizing those on the Hill and on the socials.
The men that you describe as “confused, emasculated, anxious men who are isolating from one another, balking at relationships, communicating less as a survival mechanism, and retreating to clandestine practices” tend to be Trump supporters. It isn’t because of their political ideology. It’s because they identify with his victim story, his misogyny and his xenophobia. The men that I’ve met who have strong principles, healthy relationships and impact within their communities span the political spectrum. They are not predominantly Democratic or Republican.
Very provocative post. I like the finish. Make them stronger. How do you do that? Many on the opposite side are in a cult like state-while at the same time accusing the other side of being in a cult! I don't know that I agree with the scorched earth policy that Trump and many Trump followers advocate-see his recent tweet about Nikki Haley money people.
I think that Republicans since Reagan have always been a big tent party.
The gender gap is real, but this a lagging and mixed indicator. Perhaps Dobbs was the worst thing that could've happened to the GOP and we need to listen more to women.
Really disappointed with this…whatever this was. The dems suffer from wokeness that creeps into their ideology. But the rights fascist autocratic slide is papered over with its own ‘mind virus’ - romanticization and fetishizing the ignorant low IQ pseudo intellectual as some sort of ‘Everyman’ ‘working class upstart’. Look no further than the fat redneck (often racists, but not important for this point) who peeked in highschool and is now upset at everyone BUT himself that the world passed him by. He votes against education, healthcare, the working man and free markets every time. If you love this ideology, Arkansas, Mississippi, bama, are all free to move to.
I was surprised to read this work of Balaji. I generally respect and appreciate his perspective. However, this sounds more like wishful thinking than any sort of reality. Self-awareness requires one to ask whether their political party is any better than the opposition’s. In the US, both parties play the victim card because it’s a compelling narrative for their constituents. Everyone wants to blame someone else for their woes. Republicans need look no further than Trump and his doting supporters to see the level of victim consciousness in the Republican party. The Republican party provides no legitimate role model for men; to be fair, neither does the Democratic party.
The most glaring example of Balaji’s poor assessment is in suggesting that the “the state is (women’s) surrogate provider and protector.” In fact, women are under attack by both parties. The Republican party has decided that it knows best when it comes to women’s bodies. The Democratic party has decided that trans rights are more important than women’s rights. Women aren’t out in the world claiming entitlement, the way that deadbeat men are. Women are getting educated, building their careers and looking for ‘strong men’ who are in short supply despite many Republican men believing that they belong in the category.
Franky, the Republican party cannot claim to be the party of strong men as long as it continues to promote a victim claiming, victim blaming, misogynistic xenophobe as their spokesperson. The majority of Republican leadership have both condemned and supported him depending on how it served their interest. Is this the type of leadership that Balaji claims as ‘strong men’?
The Gender/Marital status poll says it was an Exit poll. I wonder if anyone not affiliated with a party was excluded. This is particularly important since it is the unaffiliated voter that determines election outcomes, I suspect.
This CNN poll is consistent with the poll in the post with regard to gender and marital status.
You know, I've been saying this for a long time now. It's a feedback loop for toxic masculinity. But you know what can fix that? Embracing a positive masculinity.
Instead of "the strong do what they will, the weak do what the must," it should be "the strong do what they can for the weak." It's a protector mindset. The 'toughness' needs to have an outlet. That outlet should be a net positive.
The French aristocrats tried to compete with one another for the best gardens. Let's bring back that. Also craft beer, maker culture, DIYers, funneled through programs like Habitat for Humanity. It's like the premise of Ashoka and the dead child. You can kill millions but can't bring one child back to life.
If the left wants to win back men it needs to focus on creating venues for productive outlets, and middle-class programs to become active 'builders' in their communities. It also needs to be able to affect the messaging and mass communication in social media to see that through... but that's a BIGGER story.
Guilt tactics simply won't work on a toxic mindset, even if its deserved. Giving a venue to own positive outcomes though... that's a win. Just make sure the venue is shared.
Love all these ideas. We could keep it simple and just take all the toxic types to a Grateful Dead show and watch the transformation begin. See Box of Rain on Prime if you haven’t already. It sums everything up pretty well. 💀🌈🎶🎸
This is simple, yet profound. I've never read it framed explicitly this way, but it makes a lot of sense.
The liberal men on the other side are not going to appreciate this, so get ready for the attacks... (lol)
It doesn't matter what "conservative" men do. They've lost the numbers game already, they're just too stupid to see it.
Well said
Don’t confuse simplistic with simple. Most of the bullet points in the apology for a rapidly radicalizing GOP are just simplistic stereotypes that is trying to pass off as libertarian maxims.
"In other words, they don’t define themselves by their victimization but by their aspiration. "
Exactly, it aligns with the theory that collectivist academics in the 80s and 90s realized their 'eat the rich' story which worked for much of the 20th century was dieing. Aspirations were trumping victimization. In response these academics created Critical Theory, the oppressor/oppressed story as a replacement for 'eat the rich.' And now their replacement story is failing.
A great framing. It reminds me of how groups take back words like queer, or the n word. Men aspring to be better men and admiring those ahead of them.
I also appreciate the framing around the tribal game. Play it directly, win and help your tribe win. Instead of passive bleeding in cultural stretgh relative to the blue church.
Great post, Balaji. Glad your podcast is back. The new CEO of NPR is a prime example of the Democrats’ base and values: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/commissar-npr-ceo-katherine-maher-she-her
I am not sure the GOP has any independent positive vision of itself. It exists solely in reactive opposition to the left and Democrats. This essentially renders it a second party of grievances, it is just a different set of grievances. If the GOP could forge an identity independent of Trump and grievance based on some kind of traditional ideal it would probably be a more successful party. The problem is we get cartoon characters like Vivek and BAP being referenced here while avoiding the name of the most important name in the GOP; Trump.
Love him or hate him, to talk about the modern GOP without referencing him once is telling. It is to avoid the actual current driving force because it contradicts the desired narrative. I don’t see the GOP offering any kind of healthy masculine framework in practice or rhetoric. It seems to be the home of a lot of hurt egos and wound licking with an unhealthy dose of false machismo.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
If those numbers are correct, how are the Democrats ever able to win?
Great post by the way!
My guess is that only registered Republicans and Democrats were counted. Anyone with no party affiliation was excluded.
Simple, you can't just look at the total size of the populations, but how many people actually vote. Only about a third of eligible voters actually vote every 2 years, for instance, and a full third never vote in ANY election.
Women vote in higher numbers than men in every age category, and this is consistent in every election going back 50 years. It's especially true at younger ages, where almost 20% more young women vote than young men. But there are about 10 million more votes from women than men in most elections.
Whites vote inmuch higher percentages than non-white, people with higher education vote in much higher percentages (like double) those without, homeowners have almost doubled the voting rate of renters. So you can never look at just sheer size...if people under 30 and non-whites ever voted at the same rates as white older people,for example, the GOP would get blown out of the water in every election.
Also, the preference of unmarried men and married women for GOP is minor as shown in the graph...only a few percentage points spread (and this fluctuates by election year and candidates, with some years favoring Dems such as 2016 when married women only voted 47% for Trump). The percentage point spread for single women however is enormous and consistent, and dwarfs the others.
So if 25M single women vote in an election...which is about how many you can expect in an off year election...it would take more than 40M married women voting just to outweigh their votes for Democrats, bc the single women have a voting spread that is more than twice as large between GOP and DNC. Simple math.
dems have won the popular vote in 7 of the past 8 presidential elections. Were it not for the electoral college we'd have virtual one party rule. I'm not saying this is a good thing, in fact, it's not. But certainly something to think about.
Steal it. Use the courts. Use the Democratic controlled media. Spew out false statistics that hew towards gossipy long held myths.
Well...no.
The question was about votes. Your answer would be an answer to a question about how democrats get more votes, it isn't an answer to how democrats get more votes given those numbers about married/unmarried men/women.
I guess the answer is that the big discrepancy in unmarried women outweighs the smaller discrepancies in the other categories. Also I believe more people are unmarried than married, so the big+ for unmarried women and small- for unmarried men outweighs the bigger- for married men/women.
Biden won the popular vote by a pretty chunky margin.
The supposed reason Biden won the popular vote was due to antipathy to Trump by suburban women, both married and not.
Also, Mr. Carter is correct in that there was a tremendous amount of manipulation of the election by the Left in the last election. From Zuckerberg to Soros to the 51 "intelligence officials letter" on Hunter's laptop to the media to the actual illegal changing of state election laws due to Covid allowing for vote by mail and ballot harvesting--it all combined to a win for Biden in a few swing states by a slim margin.
When we talk about election rigging, it's not just the simplistic notion of voting on behalf of dead people still on the voter rolls (this does happen, too), but all of the things that manipulate minds with false information on behalf of Democrats, like Russia collusion and the coverup of Joe's corruption.
The elephant in the room is the huge influx of immigrants. Tucker Carlson mentioned 22 million .
Guess who they gonna vote for? Democrats are looking to govern in perpetuity.
Texas leads the way, by stopping the inflow.
Come on Balaji - this needs to be addressed.
Well sure, but there's a distinctiom between democrats getting votes in a devious way, and democrats not getting votes but claiming to have got them or whatever.
The original question (as I understood it) was about how Biden got more votes despite getting fewer votes in 3 of the 4 categories of married/unmarried men/women.
An election being rigged implies the means of measuring votes is being manipulated. Not just lying in order to get votes. That's bad, obviously, but it is not the election being "rigged".
More victimhood from the strong right. Hahaha
I totally agree. I knew that the day Biden was elected we would all be victims.
Biden didn’t even campaign. The fact you support him says everything about you and why this country is being invaded and the economy is tanking.
Come on. Balajis, are these the strong R’s you refer to?? Not victims at all /s. How can a party so delusional and detached from fact be taken seriously.
corrupt systems. That is our biggest problem. Corruption.
Here is how we fix it by building better systems, like Leaderless network states for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwNId_vuwPM&t=7s
Give it a generation
They'll do nothing but win as the US becomes more and more non-white. That's what the author of this doesn't understand.
Republicans are set as clear heroes in this narrative - strong, masculine. Democrats are the antagonists - weak, playing victim.
Then Conn Carroll (article quoted as #2 item and the source of the marital status/gender graph) picks on single women as the main fans of Democrats. The author doesn’t even try to explain why single women vote this way, instead he dives into a very charged topic of the destruction of the nuclear family institution, and congratulates Democrats on this - since more single women mean more voters for Democrats. He isn't attempting to offer any thoughts on the reason of the family institution demise either, but instead chooses to implicate and insinuate with the headline: “No one benefits more from the destruction of the American family than the Democratic Party”. Who had committed the crime? The one who benefits the most.
He then goes on to describe how detrimental single female parenthood is for boys (without male role model they tend to have lower academic performance, more criminal behaviour risk), that in turn per the further extrapolations of the author, produces inferior partners that women don’t find equal and, hence, choosing to not procreate and stay single. Which will make them vote for Democrats (mechanics again not explained).
This focus on single women and their “crimes” - being a worse parent, failing at mating, paired with the very headline of Balaji’s article where women are presented in a strictly supporting role (the party is of strong men, and women are there to love them) does a great job at actually obscuring the role of the superhero men of the Republican party.
For example, asking why the single parenthood is overwhelmingly women? Where are the men who have fathered those children now condemned to lesser opportunities in life due to the absence of a great male figure?
Per the same presented data set we see that the majority of unmarried men vote for Republicans. So do the married ones (remarried?) So the majority of men is republican. Did the strong men leave their children? Or the rates of divorced men, or men abandoning their children is significantly higher among registered Democrats?
A fact that receives absolutely zero attention within this discourse about gender and marital component, yet has a huge importance (and, boy, this omission is so telling): Republican men believe they have the right to control women’s body which is not only incredible insulting and oppressive by sentiment, but also results in a lifetime of implications for women of being a primary caretaker, limited career opportunities, lower income, etc. is a very obvious, elephant size factor, why many women swear off republican agenda.
I agree with most of what you wrote... the last little is where we differ. I think the difference is whether a man is pro-life or pro-choice. A believe most pro-life men are republicans because they believe in protecting the innocent... where as a pro-choice man doesn’t protect what he has help to create. To me, the pro-choice man is usually liberal and votes democrat. They love the fact that they are not held accountable for their part and all the risk is with the woman.
I sense in your assumption the same sentiment of slight for the pro-choice (hence, mostly Democrat) men that is introduced in the original post - the (implied?) lesser, non-alpha men, who do not protect what they helped create and do not protect innocent.
I think there is much more than goes into man's "pro-life" or "pro-choice" than the desire to preserve what man's made. Not to mention that "protecting of the innocent" translates completely differently to those who consider woman's wellbeing more important than of a fetus.
It is quite evident that there are other aspects to the control of women that go beyond this one expressed facet of political opinion. Take the assumption of woman being the primary caretaker - it is hardly unique to "pro-life" men although can be more expressed in religious/conservative households. But still the conscious and subconscious implications of perceived differences within gender roles are many.
And again - this has all the attention of the matter drifting away to the men. While I am still seeing a massive conscious omission, intentional sidelining if not erasing of women. After all it's usually the the supporting characters whose motivations are poorly thought through and are so nominal in the scripts that they don't make much sense at the very first glance if you actually pay it a bit attention.
Some really salient points here, Balaji. For me, this was evidenced during the Trump presidency when many men (and women) "loved" the abject bravado he displayed daily. It was a 180 from the rather measured, high brow, hyper polite Obama presidency and, I believe, spoke directly to the masses of people in the interior states consistently overlooked and maligned by the elites. The perceived "feminization" of men dates back to the metrosexuality trend of the '90s that has morphed into the current, palpable confusion among men about masculinity, specifically, how to act, what's considered acceptable behavior, and when does masculinity cross the line into "toxic." While the #metoo movement started as a great and important tool to weed out predators, it has since become a weapon for many to "take down" any man who doesn't fit a specific archetype...that no one can actually agree upon as acceptable. As such, it has felt like hunting season on men, easily, for the past 5 years and has resulted in a generation of confused, emasculated, anxious men who are isolating from one another, balking at relationships, communicating less as a survival mechanism, and retreating to clandestine practices (e.g., trolling, nefarious hacking, addictions) that feel empowering, don't include judgment or rules of any kind, and that supply enough dopamine hits to fill the psychological and physiological void from lack of masculine connection.
From what I see, I concur that the Republican party has become the party of strong men because it appears to be the only place and outlet where men can be and are expected to be "men." And it's becoming the one place where masculinity, in all its forms, is low-key celebrated. We've all seen how dangerous this can be in practice without some form of sane, strong leadership, and direction. Sadly, we're about to experience it again.
I believe for us to survive as a society, we're going to have to shirk all of these labels for a bit and, as you suggest, bench together and find some commonalities again, as men, so that we can extract ourselves from this weird-ass vortex we've fallen into and build one another back up to some form of masculinity that's "easy" and serves society as a whole. Then, we can go back to celebrating our differences and (ugh) weaponizing those on the Hill and on the socials.
The men that you describe as “confused, emasculated, anxious men who are isolating from one another, balking at relationships, communicating less as a survival mechanism, and retreating to clandestine practices” tend to be Trump supporters. It isn’t because of their political ideology. It’s because they identify with his victim story, his misogyny and his xenophobia. The men that I’ve met who have strong principles, healthy relationships and impact within their communities span the political spectrum. They are not predominantly Democratic or Republican.
I haven’t met any democrat males who have strong principals or integrity. Most roll over and follow what is trending.
Very provocative post. I like the finish. Make them stronger. How do you do that? Many on the opposite side are in a cult like state-while at the same time accusing the other side of being in a cult! I don't know that I agree with the scorched earth policy that Trump and many Trump followers advocate-see his recent tweet about Nikki Haley money people.
I think that Republicans since Reagan have always been a big tent party.
Trump is a cult that is destroying the Republican party
Interesting
The gender gap is real, but this a lagging and mixed indicator. Perhaps Dobbs was the worst thing that could've happened to the GOP and we need to listen more to women.
Really disappointed with this…whatever this was. The dems suffer from wokeness that creeps into their ideology. But the rights fascist autocratic slide is papered over with its own ‘mind virus’ - romanticization and fetishizing the ignorant low IQ pseudo intellectual as some sort of ‘Everyman’ ‘working class upstart’. Look no further than the fat redneck (often racists, but not important for this point) who peeked in highschool and is now upset at everyone BUT himself that the world passed him by. He votes against education, healthcare, the working man and free markets every time. If you love this ideology, Arkansas, Mississippi, bama, are all free to move to.
I was surprised to read this work of Balaji. I generally respect and appreciate his perspective. However, this sounds more like wishful thinking than any sort of reality. Self-awareness requires one to ask whether their political party is any better than the opposition’s. In the US, both parties play the victim card because it’s a compelling narrative for their constituents. Everyone wants to blame someone else for their woes. Republicans need look no further than Trump and his doting supporters to see the level of victim consciousness in the Republican party. The Republican party provides no legitimate role model for men; to be fair, neither does the Democratic party.
The most glaring example of Balaji’s poor assessment is in suggesting that the “the state is (women’s) surrogate provider and protector.” In fact, women are under attack by both parties. The Republican party has decided that it knows best when it comes to women’s bodies. The Democratic party has decided that trans rights are more important than women’s rights. Women aren’t out in the world claiming entitlement, the way that deadbeat men are. Women are getting educated, building their careers and looking for ‘strong men’ who are in short supply despite many Republican men believing that they belong in the category.
Franky, the Republican party cannot claim to be the party of strong men as long as it continues to promote a victim claiming, victim blaming, misogynistic xenophobe as their spokesperson. The majority of Republican leadership have both condemned and supported him depending on how it served their interest. Is this the type of leadership that Balaji claims as ‘strong men’?
Great post Balaji--you’re spot on, as usual!
ممنون بلاجی
The Gender/Marital status poll says it was an Exit poll. I wonder if anyone not affiliated with a party was excluded. This is particularly important since it is the unaffiliated voter that determines election outcomes, I suspect.
This CNN poll is consistent with the poll in the post with regard to gender and marital status.
https://edition.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls/national-results/house/0
You know, I've been saying this for a long time now. It's a feedback loop for toxic masculinity. But you know what can fix that? Embracing a positive masculinity.
Instead of "the strong do what they will, the weak do what the must," it should be "the strong do what they can for the weak." It's a protector mindset. The 'toughness' needs to have an outlet. That outlet should be a net positive.
The French aristocrats tried to compete with one another for the best gardens. Let's bring back that. Also craft beer, maker culture, DIYers, funneled through programs like Habitat for Humanity. It's like the premise of Ashoka and the dead child. You can kill millions but can't bring one child back to life.
If the left wants to win back men it needs to focus on creating venues for productive outlets, and middle-class programs to become active 'builders' in their communities. It also needs to be able to affect the messaging and mass communication in social media to see that through... but that's a BIGGER story.
Guilt tactics simply won't work on a toxic mindset, even if its deserved. Giving a venue to own positive outcomes though... that's a win. Just make sure the venue is shared.
Love all these ideas. We could keep it simple and just take all the toxic types to a Grateful Dead show and watch the transformation begin. See Box of Rain on Prime if you haven’t already. It sums everything up pretty well. 💀🌈🎶🎸
I keep getting likes on this. Presumably all thanks to Tim Walz. He's exactly what America needs.