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Young male voters are flocking to Trump – but he doesn’t have their interests at heart
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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The US will get the leader they deserve.
Too bad the rest of the world will feel the consequences as well while they have no say in the matter.
Nor does half the country. I just don't understand why trump appeals to young men at all. He's just some horrifically uncool geezer.
Because all of the aggrieved male content on yt, TikTok, podcasts, etc. There's an entire normie-to-nazi pipeline ffs, and the social media algorithms continually promote stuff that's just slightly more "edgy", and suddenly kids have gone from Joe Rogan to Andrew Tate. Because all of the white males behind social media - spez, Zuckerberg, Musk, etc - agree with that content and continue to find excuses to "free speech" it.
Those boys should put in more work getting laid. And that's only a partial joke.
The incel thing drags them in, step 1 into the pipe. The can't get laid, must be something going on they can't put their finger on, but that thing is damned sure someone else's fault.
"I'm white, OK looking and I'm a nice guy!" The unspoken question, the unthought question, is, "What happened to my privilege?" For past generations, life seemed to work out well enough for white guys, but it sure as hell isn't working out for me!
Demographic shift has been wild in my lifetime. Too young to have experienced this, they get a feeling that something nebulous has changed, for the worse. They see minorities of all stripes stepping onto a more level playing field and then tune into YouTubers saying, "Yes! Now you get it! The other is the thing you didn't realize was holding you down!" Well god damn, now it all makes sense!
Back to getting laid, the fun part. Nothing like a good screw to smooth those rejected feels. You're wanted, wanted as a man. But if they think going hard-right is going to land them some pussy, oh boy... The few women in that scene are strictly for the alphas! Your beta ass won't even get scraps.
Dated quite a bit couple of years back. That was an education. Few women had political statements in their profiles, but many wrote something akin to, "I'm not interested in politics.", often followed by a lovey, flowery sentence to lighten the mood. Men: This is code for, "Don't come at me with your Trump bullshit." Yes, apparently guys often pull that horsepucky on the first date. These woman are screening for conservatives, they ain't gonna hear it. Talking on the phone to a potential date (who I ended up dating for a few months!),
"(laughing) Yeah, I'm a bit of a redneck."
Silence. Wrong thing to say there, buckaroo.
"...uh, just how redneck?"
"I loathe Trump if that's what you're getting at."
"Oh, whew! Just checking, can't be too careful these days."
tl;dr: We need to get the word out to these young men, "This crap you're watching is anathema to getting laid."
The reality is that in humans, there's no such thing as alphas and betas. The ethology that claimed that's how wolves organize their societies, and that meme-level social darwinists tried to apply to people, was wrong too.
I cannot emphasize enough to men: nobody wants to hear how overarmed someone pursuing them is.
But seriously, the right wing loves to imply that “real men” are right wing and that women want a “real man”. And the left can’t really counter the first part because “real man” is a concept rooted in patriarchal expectations and is partly associated with real jackasses. But the second part we only have an unsatisfying answer for: that women are people and all want different things.
But they’re training young men to struggle romantically and be pissed about it without the emotional intelligence to deal with that anger. Oh and they’re encouraging those men to buy guns and to take offense at women being scared of men. That’s not how you make your fans into happy husbands and fathers who credit you for setting them on the path to that. It’s how you make them into suicide terrorists, it’s far closer to what Al Quadra did than what loving fathers do.
Feel like calling them incels and assuming you know every thing going on there gives them an easy out. Need to start asking these turds what gives them the right? Who entitled them to feel so fucking special? Was it popular media? Because that's all bullshit and we've known that since day one, so why the fuck do they think they get to live a delusion?
Pair that with white males feeling entitled to things (mostly money, women, and even friends) and society currently being set up to keep them away from those things. They're rightfully angry, it's just their anger is being directed at the wrong things.
Society isn't set up to keep them away from anything: that's paranoid rationalization. They're just shit at relating to people and lack discipline and intelligence. Once you make the empowering realization that the world doesn't owe you a fucking thing, you have a realistic starting point. Blaming other people, or "society," is just an excuse for inaction.
They are Nazis, treat them as such.
Look at 99% of media before 2001 AD. White male hero. Star Trek TOS was a giant ground breaker showing Uhura, but all the real critical leaders were males. Think on this; the James Bond movie Thunderball has a scene that's pretty much rape; they were selling little kids' toys based on that movie. There's a John Wayne movie where Wayne throws someone else's kid into a river to teach the boy how to get over his fear of water.
This is what these young men and their fathers consume. And Trump plays to that. He's a macho hero who plays by his own rules and doesn't take crap from anyone.
Muhammed Ali did more in real life than Clint Eastwood ever did in all his movies put together; guess which one these folks admire?
No offense, but I'd safely bet maybe 0.1% of current generation young men have watched any of those movies. This article is primarily talking about younger Gen Z folks (18-30), so people born 1994-2006. These males specifically consume idiot social media personalities vs old school macho man movies from the 50s and 60s.
^ This. I think even older people have scaled back on watching such fare.
Even some of us before then. Was never into movies vs longer form works
How the fuck do they think Trump is macho?
Because he has money, he can say whatever the fuck he wants and no woman can boss him. Kind of like Elon. If you have a broken brain, that is "macho".
Well, he is in the WWE Hall of Fame...
Because all his earlier life was spent paying pretty women (and girls) to hang around pretending to be attracted to him (when it was actually money, food, and/ot entertainment).
I believe the more precise term is cocaine.
Because Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson tell them Trump is macho and the young men don’t know any better. They think these morons are authority figures
Which I also don't get. Those guys don't seem macho or cool either.
I'm a zoomed so I can confirm you completely failed to bring up any media relevant to Gen Z, and Star Trek TOS and Ali are closer than Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and Bond.
Except he's not. He's a lard-assed con artist, appearance-obsessed but ridiculous: fake hair, fake tan, trying to exaggerate his height and hide his obesity, a bully, a coward, a liar, and anyone who's seen the video of him grovelling in Putin's presence wouldn't say he doesn't take crap from anyone. He's a servile, fawning toady who would have been nothing without his daddy's money. If this society were a meritocracy, he'd be pounding farts out of shirttails in a steam laundry in New Jersey, if he could be employed at all.
You know it and I know it, now try to explain it to them.
The Alt-right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie
Yep, he's a very weird old man. I think they might think rallying around him is a way to reclaim their manhood.
That's the problem with colts from the outside you don't get it.
From the inside they don't get it either but they still keep going.
You’re not paying enough attention if you think Trump winning means “too bad the rest of the world will feel the consequences.” Germany just elected their first far right government since WWII, France had a massive right wing that is now in the EU council, Austria… well they keep making shitty right wing choices, down into South America Argentina shifted right, and other countries continue to do so as well. We’re not special or alone in this.
Oh I'll definitely give you that! My own little corner of the world has been ruled by fairly hard-right nutjobs for over a decade, and while not quite as dramatic as elsewhere, almost all metrics for a positive society have gone down, except employment. We too suffer from insurmountable housing costs and low wages, which is not a coincidence at all.
In other words, all the metrics have gone down.
(Employment is only a positive metric when the alternative is poverty, not self-actualization. The notion that being employed is intrinsically good is some elitist/authoritarian bullshit rooted more in keeping the working class too scared and busy to demand better for themselves than anything else.)
Couldn't agree more. Employment today is little more than glorified slavery.
There were elections in two states in the east of Germany last weekend. In one of them the far right party AfD gained most votes compared to others. In the other state they finished second largest. There is nothing decisive however. Other parties have been called to set up a firewall "Brandmauer" to prevent the AfD to govern.
Exactly. In the last few decades Austria , Turkey and Hungary were among the first to shift to far right party based governments in Europe. An interesting read is this book by Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran (Who fled the country) which is about Turkey going downhill from democracy to dictatorship. This book also reflects on Trump winning in 2016. At some point also Poland had a far-right government but the damage from that is slowly being repaired by a new government. By now among others Slovakia, Italy and the Netherlands have far-right government coalitions. Outside Europe there was Bolsonaro in Brazil. Still, Trump winning (legally or not) would be bad for the rest of the world, especially for Ukraine.
In one German state, Thuringia. That's the German equivalent of Mississippi. It's bad, but not bad on the national level yet. In France, the FN (the extreme-right party) lost in the run-off, though their leader has been pretending to be less of a jackbooted thug than her father, the previous FN leader.
You're correct that the return of fascism is a global problem. If something were to happen to Putin, many of those rightwing parties would collapse back into the squabbling gangs of hooligans and racist goons they were before they started getting Russian advice, funding and help from troll farms. That's why Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik have been so anti-Harris. They know Trump will sell out Ukraine and gut NATO, and that's the only way Putin can keep his job and his head.
I vote my hardest but my brothers are stupid.
I get this way of thinking, but just to be clear: the US didn't get the leader it deserved when Trump "won" the first time, despite receiving millions of fewer votes than Hilary. And almost certainly here, even if Trump "wins," he will have gotten less votes.
That's because there is a 2-3% bias in the current presidential electoral system, the Electoral College. We're founded under a "1 person, 1 vote" ideology that our elections ignore.
So yes, I get the frustration. But we (the sane people) are all in this together, and the majority of voters in the US appear to still be sane, even if that doesn't win the election by default. Solidarity would be the better move here.
In 2016 voters had the excuse that they didn't know how a Trump presidency would play out. They don't have that same excuse in 2024. Anyone who votes for him knows what they're doing. If he wins, even with electoral college shenanigans, it will be a symptom of a much deeper malaise than just Trump.
Yes, I agree with all of that. But "there's a bigger problem" or "Trump voters know who he is" isn't the same as "the US got what it deserves."
I'm specifically taking issue with "deserves.". "Deserves" implies Trump represents the US, which would only be true if the majority of the US (or US voters) chose Trump. We didn't. That's important because he's not just a dangerous leader, and an autocrat, he's one that does not have a mandate of the people.
He still has the support of about 80 million people. While not the majority, neither is it a neglible amount compared to the total. If about a quarter to a third of your population are basically Nazis, you do have a much bigger problem, and the "deserves" - while definitely controversial - does start to kind of figure in the equation.
The world didn't exactly simply forgive the German citizenry after WW2 either, and for good cause.
I don't understand why you are getting downvoted. This was an incredibly salient point.
What we are observing is that regardless of our vast technological progression, a statistically significant percentage of the population continues to suffer from a clinical form of emotional retardation that has severely stunted their ability to think rationally, to feel empathy, or in many cases both.
At some point our species is going to have to learn how to correct for this aberration, or we will reach an untimely evolutionary dead end.
To expand upon that point: if y'all non-MAGA Americans think that the rest of the Germans had a moral obligation to revolt against the Nazis, well, you'd better have a good long think about your current situation.
I think the EC is an outdated system that needs to die, but it was explicitly created because they didn't want presidential elections to be one person, one vote. There is no ignoring here, it's by design.
It was explicitly created because they wanted presidents to be chosen by state legislators, not the general public at all.
Iirc, it was a compromise between those who wanted a direct election, and those who wanted Congress to choose the POTUS. Including concessions to the southern States because they were outnumbered when it came to free people.
I could be missing something about some wanting state legislatures to choose, but I'm pretty sure the bulk was what I said above.
I agree on the history, so "founded on" was wrong on my part.
But arguably the current "one person, one vote" standard controls. The Equal Protection clauses of the 5th and the 14th amendments are incommensurably in conflict with the electoral college. As between them, since the Equal Protection clauses (at least the 14th Amendment) are more recent, those arguably supersede in case of conflict.
That's my reasoning anyway.
At this point the US has massively diverged from the original intent. The original intent was that only wealthy male land owners would vote. Further the entire US government is just a very slightly modified version of what the UK used just with a President in place of a King, and states in place of noble houses.
There is unfortunately a massive sentiment in the US to uphold the founders as some kind of perfect ideal of democracy and that anything that differs from their original intent is somehow wrong. The reality of course is that they were flying by the seat of their pants and largely making it up as they went. In addition ideas and morals have changed greatly since that time. We should be far less concerned about what a bunch of people who died centuries ago would think about some law or ruling and far more concerned about what impact it would have today.
So yes, the Electoral College was intentionally set up as an attempt to prevent direct democracy, but so what? The question should not be what did they intend, the question should be do we still need/want it?
I agree with everything you're saying, except:
At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, delegates debated between Congress choosing the next president vs a straight popular vote. The former risked corruption between the legislative and executive branches, and the latter gave too much power to the uneducated, sometimes-mob-esque populous. After several debates, a compromised was reached - electors. These intermediaries wouldn’t be picked by Congress or elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent electors who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency.
Overall, though some founders agreed with a "1 person, 1 vote" ideology, they were not the majority... unfortunate though that was.
In other words, like having Congress do it, but with added Federalism by giving it to the state legislatures instead of the federal one.
The "Electors as intermediaries" part was wasn't directly about reducing corruption, because having the state legislators choose would've already solved that. The only trouble was that "one state legislator, one vote" wouldn't work because different states set up their legislatures differently and with varying numbers of constituents per legislator, so they needed a sort of 'compatibility layer' to compensate for those differences and the solution was having state legislatures appoint Electors.
Most of us do not deserve the orange monster. Most of us are actually good people who are just trying to survive. Don’t wish harm on the whole country because a bunch of assholes use a shit electoral college system to their advantage.