I posted this somewhere else, but it was pretty much ignored. Here are all the cites you need.
Charlie Kirk’s audience consisted to a large extent of resentful young white men who felt that modern society wasn’t delivering the status that they deserved.
Don’t take my word for it, read the whole thing. This is the foundation of a lot of the things that are going wrong right now
Yeah, that’s probably true (even if not really cited, and certainly less extreme than the OP thinks). We’ve gone through many such cycles in history.
Typically the “manly man” crowd loves it until they realize that either (a) they are going to get sent off to war or (b) the economy crashes because you can’t actually run an economy off “fuck the libs” vibes.
But yeah, angry people mad that they no longer have a preferential position in society has always been a powerful populist force.
What, exactly, do you think Democrats should do about it? They certainly can’t “out anger” MAGA. And it’s not like they are going to suddenly become the queer-bashing party or start preaching that women should give up their careers and become housewives.
And there is the problem, isn’t it? The people you associate with are the people that you want to associate with, leading you to make conclusions based on your own prejudices.
I would argue that one huge step in the right direction would be to stop portraying things as “X is rising at the expense of Y, yay!” and more of “Let’s lift X and Y up together.”
I understand that’s not the intention of many Democrats. But that’s how the messaging often comes across, on social media.
Possible. At any given moment, many voters hold a basket of policy stances in their minds, some of which are seemingly contradictory. Such as being pro-gun but also pro-abortion, etc. Or pro-Trump but also pro-immigration-moderate.
I think it’s actually likely to be that “vibes” is outweighs any sort of policy position at all.
In youth culture (particularly 18-22) being on the right side with your in-group is hugely important. I personally know lots of young people that have fallen in the with MAGA zeitgeist even though they don’t really agree with much of any of it policy-wise. It’s just the cool thing to be. Sort of a way to be edgy and rebel again your moderate WASP middle-class suburban parents.
I don’t think it’s portrayed as “Yay, whites are getting less spots and minorities are getting more”, or “woohoo, there are fewer men becoming doctors” but there are certainly times it can be interpreted that way.
To use one example, my local school district reports out to the school board about what percentage of minority students get spots in the gifted program. Increases in this percentage is seen as a positive development. But when it’s presented that way, it’s easy to see how white parents whose kid didn’t qualify would think it’s being celebrated that someone else got the spot at their kid’s expense (even if if it almost certainly didn’t go down that way).
As an alternative, the district could just highlight the increasing number of minority students qualifying without making it a percentage. That way it isn’t seen as a zero-sum game.
You can make whatever assertions you like here, but in the Politics & Elections forum, you are expected to back up your assertions with citations and evidence.
Back maybe twenty years ago now, there was talk of the South Park Republican. “I hate the Republicans but I really hate the Democrats.” I think those tend to less contradictory than some think, with a trend towards people approaching more of a libertarian or old fashioned liberal approach to things, often with some populism thrown in.
This is what I think gives the Democrats trouble, especially with young men. There’s at least a faction of the party (or possibly just loud people online but that counts too) that is very loud about intersectionality, punching up/down, oppressor/oppressed, privilege, and similar things that work better in academia before they get picked up and heavily distorted and used as a cudgel by the general public. It is very reasonable to hate everything Trump and the Republicans are doing right now while also hating the identity politics and terminology games parts of the left seem to love. Or just to hate the Democratic establishment for its failures just as much as the other side.