The issue with Democrats getting men back that needs to be addressed is that the political gender gap isn't really an American thing, it's global. We're seeing men and women diverge on politics throughout the developed world regardless of which parties are in power and what coalitions currently exist in their government.
The reason Democrats can't get men back is that the Democrats are the women's party in an age of gender polarization due to feminism. Feminism can't coexist with men because, like most modern identity ideologies, it only exists to negate the other and satisfy the repressed vengeance drives of people who refuse to take responsibility for their personal failures. So long as there's a woman who didn't get the job, who got rejected by the attractive man, who is less attractive than another "pick me" woman, or who in any other way cannot take responsibility for her life, there will be feminism to tell her that it's not her fault, it's the Patriarchy(tm).
For this reason, the not-feminist party pretty much has a lock on men in all developed democracies because as obnoxious as the boomer mentality on gender roles might be, the alternative is to be the designated whipping boy for every loser, fatty, uggo woman who feels like she got a raw deal in life and wants to blame others. Like I said, when it's a global pattern, you need to look for global explanations. American partisan politics can't explain this trend.
I don't know whether or not the GOP hates men, but telling people exactly what they want to hear isn't really revolutionary politicking. It's pandering. If it's true that most men are "non-religious, want to indulge their appetites, and aren’t interested in moralistic scolding," well, shame on whoever simply indulges them for votes. I grant that pandering often equals political success, but it's not virtuous, nor difficult to do.
Republicans are increasingly bad for males in the education debate. Grading practices in America, with its increasing emphasis on homework grades and frequent assessment, disproportionately penalize boys. Any attempt to address this issue by say, eliminating homework grading, has resulted in hysteria from conservatives. Never mind that no serious education system grades homework, it is largely an American practice.
Decades back England started drifting in this direction, the negative impact on boys was one of the reason they reverted to back to students getting all their grades from exams. These old stories are from when England started abolishing what they call "coursework", that is take home assignments:
Basically they saw that boys are bad at homework but do well in exams, so maybe grading homework is not that important. This was fully supported by British conservatives. Contrast this with our conservatives or Richard Reeves' proposals (who never experienced graded homework because he went through a pure exam system but wants to hold boys back a year because they are bad at homework).
*Students may get grades for homework as feedback, but these do not count.
I've always hated busy work and grading systems that reward compliance over actually building skills and knowledge. But on the other hand I think homework grades ARE relevant for certain kinds of work. They're mostly a test of conscientiousness. The relative importance of conscientiousness and intelligence/skills/knowledge is going to vary based on the job.
Realistically, if the purpose of school was to evaluate people for the job market, you would want entirely separate homework and exam grades.
One of my best friends was high IQ, low conscientiousness. He HATED homework. He would calculate exactly how much homework he needed to submit to get an A, assuming he scored at least a 95 on every test, and then stop submitting homework assignments on a certain date. Still mostly had As.
That friend ended up becoming a bum. Never amounted to anything. Marijuana and video game addict, bummed off friends and family, blew through an inheritance, worked retail jobs occasionally.
Most systems are closer to the British where students get most or all of their grades from external exams. I am a foreign educated engineering PhD, my wife and kids born and raised here. Having seen both approaches, I can say the busywork and hoop jumping of the American system is a major reason that students in other countries overtake American students. The American system always had this issue but it got a lot worse when they decided to increase the role of graded homework in order to give girls an advantage. If it wasn't for these assessment practices, the American system would probably be on top.
Other systems may value conscientiousness and compliance even more than Americans, it is just not seen as something that should be graded. Your friend is a concerning example but grading conscientiousness did not help him.
Foreign education traditionalists like myself view academics like learning to play a piano. It involves grind but is not about the grind, you are ultimately judged on your ability to draw on everything you have learnt at once in a performance (which is why they focus so much on end of course exams). In general it is better for a kid to think of learning as something they do for themselves instead of learning to perform for a teacher.
There's nothing that suggest people who are into any of these things have anything interesting or intelligent to say, and they tend to be very unstable personalities too.
Sailer is definitely not a white nationalist. Sam Francis was a white nationalist of sorts but the rare exception that proves the rule in terms of having insight that is widely recognized as powerful. Jared Taylor I don't follow and don't know much about but has that reputation. Unlike Sailer and Francis, I've never seen anyone mention or draw on any writings by him, so he obviously isn't viewed as compelling.
1. Reasonable points about young men, but the "Democrats need to recover men" trope is very overplayed right now and it's going to look stupid in retrospect the next time the Democrats win while still performing worse than Obama and Biden among men. Men are a minority of voters. Young men are especially unlikely to vote. There are many possible winning coalitions for the Democrats that involve losing the young male vote very badly.
2. Generally agree with Aaron's take on antisemitism. I'll admit that I've never heard hard antisemitism expressed in real life. Unlike with race or sex, where I've occasionally heard some very gross and dehumanizing statements. Of course, here in the South, outside of certain clusters like Atlanta, Jews are largely out of sight, out of mind. I live in a county with zero dedicated Jewish places of worship. So you kind of have to be "very online" to have strong views about Jews, unlike women or larger minority groups.
I like to bring up the State of Israel and the status of modern-day Jews in discussion groups at my church, just to test where people are. In my corner of the world, my sense is that Gen Z evangelicals not only disagree with Dispensationalist ideas; they're mostly unaware of them. Unlike we Millennials, they didn't grow up with Left Behind in the background or have Boomer parents that went nuts for Israel. So they tend not to even be aware that support for Israel has a religious dimension. When I bring the topic up, it's often the first they've heard of it.
Is it possible that those Republicans are simply couching their entitlement cut bills in anti-men language to get Democrats to also vote for them, while their main target is just entitlement recipients in general?
The issue with Democrats getting men back that needs to be addressed is that the political gender gap isn't really an American thing, it's global. We're seeing men and women diverge on politics throughout the developed world regardless of which parties are in power and what coalitions currently exist in their government.
The reason Democrats can't get men back is that the Democrats are the women's party in an age of gender polarization due to feminism. Feminism can't coexist with men because, like most modern identity ideologies, it only exists to negate the other and satisfy the repressed vengeance drives of people who refuse to take responsibility for their personal failures. So long as there's a woman who didn't get the job, who got rejected by the attractive man, who is less attractive than another "pick me" woman, or who in any other way cannot take responsibility for her life, there will be feminism to tell her that it's not her fault, it's the Patriarchy(tm).
For this reason, the not-feminist party pretty much has a lock on men in all developed democracies because as obnoxious as the boomer mentality on gender roles might be, the alternative is to be the designated whipping boy for every loser, fatty, uggo woman who feels like she got a raw deal in life and wants to blame others. Like I said, when it's a global pattern, you need to look for global explanations. American partisan politics can't explain this trend.
I don't know whether or not the GOP hates men, but telling people exactly what they want to hear isn't really revolutionary politicking. It's pandering. If it's true that most men are "non-religious, want to indulge their appetites, and aren’t interested in moralistic scolding," well, shame on whoever simply indulges them for votes. I grant that pandering often equals political success, but it's not virtuous, nor difficult to do.
Republicans are increasingly bad for males in the education debate. Grading practices in America, with its increasing emphasis on homework grades and frequent assessment, disproportionately penalize boys. Any attempt to address this issue by say, eliminating homework grading, has resulted in hysteria from conservatives. Never mind that no serious education system grades homework, it is largely an American practice.
Decades back England started drifting in this direction, the negative impact on boys was one of the reason they reverted to back to students getting all their grades from exams. These old stories are from when England started abolishing what they call "coursework", that is take home assignments:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jun/18/boys-girls-different-gcse-course
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/aug/27/maths-gcse-coursework-dropped
Basically they saw that boys are bad at homework but do well in exams, so maybe grading homework is not that important. This was fully supported by British conservatives. Contrast this with our conservatives or Richard Reeves' proposals (who never experienced graded homework because he went through a pure exam system but wants to hold boys back a year because they are bad at homework).
*Students may get grades for homework as feedback, but these do not count.
That's interesting about Britain.
I've always hated busy work and grading systems that reward compliance over actually building skills and knowledge. But on the other hand I think homework grades ARE relevant for certain kinds of work. They're mostly a test of conscientiousness. The relative importance of conscientiousness and intelligence/skills/knowledge is going to vary based on the job.
Realistically, if the purpose of school was to evaluate people for the job market, you would want entirely separate homework and exam grades.
One of my best friends was high IQ, low conscientiousness. He HATED homework. He would calculate exactly how much homework he needed to submit to get an A, assuming he scored at least a 95 on every test, and then stop submitting homework assignments on a certain date. Still mostly had As.
That friend ended up becoming a bum. Never amounted to anything. Marijuana and video game addict, bummed off friends and family, blew through an inheritance, worked retail jobs occasionally.
Most systems are closer to the British where students get most or all of their grades from external exams. I am a foreign educated engineering PhD, my wife and kids born and raised here. Having seen both approaches, I can say the busywork and hoop jumping of the American system is a major reason that students in other countries overtake American students. The American system always had this issue but it got a lot worse when they decided to increase the role of graded homework in order to give girls an advantage. If it wasn't for these assessment practices, the American system would probably be on top.
Other systems may value conscientiousness and compliance even more than Americans, it is just not seen as something that should be graded. Your friend is a concerning example but grading conscientiousness did not help him.
Foreign education traditionalists like myself view academics like learning to play a piano. It involves grind but is not about the grind, you are ultimately judged on your ability to draw on everything you have learnt at once in a performance (which is why they focus so much on end of course exams). In general it is better for a kid to think of learning as something they do for themselves instead of learning to perform for a teacher.
Pride Month, Drag Queen Story Hour, Tren de Aragua, LA riots, burning police cars…these are the things that men want.
I'm curious how and/or why you came to see those three specific dissident topics as off limits and whether or not that is an exhaustive list.
There's nothing that suggest people who are into any of these things have anything interesting or intelligent to say, and they tend to be very unstable personalities too.
Are Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, and Sam Francis WN in your estimation?
Sailer is definitely not a white nationalist. Sam Francis was a white nationalist of sorts but the rare exception that proves the rule in terms of having insight that is widely recognized as powerful. Jared Taylor I don't follow and don't know much about but has that reputation. Unlike Sailer and Francis, I've never seen anyone mention or draw on any writings by him, so he obviously isn't viewed as compelling.
1. Reasonable points about young men, but the "Democrats need to recover men" trope is very overplayed right now and it's going to look stupid in retrospect the next time the Democrats win while still performing worse than Obama and Biden among men. Men are a minority of voters. Young men are especially unlikely to vote. There are many possible winning coalitions for the Democrats that involve losing the young male vote very badly.
2. Generally agree with Aaron's take on antisemitism. I'll admit that I've never heard hard antisemitism expressed in real life. Unlike with race or sex, where I've occasionally heard some very gross and dehumanizing statements. Of course, here in the South, outside of certain clusters like Atlanta, Jews are largely out of sight, out of mind. I live in a county with zero dedicated Jewish places of worship. So you kind of have to be "very online" to have strong views about Jews, unlike women or larger minority groups.
I like to bring up the State of Israel and the status of modern-day Jews in discussion groups at my church, just to test where people are. In my corner of the world, my sense is that Gen Z evangelicals not only disagree with Dispensationalist ideas; they're mostly unaware of them. Unlike we Millennials, they didn't grow up with Left Behind in the background or have Boomer parents that went nuts for Israel. So they tend not to even be aware that support for Israel has a religious dimension. When I bring the topic up, it's often the first they've heard of it.
Just out of curiosity, what racial groups do you hear disparaging comments about? And were those comments from Christians?
Is it possible that those Republicans are simply couching their entitlement cut bills in anti-men language to get Democrats to also vote for them, while their main target is just entitlement recipients in general?
I have reason to believe at least some Republicans really are motivated to specifically go after the "able-bodied men" demographic.