I think a core lesson here, both in you going into the potentially “uncomfortable” space and your conservative friend who transferred to Berkeley is that real interactions with real people tend to sand the edges off of perceptions of what people are like—turning caricatures into, well, real people.
While I do think some of the entire reaction (“we were too mean!”) right now is overblown, this doesn’t dispel actual problem and opportunity in certain circles.
You described them yourself in terms of what you heard as a young man. These voices aren’t actually academic feminists and are not the intellectually rigorous part of the progressive movement. Many of them are probably the other side of the coin of the manosphere (Andrew Tate is not a shining star of intellectual rigor either). Whatever the conversation here is isn’t going to change them (on either side). But the Democratic Party still does need to think about how to reach people who hear them and think that is its core.
I’ve talked to plenty of men (in the trades, Uber drivers, etc) in Berkeley and Oakland who said they were absolutely going to vote for Trump. It was not all this man-hating stuff. Some was “Trump’s going to fix the economy, Democrats screwed it all up.” Some of it was, “I knew a cousin who died because he took the COVID vaccine that the Democrats pushed on us without testing.” But some of it was, indeed, “Dude, the Democrats just hate men and all they go on about is race, trans stuff, and whatever.” As a note, all of these tended to be Black or Hispanic men.
I also took feminist philosophy, ethnic studies… and religious studies (a course on the Bible)… at Berkeley. It’s always interesting to see what these things are actually about. I think indicting “feminism” is a dumb take. But knowing how to talk to non-white (and white) working class men that make them feel like the party understands their issues doesn’t have to come at the cost of fighting for any of the things (or people) the party cares about. It just needs to be less out of touch with its actual core voting base cares about (or what used to be its core voting base, John Judis’s emerging Democratic majority that is kind of moving in the direction of turning into the Republican’s…).
I enjoyed this piece a lot and think it’s important for some people to read about from your personal experience of it. It’s good pushback because everyone’s a critic after the fact—most of the media narratives right now would be quite different if Harris won. It still doesn’t either make the virulent Vox media style sphere not exist, nor does it mean Democrats have done well in communicating their values (and promises) in a coherent way.
Strongly agreed. And I'm not saying this was the end all be all to the Trump vote.
I do think it matters how major publications talked about gender, and as I said, I think in response to how bad sexism was (and often still is), people over compensated in the online media at the time.
I think this is mostly true, but I believe where we go wrong as centrists is that we are more tolerant of the feminist versions of Andrew Tate than we are of Andrew Tate himself. When women vent in this way, we often don’t want to seem insensitive to their experiences. As a liberal male, I tolerate misandry from my female acquaintances because I understand that the threat of sexual assault and objectification is a uniquely female experience.
The problem arises when we excuse this behavior; to many men, it seems like we are condoning it. Andrew Tate has been criticized by both the left and the right, and even the far-right traditional conservatives have condemned him. However, there has not been any widespread condemnation of misandry.
Darrell it's articles like this that make me subscribe. Something that they manosphere right doesn't seem to get is that higher education is where you're presented challenging views; just because you're reading Andrea Dworkin does not mean that anyone's endorsing her views. Your intellectual development is defined by your ability to consider a range of viewpoints and opinions.
"A frequent theme in the Trump voter interviews..."
I feel like so many of these interviewers and interviewees are just creating post-hoc rationalizations, either for their own decisions or to sell a story to their readers. It reminds me of those 2016 stories that were like: "we're on safari at a diner in Toledo to find out why these weirdos flipped from Obama to Trump.
When in reality it was mostly inflation, a sense of disorder in big cities and some degree of racial depolarization. The only exit poll I've seen so far says the gender gap actually shrunk by two points: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/politics/2020-2016-exit-polls-2024-dg/ I would somewhat agree that the left, writ large, can apply something of a double standard when discussing men's and women's issues, but it seems to me that only a tiny fraction of people vote based on that.
Interesting course-survey style article which is much more in content.
People are easily discombobulated when their expectations (predictions, stereotypes, delusions) aren’t met, and as medical science tells us nothing is quite as bad or violent as a (self) deluded man who is disappointed. Humans dislike surprise. Our conscious mind continuously projects a model it holds of reality, and upon perceiving the world uses energy to adjusts itself or takes actions to minimize the difference. That takes cognitive energy and the mind abhors using excess energy except when absolutely necessary.
When someone poorly socialized (developed a limited repertoire to use to models other’s behavior) confronts reality, it’s telling. They have to expend a lot of energy to adjust the world (enforce conformance to their belief) or energy to learn and adjust their models.
Unfortunately for many, time machines aren’t real and you can’t adjust reality by going back in time (“Make America Great Again”). You can make the effort and learn, which is how we are better people. I merely paraphrase Confucius, Aristotle, Socrates… or if you’re not evolving you’re dead, a broad Sartrean paraphrase.
If the only women you knew were mom, and perhaps some teachers whose only role seems (naively) to nurture you, when you meet women who don’t exist to nurture you, it’s surprising, disappointing, and angering. Sexual attraction enforces meeting many women, so there’s an “adapt or get crushed” loop going on in adulthood. The same thing happens when they meet gay men who don’t meet their stereotypes for masculinity, or people of other social or ethnic groups who don’t define themselves purely in relation to that person’s ethnicity.
It’s the “you gotta get out more often” problem. You correctly identify Jordan Peterson as exactly not recommending socialization which would help build multiple models of real world people to help minimize or eliminate surprise, anger and disappointment.
I’m surprised the course content sounded like a course in economics, but then the economics of Marx make their way into literary exegesis (instead of Milton Friedman, perhaps more useful) as a basis for critiques. I tend to view things through lenses of cognitive science (clearly). I love the phrase “false consciousness” (among many) from these views which are more daily said as “ignorance”. There’s nothing quite like language manipulation.
Internet is a cesspool of melancholy, ensuring people socialize minimally in communication therefore never having the opportunity to learn.
Really thoughtful and honest essay. And a more lucid take on election themes than much of what I'm seeing. As usual, I need to think more about it (which is why I subscribe), so thank you for writing it.
I think a core lesson here, both in you going into the potentially “uncomfortable” space and your conservative friend who transferred to Berkeley is that real interactions with real people tend to sand the edges off of perceptions of what people are like—turning caricatures into, well, real people.
While I do think some of the entire reaction (“we were too mean!”) right now is overblown, this doesn’t dispel actual problem and opportunity in certain circles.
You described them yourself in terms of what you heard as a young man. These voices aren’t actually academic feminists and are not the intellectually rigorous part of the progressive movement. Many of them are probably the other side of the coin of the manosphere (Andrew Tate is not a shining star of intellectual rigor either). Whatever the conversation here is isn’t going to change them (on either side). But the Democratic Party still does need to think about how to reach people who hear them and think that is its core.
I’ve talked to plenty of men (in the trades, Uber drivers, etc) in Berkeley and Oakland who said they were absolutely going to vote for Trump. It was not all this man-hating stuff. Some was “Trump’s going to fix the economy, Democrats screwed it all up.” Some of it was, “I knew a cousin who died because he took the COVID vaccine that the Democrats pushed on us without testing.” But some of it was, indeed, “Dude, the Democrats just hate men and all they go on about is race, trans stuff, and whatever.” As a note, all of these tended to be Black or Hispanic men.
I also took feminist philosophy, ethnic studies… and religious studies (a course on the Bible)… at Berkeley. It’s always interesting to see what these things are actually about. I think indicting “feminism” is a dumb take. But knowing how to talk to non-white (and white) working class men that make them feel like the party understands their issues doesn’t have to come at the cost of fighting for any of the things (or people) the party cares about. It just needs to be less out of touch with its actual core voting base cares about (or what used to be its core voting base, John Judis’s emerging Democratic majority that is kind of moving in the direction of turning into the Republican’s…).
I enjoyed this piece a lot and think it’s important for some people to read about from your personal experience of it. It’s good pushback because everyone’s a critic after the fact—most of the media narratives right now would be quite different if Harris won. It still doesn’t either make the virulent Vox media style sphere not exist, nor does it mean Democrats have done well in communicating their values (and promises) in a coherent way.
Strongly agreed. And I'm not saying this was the end all be all to the Trump vote.
I do think it matters how major publications talked about gender, and as I said, I think in response to how bad sexism was (and often still is), people over compensated in the online media at the time.
I think this is mostly true, but I believe where we go wrong as centrists is that we are more tolerant of the feminist versions of Andrew Tate than we are of Andrew Tate himself. When women vent in this way, we often don’t want to seem insensitive to their experiences. As a liberal male, I tolerate misandry from my female acquaintances because I understand that the threat of sexual assault and objectification is a uniquely female experience.
The problem arises when we excuse this behavior; to many men, it seems like we are condoning it. Andrew Tate has been criticized by both the left and the right, and even the far-right traditional conservatives have condemned him. However, there has not been any widespread condemnation of misandry.
Darrell it's articles like this that make me subscribe. Something that they manosphere right doesn't seem to get is that higher education is where you're presented challenging views; just because you're reading Andrea Dworkin does not mean that anyone's endorsing her views. Your intellectual development is defined by your ability to consider a range of viewpoints and opinions.
"A frequent theme in the Trump voter interviews..."
I feel like so many of these interviewers and interviewees are just creating post-hoc rationalizations, either for their own decisions or to sell a story to their readers. It reminds me of those 2016 stories that were like: "we're on safari at a diner in Toledo to find out why these weirdos flipped from Obama to Trump.
When in reality it was mostly inflation, a sense of disorder in big cities and some degree of racial depolarization. The only exit poll I've seen so far says the gender gap actually shrunk by two points: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/politics/2020-2016-exit-polls-2024-dg/ I would somewhat agree that the left, writ large, can apply something of a double standard when discussing men's and women's issues, but it seems to me that only a tiny fraction of people vote based on that.
Interesting course-survey style article which is much more in content.
People are easily discombobulated when their expectations (predictions, stereotypes, delusions) aren’t met, and as medical science tells us nothing is quite as bad or violent as a (self) deluded man who is disappointed. Humans dislike surprise. Our conscious mind continuously projects a model it holds of reality, and upon perceiving the world uses energy to adjusts itself or takes actions to minimize the difference. That takes cognitive energy and the mind abhors using excess energy except when absolutely necessary.
When someone poorly socialized (developed a limited repertoire to use to models other’s behavior) confronts reality, it’s telling. They have to expend a lot of energy to adjust the world (enforce conformance to their belief) or energy to learn and adjust their models.
Unfortunately for many, time machines aren’t real and you can’t adjust reality by going back in time (“Make America Great Again”). You can make the effort and learn, which is how we are better people. I merely paraphrase Confucius, Aristotle, Socrates… or if you’re not evolving you’re dead, a broad Sartrean paraphrase.
If the only women you knew were mom, and perhaps some teachers whose only role seems (naively) to nurture you, when you meet women who don’t exist to nurture you, it’s surprising, disappointing, and angering. Sexual attraction enforces meeting many women, so there’s an “adapt or get crushed” loop going on in adulthood. The same thing happens when they meet gay men who don’t meet their stereotypes for masculinity, or people of other social or ethnic groups who don’t define themselves purely in relation to that person’s ethnicity.
It’s the “you gotta get out more often” problem. You correctly identify Jordan Peterson as exactly not recommending socialization which would help build multiple models of real world people to help minimize or eliminate surprise, anger and disappointment.
I’m surprised the course content sounded like a course in economics, but then the economics of Marx make their way into literary exegesis (instead of Milton Friedman, perhaps more useful) as a basis for critiques. I tend to view things through lenses of cognitive science (clearly). I love the phrase “false consciousness” (among many) from these views which are more daily said as “ignorance”. There’s nothing quite like language manipulation.
Internet is a cesspool of melancholy, ensuring people socialize minimally in communication therefore never having the opportunity to learn.
Really thoughtful and honest essay. And a more lucid take on election themes than much of what I'm seeing. As usual, I need to think more about it (which is why I subscribe), so thank you for writing it.