Interesting Quora answer.
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Do leftists understand why young men are becoming more right-wing?
Yes, some do, and parts of the answer isn’t especially popular with the left.
Let’s start with the bits the left are comfortable with…
Money, lies and populism
There are wider social issues at play in the west. We’ve had it good for a long time; high wages compared with the rest of the world gave us superior buying power. But lots of factors have combined to scupper our financial present and future, so whilst we might not be poor, young people day in the west are the first generation to face the prospect of being poorer than their parents and grandparents.
The reasons are complicated, and probably impossible to reverse, which is not a message that voters want to hear.
“things are tough and will remain so for the rest of your life” is not a vote winning slogan. Nor is “a complex interaction between global labour costs, overseas industrial production hubs, and a falling birth-rate at home means we’ve had to prop up the economy with immigrants for 30 years”, or “you will have to work harder and upskill constantly to keep up”.
Populists skip all the difficult stuff and offer easy solutions, which, crucially, do not apportion any responsibility to the voters they target. Left wing populists blame the rich for hoarding wealth, right wing populists blame immigrants, women, transsexuals, and anyone else they think their target voters dislike.
That appeals to all sorts of people, not just young men. Old men, women of all ages, racial minorities; some of these people are voting for populists too.
And here it gets a bit more complicated.
The left and men
The left has become fairly negative about men and masculinity, and has made the mistake of conflating negative aspects of Patriarchal societies with almost all typical masculine behaviours.
It is a huge irony that socialism and social democracy were formed with the blood, sweat and tears of working men, but now reject and alienate exactly the kind of men who made them a political force.
Allow me to be clear, feminism is a good thing, women’s emancipation is a good thing, equal rights are a good thing, equal pay is a good thing. More women in politics, business, the legal profession etc. are all good things.
But…
When you tell young men, repeatedly, that they are toxic, their newly discovered libido is borderline criminal, their hormone driven exuberance is toxic, oppressive and threatening, and that in reality, the only trustworthy man is either gay, effete, trans, sexually neutral or a combination of all 3, then you are not going to win over a lot of young men to your cause.
And like it or not, that is the story that the left media and left wing educators push, even when they don’t mean to.
Here in the UK, the only mainstream left wing media outlet is the Guardian newspaper (ignore the right-wing trolls who claim the BBC is left wing, they think everyone more moderate than Oswald Moseley is a marxist). Almost all articles about men and masculinity are
- negative- masculinity is framed as a problem to be solved
- written by women or gay men
Any positive articles about men will focus on gay men or trans men, or men who reject all traditional masculine behaviours.
You will struggle to find a positive piece about young hetrosexual men who like sport, cars and girls, but you will find plenty of pieces mocking or criticising typical male behaviours and interests.
Now, whatever your views on these typical interests, you can see clearly why many young men would not wish to read a newspaper that so obviously hates them.
Schools
School are quite progressive, and this is often a good thing, but there’s a gaping flaw in translating progressive social theory into education for young people.
Progressive social theory often seeks to address historical injustice. But young people have no history. Addressing the gender injustices of the 20th century to kids born in the 21st doesn’t make much sense. No boy at school now was alive when women were discriminated against in law. No boy starting secondary school now is aware of a world prior to the #metoo movement. But they receive an education that speaks to them as if they are partly responsible for those things, where masculinity is by definition “toxic” and never positive.
I have 2 teenage boys at secondary school. They’ve grown up with 2 parents working; a father who does most of the cooking, a mother who does most of the gardening. I’m a musician, she’s an artist. I work for charities, she works in youth employment. I used to take them to baby groups when they were small, often the only man in the room. We’re a fucking left wing wet dream of equal opportunity parenting, feminism in action, and positive masculine role models (aside from the music, I also do DIY and play and watch sport, and their grandfathers on both sides of the family are loving, funny, supportive but also traditional in other respects- they do not want for positive male role models and positive models of educated and successful women too).
And they still find school to be negative about boys and men in general
But someone doesn’t hate them
Trump doesn’t hate them. Musk doesn’t hate them. Andrew fucking Tate doesn’t hate them. And putting the shitty politics aside, those guys are appealing role models for young men. They’re rich and successful, and they appear to have made their money through brains rather than brawn (yes, Tate was a kickboxer, which gives him extra man points from a teenage boys perspective, but he made his money elsewhere).
The right have welcomed these young men with open arms. They have not only showed them love and attention, they have taken hold of the narrative that the left hate them and twisted it to their own ends.
And we on the left have made it easy, far too easy. We’ve made it easy for young men to see not just the left as their enemy, but women, trans people, gay people, and the entire notion of progressivism as their enemy.
And it isn’t just young men who are noticing it. Women see it, especially in my limited experience, mothers of boys. They see the world their boys are coming into, and just as their mothers saw the world was stacked against their daughters, many women now see the same happening to their sons.
The Internet problem
Most young men consume almost everything through the internet. News, opinion, information; they’re not looking at books or science journals, it all comes through the web, filtered through social media, and social media has lurched right.
Not necessarily because the average social media mogul is anymore right wing than anyone else (although Musk appears to be having some kind of KetNazi breakdown), but because right wing politicians offer them the freedom to datamine and fleece consumers in whatever ways they want, but with the threat of closure if they don’t play along in the propaganda war.
That’s a problem that isn’t going to disappear overnight, but jesus have the left been bad at dealing with it.
I’ll use Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson as examples. Very different, but there's a big audience crossover.
Continued Below
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Spenser Gardner's answer: Yes, some do, and parts of the answer isn’t especially popular with the left. Let’s start with the bits the left are comfortable with… Money, lies and populism There are wider social issues at play in the west. We’ve had it good for a long time; high wages compared wi...
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