Democrats Are Realizing They Have a Masculinity Problem

So they have a $20 million plan.

Not only is the Democrat party is still reeling from Trump’s landslide election victory, now it’s facing the disheartening news that for the first time in Rasmussen polling history, a full 50 percent of the country believes the United States is on the right track. The Dems are wrestling with an existential crisis, questioning where they went wrong and how to win voters back.

Even The New York Times acknowledged last weekend that

Working-class voters of every race have been steadily drifting toward the G.O.P. And Democrats are increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated elites, the defenders of a political and economic system that most Americans feel is failing them.

Colorado Democrat Rep. Jason Crow, who is charged with recruiting candidates to help his party win back the House in 2026, was quoted as saying, “There are very real questions about the path forward.” People who used to be Democrats, he says, now vote for Trump. “We have pushed, in so many ways, these people away from our party.” No kidding? Gee, who could have suspected that the political party that prioritizes criminals over the law-abiding, that stokes racial agitation, and that inculcates gender insanity in children might eventually drive some voters toward the party of stability, unity, and normality?

So Democrat donors and strategists “have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.” They read like anthropological studies because the Left is so out of touch with normal citizens that Main Street America is a faraway place. To Democrats, a key demographic like men, which the Democrats lost to Trump, must be studied like an alien species to understand why they could possibly be rejecting an agenda that promotes such Left-wing ideals as transgenderism and polyamory.

In fact, The Times reports that the Democrats have a $20 million “strategic plan” code-named SAM (“Speaking with American Men”) to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality” online. It recommends buying advertisements in video games, for example.

This is how the Democrats go about learning how to relate to regular guys and what appeals to them: through an academic study of the internet.

Democrats are no doubt in denial about why they are so disconnected from straight men and are driving them into the conservative camp, but the answer is simple: the Left has spent the last 60 years or more waging an all-out war on masculinity – feminizing society, accusing American men of having created a “rape culture,” and demonizing men’s very nature as “toxic.” Pop culture pushes openly misandrist stereotypes like goofy, inept sitcom dads, while every female presence in formerly male-dominated arenas like the military or the Boy Scouts is celebrated as a brave blow against the hated “patriarchy.”

Men are failing now by almost every metric, which is a crisis for society, but no one cares because hey, patriarchy. Instead, all the attention goes to girl-boss antics like the handful of female celebrities who soared almost to the edge of the atmosphere for under 11 minutes in Jeff Bezos’ fiancée’s vanity project.

The Left hates masculinity, as I’ve written many times, because the key strategy of cultural Marxism is the abolition of the family, and masculinity is the warrior spirit of the nuclear family. It is the first and last line of defense against the Left’s vision of a totalitarian utopia, in which couples are enslaved in unisex devotion to the State and children are raised by the collective. This is why gender ideology and the eradication of the very definitions of male and female are the hill that the Left is willing to die on.

But Democrats realized as early as the last election season that they were losing the male vote to Donald Trump and JD Vance, so in desperation they pushed the comical narrative that they were the party of “21^st century masculinity.” The models for this new manhood were Kamala’s husband Doug Emhoff, who was embroiled in a scandal involving revelations about cheating on his first wife, and her VP pick Tim Walz, who shared recently that he was chosen partly because he could “code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck” and “put them at ease.” That’s rather delusional coming from the guy who earned the nickname “Tampon Tim” for requiring public schools in his state to provide menstrual products to boys in 4th through 12th grades.

The essence of this 21^st century masculinity, as Democrats saw it, was the willingness of men to defer to female power and ambition – just as Emhoff and Walz played supporting roles in Kamala’s presidential dream. This is hardly a vision of manhood that the vast majority of men would find compelling. Young men today are fed up with being battered by feminist contempt; they yearn for a culture that respects their aspirations and that values the competitive, assertive, and adventurous aspects of their nature.

This is also the party that thought it could capture the young male vote by electing the petite, insufferable David Hogg, 25, who exploited his involvement in the 2018 Parkland school shooting to become a leader of the March for Our Lives movement, as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee last February. (Party leaders quickly regretted this as Hogg began calling for the removal of establishment Democrats to make way for younger radicals.)

But the foul-mouthed stick figure Hogg is not exactly an icon of masculinity, either, and he’s out of touch even with the males of his own age group. He recently claimed that “young people should be able to focus on what young people should be focused on, which is how to get laid and how to go and have fun.” This is a stunning misreading of his own generation’s ambitions, and a shockingly base and immature opinion of what the youth of any generation “should be focused on.” It’s not a message that resonates with young men today.

As if enlisting Hogg wasn’t enough of a misfire, another young Democrat activist is now being promoted as a magnet for male voters. Olivia Julianna, 22, a morbidly obese, queer radical influencer, claims she understands young conservative men. In a recent podcast interview, she gushed,

I spend a lot of time on college campuses. I love young men, I love frat guys, and in that, I realize, even the ones who identify as conservative are almost always pro-choice. They’re almost always pro-gay marriage. You’d be surprised at the number of them who supported Black Lives Matter…

The truth is, again, a lot of them are with us on the issues. They’re just not part of our coalition because they feel like they’re not welcome.

So she believes that conservative young men are closeted progressives who are just waiting for a big group hug from the party that has openly despised straight white males for the last half century. The vision of today’s Democrats is so constrained by ideological blinders that they are incapable of even grasping just how out of touch they are with everyone outside their camp. They are willfully blind to the fact that young people today, especially men, are increasingly rejecting the Left’s revolutionary radicalism and embracing traditional values and institutions.

I can save the Democrat Party $20 million with some free advice, which I am under no illusion that they will take:

First of all, quit smearing masculinity as “toxic” and help to refashion a culture that honors the world-building skills, the aggressive and competitive nature, and the adventurous drive that men embody that make for a flourishing civilization.

Second, jettison feminism and help reclaim a culture that respects and rewards the complementary nature of the sexes, because that is what makes for a functioning, family-oriented society. While you’re at it, quit promoting transgenderism as “courageous,” give both men and women their segregated spaces and sports back, and stop grooming children into your sick gender confusion.

Third, quit pretending that anyone finds male feminists sexy. Men don’t want to be Imhof, Walz, and Hogg, and women don’t want to be with them. Accept that the most compelling role models of masculinity are men who are capable, virtuous, and virile.

I would suggest other steps as well, such as, quit promoting a culture of victimhood, but these three are a good beginning if Democrats want a shot at luring some male voters back. Until then, they will find themselves diminishing in power and popularity as the party of family-destroying, misogynistic and misandrist, fringe gender radicals.

A shorter version of this appeared first at FrontPage Mag.