This is not my personal opinion, I know Gen Z men who voted for Harris. But the voter demographics really speak for themselves, and maybe now people will look at the radicalization of young men as a serious (but solvable) issue.
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I’m a gen z male, raised in a far right Republican household. I’m a social democrat. I am progressive.
Good on you. No group is a monolith
Unironically, congrats on breaking free of the brainwashing. I grew up in an insanely red rural area and a very conservative religious family, unlearning all that shit has been a decades long process (and still continues).
Same man. It was wild when middle school rolled around and I finally gained awareness of the world beyond myself and learned what the Republicans actually were and wanted. A friend who knew more about politics than me explained some stuff, and suddenly I had to question why my family was against progressive beliefs.
Same. I live on a ranch in a deeply red area. Voted Kamala. I’m also happy to say my conservative parents are ex-republicans.
Same here. I’ve cut my entire family out of my life over this shit.
I’m also a Gen Z male, raised in an evangelical household at a Christian school that supported Christian nationalism, and was supposed to be a strong conservative Christian but ended up turning into an atheist socialist instead. It’s kind of funny to read that Gen Z is going radical right when for me it was the opposite.
Can you please tell your entire generation to get it together worldwide? That’d be great, thanks.
Leaving this here just in case: /s
According to the voter demographics, you’re a minority there.
There is a lot to be said here. I’ll use my own experience as an example.
I’m a millennial male who had a terrible time as a young adult through my mid 30s. I grew up in a fairly religious/conservative area of the US, and I didn’t have the ability to even start questioning that before my college years because literally everyone I knew was either a vocal supporter of or tacitly accepted that cultural status quo. Mental health issues were either not discussed or not recognized in any serious fashion. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I finally understood that I had severe depression and anxiety and sought help, despite suffering from it since my early teenage years.
Socially, I never felt like I was cool enough or good enough. I didn’t understand women, and the endless series of rejections and confusing encounters only served to erode my low self confidence further. I had no idea what a healthy relationship looked like because my parents were just going through the motions at that point, and the relationships I saw in TV shows and movies were incredibly shallow. The few people I considered friends did not support me in any positive way. I eventually kicked them to the curb, preferring solitude to being the butt of their jokes.
I was a prime target for recruitment for the alt-right: depressed, alone, disaffected, and ready to lash out. The only thing that kept me from going in that direction was a keen sense that the rhetoric was bullshit and its leaders only cared to take advantage of the rank-and-file to accumulate money and power. Many people I knew were not so perceptive and became victims of that movement.
My only saving grace was that I had a decent job with healthcare benefits, which allowed me to get the therapy I needed to overcome these challenges. Again, most people I knew did not have such resources. Nearly a decade later, I am now a family man with a wife and child. I am far happier than I have been at any other point in my life. Despite that, there is still plenty I don’t understand. I don’t have a good grasp of what positive masculinity looks like. I cannot point to anyone who has served as a good, male role-model in my life. I still don’t have any close male friends with whom I can share my feelings and challenges.
However, I do understand how easily young men can be swayed to far-right crusades. Social media warped my view of reality, and it’s far worse now than it was 10-15 years ago. Moreover, there is no alternative to far-right echo chambers for young men to commiserate and get help. Those spaces simply do not exist on the left. If you dare to complain or vent, you will immediately be told your problems don’t matter and called a misogynist. I can readily call multiple conversations I had with liberals and feminists who rejected my problems, even being told that I was “living life on easy mode” because I was a man.
For all the women who are reading this, I get it. As a man, I don’t have to worry about the government meddling in my bodily autonomy. For the most part, I don’t have to worry about walking alone at night or being accosted or raped. I don’t have to worry about being taking seriously at my job or being passed over for promotions because of my gender. However, none of that negates the challenges that young men are facing. Their gender does not save them from broken homes, abuse, mental health issues, a bad job market, degrading standards of living, student debt, double-standards, confusing and contradictory narratives surrounding dating and relationships, etc. Yes, privileged men with no right to complain do exist, but they are an extreme minority. The vast majority of young men are in a bad place, and the only people reaching out to help have ulterior motives. If you want things to change, try having some empathy. Maybe you will get empathy for your problems in return.
As a Gen Z man who statistically should have fallen down the incel and alt-right pipeline but didn’t, this echos exactly what I see in my generation. We don’t have positive examples of Masculinity, and the left just yells at us that we’re trash, when we struggle with things and most don’t have many (or any) good friends to lean on. So of course they go to the alt right.
and the left just yells at us that we’re trash
I’m a millenial and I never got this. There must be a split somewhere when people fell into different echo chambers or algorhythms. Like 7 years go I used to frequent reddit subs like MGTOW and pussypassdenied, looking for something to connect to because of clinical single-ness. These were the only spaces I would find comments like that. On my other, left wing, socialist Internet spaces this wasn’t present. That is why those pro-men/anti-women subs never connected to me. The work on yourself, improve yourself and keep reading was great, but the insane amount of hatred and religion pushing was crazy.
Yet it feels like men in my situation these days don’t have alternatives. It’s sad when Andrew Tate is considered masculine. Terry Crews or Keanu Reeves are much better. Sure they’re not podcasters, but they give off a much better vibe.
It’s a shame that the space these men find themselves is pushing against freedom of expression for others.
I think it depends on a lot of real-life interactions, too. I had coaches and teachers and older work colleagues (including in heavily male dominated workforces, like the military) who were strong masculine role models. So when it came to media consumption I tended to gravitate towards celebrities or famous characters who already fit the worldview.
Nick Offerman played a libertarian Ron Swanson on TV, but in that fictional work the core cultural markers of manhood were explicitly presented as non-political, and seem largely shared with the left-leaning actor himself.
Terry Crews is similar, as you’ve pointed out. On Brooklyn 99 his character was presented as a loving father of young girls, who was in connection with his feelings, but also loved working out and sports and, you know, was a cop with a gun. In real life, in interviews, he seemed very much in tune with healthy masculinity and his place in the world.
Steve Kerr and Greg Popovich give off positive male leader vibes and often speak up about political and cultural issues, while largely being protective and supportive of the younger men who essentially work for them.
George Clooney is funny because he came off as a bit of a womanizer for years, but dove right into his long term relationship with a woman whose own career would arguably overshadow his. He is unabashedly and vocally a supporter of Democrats and other causes associated with the left in the United States.
Nobody is perfect, or deserves to be put on a pedestal. But there are little nuggets of positive examples all around us, including traditionally masculine men who support ideals that are more culturally and politically associated with the cultural left.
George Clooney is funny because he came off as a bit of a womanizer for years, but dove right into his long term relationship with a woman whose own career would arguably overshadow his.
George C- oh, you mean Amal Clooney’s husband. He’s some sort of actor, right? Anyway, Amal Clooney is awesome and a hero.
I mean, I get the joke but this whole thread is actually about not dismissing men’s problems and acknowledging some positive male role models, just feels a little in bad taste. Yes amal Clooney is amazing, but read the damn room. That’s part of the problem, even after this whole discussion, you still come away with the same conclusions - let’s not bother celebrating the white male because he doesn’t “deserve” it as much as (in this case) his wife
There is only really Noel Deyzel from social media as a positive role model
Thanks for relating all that - lots of information but worth the read. You largely summed up my own early existence in the first few paragraphs. My therapy came in the form of getting involved in theatre, which exposed me to all kinds of people and ideas, revamped my attitudes and saved me from embracing radical ideas that are more or less based on rejecting a society that rejects you. I think that same cynicism is common in people from many different backgrounds, who share the same alienation for all kinds of reasons.
I’ll even add one - throughout my software career doing contract jobs, finding a new gig always took me 2-3 weeks and was very routine. When I turned 50 the 2-3 weeks abruptly and permanently became 2-3 months, and took a lot more effort. Apparently in that community I was suddenly too old. Only one recruiter let slip that age was the reason a potential client rejected me, but the sudden difference at 50 was stark. So I don’t know what you do for a living but you might be facing that yourself when it’s your time.
Anyway I totally agree about empathy. I don’t know what it is but people seem to be constantly on guard nowadays. Their go-to assumption is to look for evil and refuse to accept simple mistakes. That and permanently crucifying anybody who does anything morally unacceptable, or ever did in their past. If somebody Likes the wrong tweet it’s unforgivable and irredeemable. I don’t recall another time when so many people were so militant about this attitude. Forgiveness used to mean compassion, now it means you’re complicit, enabling, a shill, “just as bad,” etc. I think we need to think of the glass houses analogy and stop pretending to be morally impeccable.
there is no alternative to far-right echo chambers for young men to commiserate and get help
I feel like there’s an adjacent issue where any space like that without a clear political lean quickly gets pushed rightwards by shitters
ugh I remember my last straw on Facebook was my high school alumni group becoming a shit-storm of sea-lioning and a couple folks blocking people and also spamming nostalgia-posts to drown out and push down more serious discussion. A high school famous for it’s science-focus but alas, the older (but not much older) folks were openly commenting about that black-people-crime-percentage “statistic” and gay people.
That was a very thoughtfully written response. I can relate to a lot of your story and agree with your conclusions. There needs to be more outlets for men as an alternative to right wing communities. I hope you meet more liberals and feminists that are open-minded to men’s hardships. I have to believe there are more reasonable people out there on the left than not.
I have to believe there are more reasonable people out there on the left than not
There are, but online is where the psychopathic man haters feel free to let their colors fly. At union conventions and community meets, I only ever hear tame comments from the very obvious radfems.
half joke first. nobody’s trying to meddle in our bodily autonomy, yet.
edit: i havent looked too close at it but the mensliberation space on lemmy.ca may interest you? cancermancer down bellow has a rec for r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates that looks to have another good perspective in the topic. so im sticking it right here with the other.
I’ll try to approach the topic from my perspective as well. my gender has never really be part of my internal view of myself. but it is an inescapable part of how other people will see me, and the rules are always whatever the other person wants. so maybe not the poster child for speaking on masculinity. i’m literally the default charater generator in every videogame, but it’s just a hallucinating meat suit.
talking about gender concepts and social roles was a norm growing up because i did that growing up in the weird outside groups the christian kids chased. any reference to maculinity was done at me as an attack, even when i was doing it according to the rules. i agree, there are few places for young men to explore their way out of those strict views. especially in the early years. i’ve often seen them jump straight into spaces meant to be safe for people who’ve had not great experiances with the topic, especially women. and press other people to do all the work, explain things to them and navigate their often* harsh language. and i get it. when you’ve only ever been allowed to express 3 levels of the same emotion, it’s gonna be rough sorting that out.
it’s going to be on people who have worked their way through that mind set to make those places for kids to start the process. most importantly, people who share their experiance and perspective. yes folls like me can and really need to come in there and talk openly. but my own experiance is never going to line up in a way that will connect with those kids. even when i look exactly like our experiance should line up.
…if theres more spelling mistakes then there are more spelling mistakes. fuck it thats too much text for a phone
Bodily autonomy? What’s this scar on my cock again?
fair point. sounds like theres a need for a space to have these conversations. with people effected by the topic and moded by people on the otherside of the joirney, who could have empathy in the difficult moments. anyone know of a space? i’ll try engaging where i can.
Have also heard people talking about giving men vasectomies at 16 (people who don’t understand they can’t actually be undone)
FWIW I’ve only seen that used to illustrate how ridiculous it is that we find it essentially normal to have laws controlling what women can do with their reproductive systems but not men. I’ve not seen a single credible example of someone seriously suggesting this.
I’ve known a person who took that seriously and thought it was a good idea
I mean, yes, I’m sure there are people who do. There are people who think the earth is flat. They don’t influence policy though.
Edit - my point is, no one is coming for your testes, and knowing someone who thinks it’s a good idea is no better an example here than it would be for me to say I’m worried a flat earther is going to influence space exploration policy.
Fair point
mensliberation space on lemmy.ca
I appreciate your otherwise quality comment but I have to say that I don’t intend to use a space that only views men’s issues through a feminist lens.
On Reddit, LeftWingMaleAdvocates is a solid lefty men’s space.
i spent all of a minute poking around. not a topic i deep dive in really. more hoping to pose the question of “hey do we maybe have a space like this?”. someplace where people having a shared perspective would have the patience for eachothers early questions they once had.
i’m not on reddit but a few minutes poking around there it doesn’t look crazypants. so i’ll add it to my comment too.
No that’s fair, I don’t want you to feel like I’m saying you’re acting in bad faith because I absolutely do not believe that.
nah i get it, i assumed good faith on your part as well. i skimmed through some threads in that sub and all i wanted to do was start jumping saying “guys just pause a second so we can talk about some of this language”. but thats absolutely not the place for me to do that.
it would be as productive as the guys who’d go into r/twoxchromosomes posting “explain like i’m 5 why my wife left over not doing the dishes enough”. assumimg good faith, i get he’s thinking “ok this is where other women who have done this talk, i’ll ask them”. there wasnt anyplace else to send the dude, so a few people would try responding. but it always devolved into language policing, because not doing so in that space would forfit the sub to the people it was designed to be safe from. i never commented in that space specifically because it was their sub and i was just there to understand perspectives. i was a guest in their home.
people need to be able to use the only words they know with the meaning they understand them to have. before they can do any self reflection or understand why it becomes important to adjust our language for eachother sometimes.
I have to imagine if the democrats had not largely ignored these problems they would’ve won by a landslide
If you want things to change, try having some empathy. Maybe you will get empathy for your problems in return.
Funny a man has said this twice this week. Women have higher EQ than men in general - how do you think they developed this?
Extending empathy to men is not what helps men feel empathy, though. That’s not how empathy is developed. If it was, movie actors and kings etc who have empathy extended to them constantly, would be the most empathetic people on the planet. Yet they are the least empathetic.
The thing that gets men to feel empathy, is the man feeling empathy. It’s like a mental weight - you have to choose to lift it. I can’t make you do that by rolemodeling. You have to actually take time and do the work. Actually sit down and think and perspective take without projecting or objectifying. Just radical acceptance. You have to do that work. Your comment asking women to once again bear your emotional burden of empathy is silly. We can’t. It’s a skill you gotta develop. And the sooner you do it instead of thinking it’s women’s work (which is why you just asked us women to be empathetic - our assumed role), the sooner the world is less shit.
And only then can you be truly caring, empathetic, or a feminist - by examining your own actions as a man. It’s great to allow men to have a sense of community outside of toxic masculinity, but this isn’t how men develop empathy or Feminism and that’s weird to phrase it like that,as if it’s valid for men to punish women by removing rights, voting for Trump, removing empathy, and not being prosocial. In fact, that’s quite controlling and abusive.
I once saw a gif on Reddit of a little girl being forcibly kissed by a little boy (both about 6), and she shoved him off and he looked sad. The entire thousands of comments focused on the little boy’s first rejection. No one even noticed it was the little girl’s first sexual assault. She even wiped the kiss off, reminiscent of victims cleaning themselves after assaults.
When I pointed this out, people were angry. How dare I suggest that little boy is a monster. But I wasn’t. I was entirely focused on the little girl’s experience and I wasn’t advocating for anything relating to the boy. In fact, I think an appropriate “punishment” would be to explain to him to not touch people without asking etc. And that’s it. I just wanted to see her experience and make sure she was okay. Her situation is more important and critical in this moment than the little boy’s. But these men heard ‘sexual assault,’ and instead of empathizing with the victim, they empathized with the assaulter, so much so they started defending him from a nonexistent attack. Do you not see the clear problem here? Do you see the issue?
But men were so unable to extend empathy to a girl, to a woman, that they literally couldn’t absorb this information or perspective take as her. It was impossible for them to imagine what she felt like. This was like 3 years ago. It was astonishing. No, men do NOT empathize with women. Men empathize with themselves as an idealized version of who they would be as a woman - that’s projection by definition and is entirely how they feel entitled to control women and objectify them.
So much fucking this
Theredpill is banned on reddit but they leave redpillwomen online. Weird reddit…
It seems counter intuitive but I don’t think Gen Z is as good with technology as most people assume they are.
I think they just believe everything they see on YouTube and TikTok. Those algorithms just feed people what they want to see and don’t challenge anyone.
Who thinks they’re good with technology? They’ve never had technology that requires any more knowledge than how to swipe. They’re shit with technology.
I mean that many people just assume younger generations are better with technology.
Do they? That’s what I’m asking, who thinks that? I don’t know anyone who thinks zoomers are good with technology.
It’s absolutely a belief and it used to be true. For millennials especially it was true. We grew up with technology around us, but they required effort from the user to make them work. These created a lot of self-learned resourceful technologically literate people.
Modern technology almost all wants to prevent you from messing with them. They function out of the box and limit your ability to modify them. This has created a lot of people who can’t understand how technology works beyond the user interface. They’re great at using a touch-screen, but they don’t understand what the device is doing beyond that.
Millennials aren’t zoomers though. The original statement was specifically about zoomers, and idk anyone who thinks they’re good with technology, and from what I’ve seen, they are not.
Gen X and older millennials are the only generation who knows stuff on average. We had to teach our parents, and then we had to teach our kids (who don’t care to learn). We’re sandwich meat!
That’s why I worded it the way I did. There’s still a sentiment that younger people should be better with technology, since they’ve interacted with it their whole life also. Their interaction was much different than ours though.
I personally don’t, but it’s a sentiment I hear around me from time to time in the workplace or on TV.
That’s been a common and roughly true trope for a long time, but I think we may have hit the point where high technology has been ubiquitous for multiple generations now and it’s probably not quite as true as it once was (that the younger generation is always better with technology than the previous)
Who thinks they’re good with technology?
Millennials, it’s the only thing we’re good at, we suck at everything else…
I meant who thinks zoomers are good with technology.
We killed napkins motherfucker
Also stigma about depression, no stigma when you’re the majority.
We killed napkins
Do you use your sleeve? I don’t understand.
Apparently millennials prefer paper towels over napkins and it’s affecting the napkin industry.
“tissues” vs “kitchen rolls” for anyone wondering what a paper towel is compared to a napkin.
I gotta say, I always found tissues just sub-par for the job. A kitchen roll (towel? sleeve? paper?) you just need to fold it once and it will hold against a storm
Maybe napkins is some kind of influencer or something
You could literally search “millennials killed napkins” and get your answer
I’m not, tho. 😎
Have a discussion with me about napkins. This is a social website.
Ok, the first article says “Millennials killed the paper napkin industry” then says they’re using paper towels instead
WTF is the difference between a paper napkin and a paper towel? I thought they were the same thing? 😂
You could literally search “millennials killed napkins” and get your answer
Yep. Older people (Millennial, Gen X) grew up with PCs that could be heavily modified, run any program, even repurposed to run Linux if you were brave. Later generations who grew up with phones only get to use the apps that Apple / Google approve of. There’s no hacking the system, so you get whatever the algorithm says you get.
Older people grew up on BBSes and later “Bulletin Boards”, which were mostly the same thing just with prettier graphics, also with email, and sometimes instant messengers. Communities were smaller, and there was no mediator. Younger ones are stuck in apps that are designed around engagement, with a “celebrity” vs “fan” content model where it’s all geared around followers and likes. It’s all parasocial relationships from the “fan” side, and trying to keep up with whatever the algorithm wants from the creator side.
It really fucking sucks that platforms that used to be designed to allow 2-way communication between equals have flopped so hard trying to follow the exact model you just outlined. For all its faults, Facebook used to be a really great place to keep in contact with long distance friends and family. Now it won’t even show you anything anyone in your friends list posts, and the options for interacting are completely neutered on their mobile site. It went from being a site I enjoyed, to a site I despise. And there aren’t any alternatives. The era of a platform for friends and family is over.
The only reason Facebook was at all successful is that they made it easy to migrate over from MySpace.
Before Facebook people weren’t locked into their social networks. In the early days of BBSes you were mostly on your local BBS, but you could sometimes communicate with another BBS if your BBS was part of FidoNet. When instant messengers like ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc. became popular, it was common to use a unified program that logged into all of them at once. But, already there was corporate consolidation. BBSes were often run by people out of their own homes, or at least by hobbyists. The early messengers were all commercial products.
Then there were the early social media websites: SixDegrees.com, Classmates.com, Friendster, (LinkedIn), MySpace, Orkut, and in 2004 Facebook. At first Facebook was closed to anybody who wasn’t a US university student. You even had to have an email address from a US university to register. But, when they wanted to grow, they made it easy to migrate from other sites, especially MySpace. They released a tool that allowed you to basically stay in touch with your MySpace friends from Facebook, but not the other way around. That slowly drained people away from MySpace until it eventually collapsed. These days, thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, if you tried to release a tool that allowed people to migrate away from Facebook, you’d be nuked from orbit.
Now, every social media site is a walled garden protected by a moat and an electric fence. Every one is owned by companies worth more than $1b. People can’t leave because the FOMO is too strong, but they don’t want to stay because the sites are pure shit. You see that especially with Twitter. It is absolute shit since Musk took over, but many people feel like they can’t leave. And, when people do leave, do they go to Mastodon, which isn’t owned by a corporation? Nope, they mostly go to Threads, owned by Meta, or Bluesky, owned by a lot of the same people behind Twitter.
Unless the governments of the world step in and either break up the tech giants, or require that they are interoperable, I don’t know how we back out of this shitty situation.
I lived through those early days, and although they were glorious, those boards, and forums, and ICQ chats weren’t filled with friends and family.
MySpace was the first place where everyone was. It was the first time in history where you could go find out what happened to all of your old friends and rekindle a relationship if you wanted to.
I remember going through basic training when the Drill Sergeants told us we’d make the best friends of our lives, that we’d never see again. And that held true for 10 years after I got out. Then suddenly MySpace became hugely popular and I found them all again! Because of Facebook I’m still friends with several of them today.
Facebook got really lucky with the timing of their public launch. They still kind of just sat around being empty until MySpace started massively changing the platform under new ownership from NewsCorp. I think that acquisition was the worst in history up until Twitter.
Anyways, in their infinite corporate wisdom, they wiped everyone’s profiles. Like seriously, WTF? They deleted everyone’s pictures, all of their blog posts, comments, and just about everything. Talk about not understanding what they bought. They did release a tool to get your pictures back, but why the heck would anyone trust the site after that. People were already checking out Facebook, so they all just jumped over there. Plus the clean design, with lots of white space (which is completely gone now), was very Web 2.0 and people liked it.
Anyways, like I originally said, and like you confirmed, that era is over. We both know the government is never going to split them up, and even an exact clone of a service today would fail. Social sites need people to succeed, and people don’t have any interest in creating a new community when there’s all of these ready-made communities that they already understand, regardless of how bad they have become.
The only reason TikTok succeeded is because it had backing from CCP and basically infinite money to market and attract new people. No start-up would ever have those types of funds these days. If somehow through a miracle a start-up did acquire enough funding to be a threat to meta or Xitter, then the billionaires at the heads would make an irresistible offer, buy it, and kill it. It’s over. The free Internet is dead.
We both know the government is never going to split them up
The American government isn’t going to. But, I do hold out hope for the EU. The EU already doesn’t like the US tech giants, and they’re much more driven by lobbying by European-based businesses, almost none of them on good terms with the US tech giants.
We’ve already seen what effect the GDPR had on the web, and it affects Americans even if the law doesn’t apply in the US. We’ve seen how Apple has had to design all its devices to use USB-C because of new EU rules. I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect that the EU might require Mastodon-type rules for social networks, that you can leave to an instance that communicates with your old one, and that your followers and followees change when you move. Facebook would hate it, but Google (whose social network efforts all failed) wouldn’t really be affected, so they might push for it just to spite Facebook. Some of the other big American tech companies might actually like it. Like, Netflix might like to be able to graft a social network onto their video watching platform so that people could watch and talk about videos together.
With the Biden administration going out and Trump going in, I think the FTC is going to go back to being a corporate cheerleader, but I still have some hope for the EU.
Xennial here, you speak pure facts.
Sure are some glass-tappin motherfuckers
This made me actually laugh out loud. I’m calling gen z that from now on
I was actually wondering how the gender gap changed in this election, and it wasn’t at all what I was expecting:
According to exit polls by CNN Trump gained +2% of the male vote, and +5% of the female vote compared to 2020 - though women were still more likely to support Harris, of course.
An analysis by the AP found similar results, with the support from men under 45 increasing +7%, and women under 45 +6%, while for older men it decreased -1%, and for older women stayed the same.
Surprisingly, Trump’s support among racial minority groups increased while white and older Americans increased support for Harris.
After thorough analysis and much thought I have ultimately concluded that I have absolutely no fucking clue what is going on with American politics.
It’s the economy. Look at the numbers for voters without a college degree, rural voters, and lower income voters. Trump won all of these groups. In the WaPo exit polls the issues are included, not just the demographics. For voters who think the economy is the most importantly issue and for voters who think the US economy is doing badly: Trump dominated.
The Democrats continue to fail at shedding their reputation for being out of touch with working class Americans. The only income bracket that Harris won was the $100,000+ group. This tells us that the Democrats are an upper middle class and upper class party.
So they voted to have their faces eaten
They probably feel like they’re fucked either way and have nothing going for them. That makes it easier to side with the dude spouting hate. If I was that age I’d probably be in the same boat as them because being angry and hateful feels good and it took me a while to get that under control. I certainly didn’t have any actual hope things would improve after this election but I did vote for Kamala because she at least wasn’t spouting hateful shit. Not that it helped because I live in a dark red district. If there hadn’t been an abortion amendment on the ballot I’d have probably skipped this one.
Anger doesn’t reason.
Wow, that’s crazy.
I wonder how much of that is demonization of unions. If a big piece of Democrat support for working class is support for unions, does that actually matter when so many people of all incomes are taught to hate unions?
Then there’s the student loan fiasco. By all rights the Biden administration should have gotten kudos for finding so many ways to attempt student loan forgiveness, and for focusing it on lower income people (for example, people in income based repayment with less than $10k left). However the right succeeded in making that seem elitist or not independent and the left seemed to blame Democrats for not being more successful in the face of Republican obstruction
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Trump grew with educated voters, too, though.
Year to year comparisons can be viewed here.
Strangely enough, he lost educated white voters compared to before. He won white people with college degrees the previous two times, but lost them this time.
I guess that means that the shift in minority support cut across education levels.
Oh interesting, CNN had different data before, but maybe its updated for more votes now? If you’re a data fan, The Guardian has a cool visual analysis: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/nov/06/the-key-swings-that-handed-trump-the-white-house-a-visual-analysis
the real metric that matters is that way way less people voted. not many people changed their votes from last time. many people are simply convinced to stay home, and as always, that results in a Republican win. the propaganda that was most effective was all of the “Kamala is no true Scotsman, so you should just not vote”. i believe this was lost by the people that “refused to vote for genocide”. i think that’s what accelerated the genocide.
I really doubt double-digit millions of voters sat out because of Gaza.
Kamala’s vote total is roughly in line with what would be expected looking at 2008, 2012, and 2016. The massive turnout in 2020 on the Dem side appears to be an abberation - it was unique circumstances with COVID and all that. On the Republican side, Trump ran slightly ahead of his 2020 performance, and well ahead of 2016.
It’s basic electoral politics: Trump has succeeded at expanding his base of support and turning them out to vote reliably. The Democrats have not. No single issue is responsible for that.
You can blame protests or Gaza or third parties or whoever else you want - the truth remains that the Dem base from the Obama years is not large enough and not appropriately distributed to win an election against Trump’s base; whatever else you think of the man, he has been very good at gaining and retaining support.
but all of the same things could be said about Biden. he won. what changed?
2020 was different from 2024. It was a very unique set of circumstances with an election in the middle of pandemic, with an incumbent who was never broadly popular, amidst utterly terrible economic conditions.
Still, Trump’s base showed up, just as they did on Tuesday.
Biden had the benefit of all the unlikely voters not being able to ignore the country burning down around them, he got a lot of dissatisfied people who don’t pay attention to politics to come out.
Harris didn’t, she got the Dem base. People broadly dissatisfied at the state of things probably voted Trump since he isn’t the incumbent.
Just how it works - voters don’t have to be rational.
True but I think that’s probably more of deep red state residents seeing their vote not matter live on TV every fucking election. I’ve seen the federal turnout but I haven’t compared state to state turnout yet and I would imagine that’s probably a better metric since like 30% of the population live where their vote makes no difference.
After thorough analysis and much thought I have ultimately concluded that I have absolutely no fucking clue what is going
The statements above seem to suggest it’s no longer about identity politics. The habitual way of labeling people no longer explains political results.
Harris just offered little to get voters excited. Mostly ran as a status-quo candidate. Racial minorities, for the most part, are not happy with the status-quo. By being ignored, it allowed right-wing propaganda on media (social and traditional) to do its work. One thing I’ve heard is, “well, at least Trump sent me some checks.” Many people I’ve talked to weren’t happy with Biden’s involvement with the crime bill, or Harris’ being a DA that proudly prosecuted cannabis offenders. Some people I’ve talked to liked that Trump pardoned Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, and that woman who had an extremely long sentence for cannabis. One person I’ve talked to was upset about “libtards” removing black faces from grocery store products (using Aunt Jemima as an example). Some younger men I know (some racial minorities) have started going deep into the Jordan Peterson, Fresh and Fit, Andrew Tate, etc pipeline, which I’m guessing is rooted in sexual insecurity.
Yep, Trump’s popularity went down with white voters (albeit only 2-4 points depending on male or female) but gained ground in Latino and “other unidentified” minorities. He also actually lost older voters too.
But I think the biggest surprise for me is that Trump gained more of the new voters than Harris. And while I don’t have a gender breakdown from that, I wonder if a lot of those were males.
The guy that can’t shut the fuck up about eliminating minorities, got minority votes? If America is that suicidal, why can’t they just take a collective bullet? Would save the rest of the world a lot od trouble…
So many pundits were leaning into the gender gap so hard, I really expected a blowout landslide for Harris. This is the last time I pay any attention to commentators, forecasters or polls. My current theory of American politics is that we’ve become a full-on Idiocracy. There are always idiots in any society, but I really feel like if we can elect the Orange Sack of Shit a second time, our collective stupidity has passed a tipping point. We almost made it to 250 years too. But nothing lasts forever. Hang onto your seat, I don’t expect swirling down the drain to be fun.
Some commentators were even publishing absolutely ridiculous cope to explain why the polls were 50/50. The media was working overtime to stick their heads in the sand for some reason.
I think corporate media wants every race to be neck-and-neck because that gets more ad views. I put the results of this election to Trump’s stunning con man ability (his only real ability) and to millions of Americans being fucking idiots.
As a zoomer that’s old enough to be working class now. Man, my childhood was fucked. At school, being a right wing troll was the norm, at least for boys. I was too.
The worst part is no-one cared, fucking “they’ll grow out of it” and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he’s even in fucking denial about it, “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.
And our education system doesn’t do anything to combat this shit either. Quite the opposite, the dogmatic authoritarian approach schools take coupled with zero-tolerance policies pretty much ensures people shouting this hateful shit get away with it.
After all saying “Hitler did nothing wrong” only gets annoyed looks, gets completely brushed off as “edgy” or something. But then when someone points out that person’s shit, suddenly that’s an attack???
I graduated from a Christian high school a few years ago, and now they have a Discord server that’s basically their own version of 4chan and they post a bunch of edgy racist/queerphobic/etc stuff. Then the person running it went to MIT. It still exists and I’m pretty sure the staff knows about it and doesn’t give a shit. Of course the school itself promotes racist and queerphobic political ideologies as well so that’s not exactly helpful either.
A lot of this are encouraged under the table. Any plans on it is usually talked rather than texed, so there will be less chance of it that it could surface, and is between the most trustworthy people.
The worst part is no-one cared, fucking “they’ll grow out of it” and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he’s even in fucking denial about it, “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.
Most edgy teens do grow out of it. I roll my eyes at embarrassment at some of the stuff I wrote in college, and high school me was even stupider.
But one difference in my high school years (in the 90’s), edginess wasn’t inherently politically coded. Some of it was racist, sexist, or homophobic, but plenty of the targets were also Republican constituencies: rural/small town people, Christians, fat people, old people, prudes, etc. In a conservative suburban area, jokes about abortion, sex, drugs, etc. were often designed to elicit shock and disgust.
I think we’ve seen a cultural shift in which edginess is seen as right wing in itself, in part because the right, which used to get offended at things like Harry Potter and Howard Stern and Disney movies, has fallen in line with edgy Gen X comedians who somehow didn’t grow out of it, and made room for people who smoke weed and mock the Bible.
in the 90s you attacked whatever was around cause you were a piece of shit, now you got the internet so pieces of shit worldwide can band together and hate a specific cause.
We had the internet in the 90s. It just wasn’t in every 12-year-old’s pocket all day, and the nefarious smoky room types were too old to understand how it worked, let alone carry our mass manipulation campaigns with it as the medium.
band together and hate a specific cause.
The thing with Gen X teenage nihilism was that the only cardinal sin was actually having a strong opinion. There wasn’t much room to hate on anything, because actually hating something showed that you cared too much, and that wasn’t what we were about.
Gen Z seems to be much more willing to embrace negative emotions and acknowledge that they care enough to hate. Whether that’s a better or a worse thing, I’m not sure.
“Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.
Because those were jokes.
The problem we have today is not that it was socially acceptable to be a psychopath online in 2014. The problems are, in my opinion:
- Rapidly decreasing standards of living
- Social media making people more stupid
- Governments being too large and intransparent
- Pointless governmental spending without explaining the why to the population
The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.
The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.
Yes! Thank you.
Just as the next left-wing shift won’t be a result of humanity getting smarter somehow, it will be a result of right-wing policies failing. And that shift won’t lead to any improvement either.
It’s a pendulum.
People are willing to tolerate a failing system longer, when it aligns on surface with their own views. This is similar to people on the right defending Pinochet and death squadrons.
And people on the left 20 years ago would defend a lot of things about USSR or Che Gevara or stuff like this, even not being tankies.
Tribalism leads to degeneracy.
Get that logical crap out of here!!
I begged my admin to do something about my boy students sexually harassing my girl students. Instead, my some of my boy students discovered I was trans and outed me.
A lot of millennials were pro war back in 2001+ a bunch of people I went to school with joined the military. People would say “support our troops!” When you criticized the wars. This is nothing new, just brainwashing.
I have seen teachers say that hitler was right, that walls were invented by aliens and that giants existed and were romanian
giants existed and were romanian
Wait, what? I didn’t see any giants in my high school. Are they invisible giants or something?
Also, where were those giants during the 2nd Dacian war? Romans must have been superheroes or something to take on giants and win.
We were told that there were only bones on romanian territory, not alive ones
Also, why do you think there were multiple Dacian wars?
Not enough Panera bread locations.
White women as a majority still voted for Trump. Why just blame men?
The result of telling women they could vote for someone their husband didn’t vote for was the right flipping out and essentially calling them property. How likely do you think speaking up is when you are stuck financially to someone who sees you as a servant rather than a person?
We went from voting privately to “speaking up”. Why?
What was keeping them from voting for Harris besides their own shitty views?
Nothing, lots of people just didn’t know they could.
We found out tons of people just don’t keep up regardless of party, where to vote for Biden shouldn’t have been so popular but it was and is kinda sad.
Lmao, ‘it was the husband’s fault’, good one.
Seems to me a little belittling to not attribute responsibility to women when shit hits the fan.
Let me guess, the “responsibility” we have to take is to “double down on moving to the right”.
No, I’m talking about the responsibility of voting
Lmao so women have no agency?
Fucking spare me. You’re a miserable sap that can’t stop slinging shit/blame 😂
They have it all they want, I’m going to guess a lot just don’t want to deal with a pissed off significant other. Would you?
Calm down and make some limited amount of sense and try to make a point.
What the fuck? Where? Not where I am.
From a quick google search. It’s about 53% for Trump, 45% for Harris.
It may not be true for those you regularly interact with, but that doesn’t make it untrue overall.
The Exit Polls that were a verbal conversation upon leaving might not be accurate if they are asking women in front of their partners, right?
I’m not USian, so IDK how those polls work. I’m just dismayed that that many women would vote for a pedo rapist who took away their bodily autonomy.
According to your link it looks like it was the other way around, women were 53% Harris and 45% trump. Assuming that’s what the blue and red bars mean.
They’re talking about specifically white women, not all women, which the link (and exit polling from other major sources) also reports had a 53% vote for Trump.
Ah, I see. Thanks, I just needed to scroll down a little.
A lot of those white women are Christian evangelicals salivating to install the Christian Theocracy. It’s sad & infuriating. I’m seeing clips of interviews with swing staters of various demographics who voted for him. They’re all like, “It’s gonna be great, the stock market’s gonna go up 40%, gas prices will go down by half! All those ads about him doing bad things are lies.”
Fair enough. I just talk to a lot of women, all are aghast no matter their race. Men are less so, though many are disappointed, they are more blase.
They went for Trump by 2%. Calm the fuck down. Go after millennial men, we went for Trump by something like 10%.Gen X men went for Trump by 22%. And Boomers were actually better than X at 11%.
So if you want to go after someone go after Gen Z’s parents.
Alienation caused by economics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
Fascists have a message for them, the liberals don’t because they are committed to the current economic and political system
I can see why some young men might feel like the Democratic party is prioritizing women’s issues over those affecting men, especially young men. In fact, it might seem like the Democratic party is not only indifferent to struggling young men, but hostile to them. I can understand why someone might not want to vote for a party that thinks of them as deplorable, pathetic losers.
Social media. Gen Z grew up with youtubers and influencers pushing their beliefs.
in the age of misinformation and grifting mind you. it’s not just the technology, we’ve had youtube for 20 years
The main source of this recent trending fascism, anti-scientific thinking and so on is social media or the web in general. To resist or refute the mass of false information and find out what’s likely true and what’s not, requires education, literacy, media competency, things like that. I guess current generations are lacking this so they fall easy prey to “funny” fascist memes, fakes and rhetoric, then vote for rightwing extremists, destabilizing their own country as a result, not realizing that this leads to big disadvantages for everyone including themselves. We failed to protect these younger generations from misinformation, and now they are turning the world into what they are misled to believe is true.
We used to have relatively high living standards in the Western democracies. This will soon all crumble and we (most people who aren’t rich) will suffer from it, regardless of who you voted for. And on top of that, climate change will finish us all off, because battling that isn’t even on the radar for those fascists because they don’t even believe in it. So instead of doing too little, we’ll do literally zero and even accelerate the problem, meaning it’ll affect us all much sooner already and with higher intensity.
So enjoy your still existing relatively privileged life while it still lasts. It’s ging to get much, MUCH worse before it’s going to be better again. Buckle up and prepare yourselves.
With the levels of anti-intellectualism, it’s also quite hard.
You write more that 3 lines? You used a “buzzword”? Congratulations, your refutation won’t be read, but will met with ridicule!
My mother’s boyfriend often “reads” articles from more liberal-leaning news sources, and he just laughs at the buzzwords. Cannot tell what the articles were about.
A buzzword being one with three syllables or more, I presume?
(Syllables are probably woke nowadays)
map of climate change outcomes. 2.7 warming. Violet - unhabitable*looks at Russia*
Well, I knew we are fucked.
Russia is going to be a bit busy with a massive influx of climate migrants. America will also have this issue, so they will both have that much bigger problem to deal with.
Do you have the source for this? I’d be interested in learning more, this is pretty useful imo
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6
Its heavily processed and prettified https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6/figures/15
In the linked sources, I don’t see that huge black area in Siberia
“More suitable” than what? I live in a green area: both this phrasing and a scan of sources added below, make it look like I benefit from 2.7°C global warming. Bring it on!
Women asked for some basic goddamn respect and when they got “uppity”(because us men weren’t listening) they really got a “you were mean to me so I’m gunna elect Hitler again”. Millions of people alive today want women strip women of the rights they fought for and women are supposed to be polite about it?!
It’s crazy how weak they are and I’m sad sharing a gender with them.
And many of those people who voted to “elect Hitler again” were woman. I think it is wild that people keep minimizing the role of the single largest voting demographic into victims.
I thought the Harris campaigns ads to encourage female voters in red counties was incredibly demeaning.
“What happens at the polls stays at the polls”
I’m male, but I cringed hard at those ads.
I wonder if the had good reception at focus groups or something. Maybe it really did play well, I don’t know. But it made it seems like women were too weak to own their opinions or vote.
Yeahhhh, maybe treating voters like that was not a great idea. Also I got the impression if they felt safe about voting before, those ads made them reconsider.
Which would forget the huge amounts of indoctrination that subset of that group has experienced, both religious and just cultural by way of hearing “it’s a woman’s place” for their entire lives. And just because they can be stupid, too, doesn’t mean they aren’t victims and just because they’re victims doesn’t mean they can’t be stupid.
We’re all getting fucked by the right economically and it’s not even hidden a little but but they keep getting into power. It’s the same shit, different pile.
the data does not support this conclusion. more young men did not vote for Trump, less people in total voted. almost no one changed their vote from last election. people were just convinced to stay home, which always results in Republican wins. both candidates got less votes total than last year, by a lot. i blame this on the “i refuse to vote for genocide” people that have just successfully accelerated that genocide.
More like men don’t want to elect someone who actively and publicly tells them they’re the problem based on a minority that believe those things
A not-insignificant number of men are the problem. Where are you seeing the democrats saying this so blatantly? I haven’t seen it yet and would love to know where it’s coming from.
It’s just right wing propaganda.
I blame social media and algorithms. My teen son for the longest time was leaning further and further right due to the content he was getting served on YouTube. He was making disparaging comments about women and how stupid they are. My wife and I who lean left had to sit down and have a talk with him about what he was saying and videos that he was getting served by YouTube (that popular red pill girl, I can’t remember her name and andrew tate among other red pill stuff). He’s a pretty smart kid, once we showed him data and articles that directly proved all the things he was watching wrong, he started to come around. He’s been careful to believe things that he sees or hears on the internet more now. Occasionally, he’ll bring things to us that we have to double take and fact check to see if it’s wrong.
that popular red pill girl
brett cooper? I literally got it on my recommended yesterday and holy shit people are braindead
I had to go digging. It’s Pearl or something.
You mean fem shapiro.
Exactly why we nixed youtube at my house. It’s a right wing disinformation machine. A shame because there are some genuinely good content creators on that platform. My kids are younger, but their attitudes get out of whack when they watched YT. Fuck that platform.
I feel like any social media platform you start a fresh new account on has a built in right leaning bias unfortunately. Then on top of that rural am radio is mostly GOP talking points.
Nice. I really can’t say much more but I will. Great oversight.
I am Gen Z male and please do not let my blond hair, blue eyes, and German lineage deceive you. I’m as appalled as one can be with all of this. I never connected with my boomer dad or my millennial elder brothers over machismo or sports nor did I ever pick up TikTok and my social media consumption elsewhere was limited or gated by my own doing. From my experience, the pressure to conform to masculinity and male dominated in-groups; the perceived onus to keep males in power and powerful; and the propagandists’ weaponization of media such as TikTok, Facebook, podcasts, and Fox News and their ilk on TV and radio are the main depreciators of character in these cases.
Don’t apologize for the way you look. You didn’t choose that.
I only mentioned those characteristics because of the Hitler Youth descriptor used in the screenshot and I wanted to underscore that there are strangers who don’t want to be seen as the enemy but the enemy has co-opted their innate look. I know not to judge a person’s character by their appearance and I hope those on this side of the situation all know that as well.
I hope so too!
They could dye their hair…
Clearly my attempt to joke fell flat, sorry for using comedy as a response to stress.
They shouldn’t have to.
It was a joke.
No jokes 😡
(no but seriously I don’t think anyone in the “Hitler Youth” post is in a joking mood :,) )
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Because the Republicans succeeded at fully killing education. It’s dead.
I am morbidly curious to see what happens over the next generation or two. The innate anti-intellectualism that seems to be a required component of right-wing policy will heavily affect red states, but blue states are still prioritizing their school systems. Is the “states’ rights” party going to sic the fed on state-controlled school systems in blue states to prevent the spread of thoughtcrime?
If it’s only blue states that continue funding education, what does that do long-term in a nation that has shifted away from being a manufacturing superpower to now primarily making its capital on knowledge industries? It is already the case that college applicants from states like Massachusetts and Connecticut get inherent bonus points in their transcripts just by virtue of where they graduated high school, because earning an A in Boston means more than earning an A in Baton Rouge. We’ve got a brain drain of doctors and nurses, and teachers and college professors, all leaving red states because the laws there are getting too oppressive for them to work. Most of the finance and technology sectors remains in the (blue) northeast and west coast states as well.
What is the long-term plan for the Republican party to empower their own constituents in these red-state strongholds when their old industries are gone, never to return, and they refuse to invest in the education and welfare of their citizens?
My prediction is that we’re going to have plaques and monuments that say “In memory of 2026, thousands of American citizens deported - and its the Democrats fault btw”
Any semblance of resistance will be labelled as “radical leftists trying to subvert the will of America”… with how over half of voters made their decision, the will of America seems far different than I remembered.
Take back your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Expel these, the homeless, tempest-tost to anywhere else, I laugh and lock our golden door!
If Trump manages to succeed in his massive deportation, someone needs to make that plaque and weld it on top of the original.
