by David Balashinsky
I don't know how it wound up in my feed or even where I first saw it but I recently came across a column by River Page entitled ("entitled" being the operative word, here) "How the Democrats Lost Men Like Me" (The Free Press, 06.03.2025). What Page means by "like me" is that he is a young, White, cis man, although he also happens to be gay which, to the credit of the gay rights movement, is not nearly the liability that it once was.
It's no secret that young White men have been turning away from the Democratic Party and turning toward Trump, instead. Page's column is, in large part, advice to the Democratic Party as it tries to figure out why and how it should be "Speaking to American Men" if it is to have any hope of reversing this trend.
Writing from the perspective of one of these alienated young, White male voters - "someone the Democratic Party once won and lost" - Page identifies several causes, including "the Democratic Party's demonization of white men," its "embrace of an extreme version of identity politics," its "inability to name an enemy, apart from Trump and the Republicans, or articulate a vision for the future," and, equating the Democratic Party with the Harris campaign of 2024 (which is not an unreasonable thing to do), that it "ran on nothing at all."One of the most frustrating and annoying aspects of the 2024 presidential campaign was having to listen to the constant repetition of the claim that the Democrats didn't "articulate a vision for the future," or offer a coherent agenda for the next four years. Now, six months into the Trump regime, here is Page lecturing the Democratic party for losing White men like him by failing to articulate a vision for the future and the Harris campaign for running "on nothing at all." Evidently, Page never bothered to read the official 2024 Democratic Party Platform, which is close to 100 pages of concrete policy statements and legislative goals, many of which are in line with the very "economic populism" Page claims to support. Leaving aside the fact that the only thing that mattered in 2024 was defeating Trump, is this willful ignorance? Or is Page gaslighting us? And are White men really being demonized? Or is it, rather, that Page is blinded by - and blind to - his own privilege?
I should mention that, being White, male and cis myself, I know something about privilege. And in these three particulars I share what surely are Page's most important attributes. Also, like him, I was an enthusiastic supporter of Bernie Sanders - in 2016, before he dropped out and endorsed Clinton, and again in 2020, before he dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. Unlike Page, however, I am not young and in that respect I consider Page more privileged than I am (not just in a social sense but in an existential one, too). Also unlike Page, I am not gay. On the other hand, I am Jewish which, it turns out, is now probably much more of a liability than being gay is. There were a reported 2,402 anti-gay hate-crimes in 2023 but four times as many antisemitic hate-crimes that same year. On balance, this makes Page even more privileged than I am.
Why does this matter? Because when White men complain about being demonized, it's hard even for another White man like me to take them seriously. And if that's my reaction, one can only imagine how galling it must be to others with far less structural advantages in our society to hear us White guys complaining about how downtrodden we are. (The entirely understandable if morally inconsistent intolerance for men's claims of unfair treatment in the exceptional cases when those claims actually are valid is one of the chief causes, I believe, of the failure of the movement to ban male genital mutilation - to cite the most conspicuous example - to gain traction with feminists and progressives more broadly. But it's worth pausing to remember, here, that patriarchy harms boys and men, too.)
Two of the basic questions raised by Page's column are whether White men are really being "demonized" and whether the Democratic Party, in particular, is guilty, as Page claims, of demonizing them. The reason the Democrats have been losing the support of young White men like him, he argues (and to quote him a little more fully),
. . . is the Democratic Party's demonization of white men, ostensibly in the service of "social justice." As Rod Dreher put it in The Free Press . . . "Think what it must be like to be a white boy growing up in a culture that tells you that you are what's wrong with the world. You are not only demonized by cultural elites and institutions - not because of anything you believe or have done - but because of who you are."
Dreher expands on this in an essay he wrote subsequent to the publication of his Free Press piece:
[I]t's not hard to see why certain young white men are drawn into radical-right politics. They have grown up in a culture dominated by wokeness, which tells them that everything wrong with the world is their fault. . . .
I've tried but I cannot find any evidence supporting Dreher's claim that our culture is telling young White men that "everything wrong with the world is their fault." I also haven't been able to find a single instance of the "demonization of white men" by the Democratic Party, which is what Page explicitly accuses the Democratic Party of doing. I'm not saying that misandry doesn't exist. Anyone who follows social media is bound to come across memes now and then that vilify men. But these anti-male messages obviously represent a minority viewpoint, especially on social media. Anti-White bias and misandry are not being inculcated in children in America's schools, they are not dominant ideas in our culture, and they certainly are not espoused by the Democratic Party (the majority of the Democratic caucus of the current congress is White and male). I realize that absence of proof isn't proof of absence, and maybe I just haven't been looking hard enough. But, still, "he who asserts must prove." If Page is going to level a charge like this against the Democratic Party, the burden of backing it up with at least a couple examples rests with him more than it does with me.
I do know that it's a favorite rhetorical tactic of the right wing (a convenient catchall that, for my purposes here, includes but is not necessarily limited to the MAGA movement, White nationalists and Christian Nationalists) to claim that White people and Christians, and now men, are persecuted, but this is a patently absurd claim in a predominantly White and Christian nation that has never had a non-Christian or Christian-adjacent president (Trump, himself, of course, represents the antithesis of actual Christianity, but that's another matter), has never had a woman president and has had only one non-White president in its entire history. I also know that young White men like Page hate the word "privilege" and don't want to hear it but the fact is that White men are privileged and have been throughout most of our nation's (and our civilization's) history.
Rather than that White men are being "demonized," what I think is going on in our society is that White men are finally losing some of our privilege. And if someone is accustomed to a certain amount of privilege, it seems plausible that having it taken away can make him feel as though he is being deprived of something to which he is entitled. But that sense of being discriminated against or oppressed, in this context, is less evidence of being treated unfairly now than it is simply of having been accustomed to receiving unfair benefits previously. One of the privileges of privilege is not having to recognize one's own privilege. This is what I meant when I suggested that Page is both blind to and blinded by his own privilege.
But privilege is precisely what is wrong with Page's worldview. A good example is the emotional reaction he attributes to "most men," among which I have to assume he includes himself, when listening to a land acknowledgement - a reaction that he describes without a whiff of compunction as "secondhand embarrassment." I don't want to come off here as holier-than-thou but, honestly, to me that seems remarkably indifferent to the suffering and misfortunes of others. "Embarrassed" by a land acknowledgement? The America we know today was made possible, at least in part, by acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Is it really asking so much to acknowledge this? If Page is more outraged by the fact that young White men like him might be made uncomfortable or experience "embarrassment" when listening to a land acknowledgement than he is by the misery, displacement, and death of the people whose former land is being acknowledged, then Page definitely needs to do some honest and serious soul searching.
Similarly, Page excoriates "identity politics": "General respect for minorities is one thing; deification is quite another." (Several paragraphs below this comment, incidentally, and without a trace of irony,
Page approvingly mentions Charlamagne tha God, a popular DJ and podcaster who
literally refers to himself as a god. Don't get me wrong: Lenard
McKelvey can call himself whatever he wants. But if he can call himself a god, why can't a transwoman call herself a woman, or a non-binary person use "they/them" pronouns and ask others to respect that?) Page counters that
What young men want is someone who's willing to let them fight for themselves - together. Economic populism allows for that without turning into a sinister form of identity politics.
Page's entire piece is written, of course, from the perspective of young White men and amounts to a plea on their behalf. That's not identity politics? "Sanders could give me - and lots of men like me [my emphasis] - a better life," Page declares. (Agreed, but Sanders wasn't running only to improve the lives of young White men.) If it counts as identity politics (and "sinister" identity politics, at that) when minorities, women, gay (and, yes, I know that Page is gay, but that just means that he should know better) or trans
people invoke their identities as being central to their lived
experience but doesn't count as identity politics when young White men do exactly the same thing, it is because White men still enjoy the privilege of being regarded as the standard, default, neutral person in contrast to which everyone else is an "other." That, too, is White male privilege. Surely the unconscious bias - by which I mean sexism - to which this can lead is also behind Page's contrasting characterizations of Sanders's and Clinton's quests for the White House. Page represents Sanders's campaign as an act of pure selflessness and virtue. Clinton's, on the other hand, Page denigrates as mere "political ambition." Apparently, running for president is noble when a man does it but self-serving when a woman does it.
Another example Page offers of the Democratic Party's "embrace of an extreme version of identity politics" is a "fat activist screaming about privilege." Okay, I get it - do fat people really need their own liberation movement? And, while we're at it, what about those self-righteous disabled people? What makes them so special? They even have their own law granting them special rights! The point is, though, unless you've experienced fat-shaming or have been on the receiving end of weight-bias in the medical profession, or have been discriminated against on the basis of any number of other characteristics that you yourself may not have, you simply don't know what it's like. But being ignorant about other people's adversity, too, is a form of privilege. Instead of snickering at fat activists, god forbid we should put ourselves in their shoes and try to understand what they have to deal with, day in and day out. I would say that it particularly behooves Page, as a gay man (just as it does me, as a Jewish man), to try to muster a little bit of empathy and understanding for other minorities, however they define themselves. Gay men, too, were once the objects of scorn, ridicule, and oppression, their very gayness pathologized by the medical profession. Gay rights, too, were once attacked as being "special rights."
Where Page perhaps (and I use that qualifier advisedly) comes closer to a least having his finger on the pulse of mainstream opinion is in his criticism of the Democratic Party's
embrace of the most extreme goals of the trans movement, such as allowing children to transition or for transwomen to participate in women's sports. . . .
But nowhere in its Master Platform of 2024 does the Democratic Party explicitly call for either of these things. The short, extended quote that follows is by no means everything the document has to say on trans rights but this is the closest that it comes to addressing the questions of children's transitioning and transwomen participating in women's sports:
Democrats will vigorously oppose bans on gender-affirming health care and respect the role of parents, families and doctors - not politicians - in making health care decisions.
Democrats will continue to fight for LGBTQI+ youth by . . . guaranteeing that transgender students are treated fairly and with respect at school. . . .
(A much more thoughtful and thorough analysis of this hugely controversial topic, by the way, written by Andrew Sullivan, appeared just the other day in the Times. In his op-ed, Sullivan, a prominent, White, gay, cis male who identifies as a conservative critiques "gender identity" specifically from the perspective of a longtime champion of gay rights.)
It's not necessary to take on the fundamental questions raised by the phenomenon of gender dysphoria, by gender identity and by gender-critical feminism, here. (Full disclosure: I tend to fall into that last camp.) It's enough to point out that what the Democratic Party advocates in its 2024 Platform is not "the most extreme goals of the trans movement," as Page characterizes it, and certainly is not "allowing children to transition." It merely opposes the criminalization of gender-affirming care - that is, it opposes legislation that would deny access to gender-affirming care to children and adolescents for whom, with the guidance and support of their parents and physicians, such care has been deemed medically necessary. That hardly seems "extreme" to me. What's more, the Democratic Party's support for gender-affirming care and trans rights must be viewed in the context of - and as a response to - a concerted effort to politicize the issue by the right wing. It also should be borne in mind that "gender-affirming care" in children in almost all cases entails the provision of puberty blockers, which do not change a person's sex or secondary sex characteristics but simply delay the onset of puberty, hence, delay the development of secondary sex characteristics, buying the child time so that, once s/he matures, and if s/he still wishes to transition to the opposite sex, that child will not have undergone physiological changes that are much harder to reverse. Additionally, once puberty blockers are stopped, puberty will proceed normally, albeit delayed. And surgery involving a child's genitals or to other parts of the body is, in fact, extremely rare. This is in contrast to the gender-affirming genital surgeries that are routinely (more than one million times per year) imposed on children and infant boys without their consent in the United States with no objections whatsoever from the anti-trans chorus, including Trump - or from River Page, himself, for that matter. But nowhere does the Democratic Party Platform call for "allowing children to transition."
As for allowing "transwomen to compete in women's sports," the only text I was able to find in the 2024 Democratic Platform that seems to have any bearing on this (and even this, it seems to me, is open to interpretation) is what I quoted above, namely, "Democrats will continue to fight for LGBTQI+ youth by . . . guaranteeing that transgender students are treated fairly and with respect at school. . . . " Fairness, by definition, means balancing the sometimes irreconcilable interests of two parties. I'm perfectly willing to concede that if a transwoman student athlete had already developed secondary sex characteristics before transitioning that would give her a meaningful and unfair advantage over natal women athletes, it's not necessarily unfair or intrinsically transphobic or anti-trans to take that into consideration. But neither does it strike me as "insane," as it does Page, to treat transgender students "fairly and with respect," even if in some cases this results in allowing a transwoman to participate in women's sports.
One of the things that is especially irksome about Page's blame-shifting onto the Democrats for supposedly embracing policies that alienate young White men and failing to articulate an agenda that would appeal to them is that he is writing at a time and in a political context in which the Democrats represent the only viable political alternative to Trumpism. (It's not for nothing that Sanders ran as a Democrat in the Democratic primaries.) A significant portion of Page's column is, in fact, dedicated to drawing a contrast between the corporatist tendencies of the Democratic Party and the economic populism - or democratic socialism, to be more precise - of Bernie Sanders. Page pays lip service to criticizing the Republicans but, by focusing on the Democrats, he basically lets the Republicans off the hook:
I was drawn to Sanders in 2016 because of his message, which was that Americans had been screwed - not just by Republicans, but by the Democrats as well - the party that refused to punish the executives who nearly brought down the financial system in 2008, and who preferred to dine with the country's oligarchs instead of attacking them. Democratic administrations were just like the Republican ones: Heads didn't roll. The rich got richer. The poor were forgotten. And nothing fundamentally changed.
The post-financial-crash period of 2008 on, of course, was when Obama was president. And, while it's true that no corporate CEOs went to prison, it's also true that the Justice Department under the Obama administration managed to secure over 125 billion dollars in fines (or "settlements") for faulty mortgages. A democratic socialist administration, to be sure, would have done better and, one hopes, would not have allowed the greed, corruption, and mismanagement that led to the Great Recession (which began under a Republican administration in 2007) to have festered in the first place. But a Republican administration? For years, the Republicans have been attempting to repeal the most critical piece of legislation that was enacted to protect consumers, investors, and the American financial system in the wake of the 2008 market crash, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The Republicans have also been doing everything they can to kill one of this legislation's most important provisions, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB). And, now, while Page is busy complaining about the Democrats and the Harris campaign of 2024, Trump has effectively killed the CFPB, ordering it to cease operations and closing its building. In contrast, Kamala Harris consistently supported the CPFB and said so time and again during the 2024 campaign. I wouldn't call that "unprincipled" or "believ[ing] in nothing at all."
Yet not only does Page fail to credit the Democrats (and Harris in particular) with their adoption of a populist, pro-family agenda in 2024 but, midway through his piece, he pivots from contrasting the Democrats unfavorably with Sanders to contrasting them unfavorably with Trump by portraying Trump, of all people, as some sort of an economic populist. "If Democrats want to win back young men," Page writes,
they cannot promise reform. They have to admit what Americans already feel is true: that there is something that's going very wrong with the country - and it's time to radically change it.
Trump knows this. He leaves you in no doubt as to who his enemies are, and they happen to be some of the most unpopular people in the country: a governing elite in both parties who have gotten all the big calls wrong.
Really? The governing elite are Trump's "enemies"? Trump is the governing elite. Trump is the very embodiment of an oligarch. What's more, he's an oligarch who has spent years maneuvering himself into a position from which he could hijack the levers of power for the personal enrichment of himself, his billionaire family and his billionaire friends. In the first three months alone of the Trump administration, Trump's family has become three billion dollars richer. Trump has "assembled the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history, with at least 13 billionaires set to take on government posts." Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" will effect the largest upward transfer of wealth in our nation's history. It gives most of the tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and to corporations while depriving millions of lower-income Americans of health insurance and threatening access to and raising the cost of healthcare for everyone else. It is the clearest evidence yet that Trump is waging class warfare on poor and working-class Americans, including young White men. Completely ignoring this, Page creates a false equivalence between the Republicans and the Democrats while lamenting that, after 2008, "[t]he rich got richer." Well, thanks to the Republicans and to every young White man who didn't vote Democratic in 2024, the rich are now going to get even richer.
In the real world, the Democrats and the Republicans do not represent a distinction without a difference. The reconciliation bill just passed by congress is not the creation of the Democrats. Not one Democrat in the House of Representatives or in the senate voted for it. It is a Republican bill through and through. More than that, it is Trump's bill, his signature legislative accomplishment. Yet to hear Page describe Trump (and if the description weren't so obviously false), one could easily get the impression that Trump is the champion of the little guy - a populist who's only concern is to give hard-working (or undeservedly unemployed) Americans (the "real" Americans, that is, and we know who they are) their due. But what has Trump actually done for working Americans? His biggest achievements (if you could call them that) so far have been to increase the cost of goods by imposing tariffs (which is basically a tax increase for the American consumer), to make it harder for Americans to access their social security benefits, and to throw close to 60,000 federal workers out of work. These civil servants, incidentally, are hardworking, good people with mortgages, student loans and families to support - our fellow Americans - people who didn't deserve to be treated this way. Some of them are young, White men, too. Not only did Trump take away their jobs but he enlisted the world's richest man (an immigrant, by the way) to do it.
In Page's version of reality, that all this has come to pass is somehow the Democrats' fault for insufficiently ministering to the special needs of young White men.
Page is right about one thing. Trump leaves you "in no doubt as to who his enemies are." But they are not the "governing elite," as Page claims. Rather, Trump's enemies-list includes the press ("They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE"; "scum"), Mark Milley (a four-star general and former Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff whose actions Trump characterized as being "so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH"), Jack Smith ("deranged," "evil and sinister"), women, assorted ("Horseface," "Lowlife," "Fat," "Ugly," "dog"), Democrats ("totalitarian," "willing to do illegal acts"), public servants ("crooked," "dishonest"), immigrants (they are "poisoning the blood of our country"), the Biden administration ("scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds"), Mexicans ("drug dealers," "criminals," "rapists"), Blacks ("low IQ"), Judge Juan Merchan ("psychotic," "corrupt," "incompetent"), intellectuals ("Marxist Maniacs and lunatics"), science and scientists, universities, and probably others. But Trump's fellow oligarchs? Not so much. (It's true that Trump has recently
attacked Elon Musk, however, it wasn't for being part of the "governing
elite" but simply because of Musk's opposition to Trump's "Big Beautiful
Bill.")
Page's column, as I have already mentioned, was written in response to news about a research project being undertaken by the Democratic Party in order to "reverse the erosion of Democratic support of young men, especially online." Page refers to the $20 million earmarked for the project as "money well wasted." The problem, in his view, is obvious: it's not the young White men like him who have been turned off by the Democrat Party but the Democrats themselves. It doesn't seem to occur to Page that it could be the other way around. It is this blind spot that makes me wonder whether Page's own White privilege obscures for him a darker truth about White flight from the Democratic Party - and toward the Republican Party, about which Page has little or nothing to say. Steve Phillips, writing in The Nation a year ago, also looked into this question. But, rather than blaming the Democrats, as Page does, Phillips provides what I think is a more realistic and, sadly, a more likely explanation.
In a country that is growing increasingly racially diverse, the Republican Party remains disproportionately white (83% of GOP voters, according to Pew Research analysis of exit polls). White rage has always been the rocket fuel powering Trump's ascendance and continued political relevance. Most have forgotten that when he entered the 2016 presidential contest in the spring of 2015, he languished in the polls with the support of just 5 percent of Republican voters. Then, in his presidential announcement in June of 2015, he demonized Mexicans as rapists and murderers and clearly sent a signal that he would be the defender of white people and the culture he claimed immigrants of color threatened to destroy.
The political fruits of the speech were instantaneous. Trump rocketed to the top of the pack in a matter of weeks and has never looked back.
That might be a slight oversimplification - I'm sure that not all Trump supporters are racists. And it's also true that, in the last election, Trump gained support even among Black and Latino men. This could be due to legitimate concerns (among young White men, too) about the economy but it could also be explained by what some researchers have referred to as "precarious manhood theory" and the degree to which it, in turn, explains the role of "masculine anxieties" in support for Trump. Clearly, the "Democrats have a masculinity problem."
Page concludes by counseling the Democrats that if they "want to win back people like me, they have to go to war with the rich." It's hard to see how that would help, given that, in 2024, the young White men who didn't vote Democratic either enabled the oligarchy by not voting at all or actively supported it by voting for Trump.
Phillips takes the exact opposite approach and advises the Democrats, rather than trying "to woo white voters," to focus on targeting "the right white people [my emphasis]." "Democrats," he points out, "need to realize that if Donald Trump's felony conviction won't weaken his support among most white voters, then nothing will."
On balance, maybe the fact that the Democratic Party has lost men like Page has less to do with the reasons that Page cites and more to do with the fact that Trump is just so adept at appealing to the identity politics of young White men. It would be great if this cohort could see themselves as part of a broader, racially- and gender-diverse coalition that opposes Trump's authoritarianism, his contempt for the rule of law and his class warfare against average American people but there is probably always going to be a segment of young White men for whom the allure of fascism and the seductive appeal of persecution-envy are just too great. At least for these young White men, maybe the fault, dear River, is not in the Democratic Party but in themselves.
* * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * *
* *
No comments:
Post a Comment