Democrats Don't Need Young Men
It's possible—and preferable—to win without them
1. Young Men Are Terrible
Remember the Bernie Bro?
In the 2016 election, something strange was happening. Even though women have become consistently more progressive than men, the farther-left Bernie Sanders was winning more male voters than female.
Ah, but that was just sexism! The Bernie Bro was nothing more than a thinly-disguised, overgrown frat boy: he “was the kind of person who’d show up to a college party in a toga.” He probably just thought Hillary was too much of a girlboss or something. Nothing to worry about.
…And then in 2020, when Bernie went up against Joe Biden, the Bernie Bro returned with a vengeance.
Biden went off and beat Trump and everyone stopped paying attention to Bernie, and so the mystery of his Bro was forgotten.
…Until 2024, when a ton of Bernie Bros flipped and voted for Trump. In fact, Trump carried the young male vote as a whole, and so now the Democrats are panicking and throwing millions of dollars at young men in a desperate attempt to win them back.
But I think this is an extremely misguided approach, and it has to do with the reason Bernie was so popular among young men: namely, that they suck.
It’s well-known that young men are responsible for the vast majority of crime, and especially violent crime.
This is, of course, closely related to the biological reality that young men have way more testosterone in their veins than anyone else.
The lesson here is that young men like violence, chaos, and heroism.
If you’re not convinced by the data, allow me to anecdote you: I am, by all accounts, a young man myself. The other day, as I was doing my laundry, I thought to myself: Boy, doing laundry is really awful and boring. I wish there was a war and a draft, so I could go off and fight in the war instead of doing my laundry and worrying about getting a job.
Obviously this was an insane thought to have. If our political decision-makers were thinking like this, we’d be in real trouble!
Young men want to be Great Heroic Men. But it’s very difficult to be a Great Heroic Man in peacetime, so young men want to tear it all down. They want revolution, they want to be free from hopeless meritocratic immiseration, they want populism—left or right, it doesn’t matter.
Young men vote for chaos.
2. Do You Really Want to Be the Chaos Party?
If Democrats want to win young men back from Trump, they’ll need to offer a similarly pandering, similarly insane platform. Young men want to hammer things together in factories and to fight wars—to accomplish that, you’d need to destroy the neoliberal world order. You’d need to slap massive tariffs on mutually beneficial trade and you’d need to do crazy erratic things that shake up alliances and end the unipolar moment for good.
I don’t think the Democratic Party should do all that. For one thing, it’s awful and going to hurt lots of people (some of it is already hurting millions of children). But it’s also bad politics!
Tariffs will do very bad things to our economy; they will make many people—many young men, even—much poorer. Shattering the Pax Americana, too, is certain to prove a bad and destabilizing move whose effects will eventually be felt at home. Everyone likes the idea of noble warfighting, but once you’re lying in a trench with half your leg blown off, you start to miss the deep-fryer.
In short: young men don’t know what’s good for them. And they certainly don’t know what’s good for the rest of the country! Pandering to young male immiseration will work for one or two election cycles, but it’s in no way a sustainable political strategy. If you give them chaos, then there will be chaos, no one will end up enjoying the chaos, and you will lose, having destroyed many millions of livelihoods along the way.
If our democracy survives Trump, this plot will play out. Populism is volatile: there will be a revolution, or else there will be a harsh reaction.
3. Democrats Don’t Need Young Men
The only people that vote less frequently than men between 18 and 29 are high school dropouts. In 2024, 66.9% of American women voted, compared to just 63.7% of American men. When you’re multiplying by the tens of millions, that’s a very significant difference! If the Democrats mostly abandon the young male vote but make it up among older and more educated women, they’ll certainly come out on top.
There’s a quote that people often attribute to Winston Churchill, but is probably just some timeless aphorism: If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.
In the US, this used to map well onto the Democratic and Republican Parties. Compassionate young liberals voted for Jimmy Carter; shrewd old conservatives elected Reagan.
The Reaganite era of the Republican Party is now long dead. Donald Trump is no more a conservative than Mao Zedong was. The Republicans have become an authoritarian populist party—no one with either a heart or a brain could vote for them. Only young men, whose reproductive organs dictate most of their decision-making, could be so enamored.
Which leaves the Democrats with an opportunity to win both the American heart and the American mind. But if the Dems are to become the party of the sane and thoughtful, they’ll need to discard their insane, puritanical identitarian politics of the last decade, and any Bernie-style socialist fervor too. They’ll need to appeal to calm stewardship, economic growth, and a trustworthy social safety net. In the face of chaos, the Democrats must promise stable normalcy.
The antithesis of authoritarian populism is technocratic liberalism—the Abundance agenda.
No, I don’t think it’s likely to win the young male vote.
Ezra Klein can grow as manly and bushy a beard as he wants—but he’ll never be as cool and chaotic as Hasan Piker making fun of Dan Crenshaw, or Jackson Hinkle speaking at a Houthi rally. These streamers epitomize today’s young American man: they claim to be Marxists, but they’re just revolutionaries. Hinkle calls himself a “MAGA Communist” nowadays, dropping the whole charade.
Piker, on the other hand, is still a diehard Bernie Bro, and trying to pull the Democrats back in a radical direction. For this, naturally, he received a fawning profile in The New York Times heralding him as the voice of the next progressive generation.
That prediction should, under no circumstances, be allowed to come true. Hasan Piker is a terrible and crazy person! His ideas are bad for America and bad for the Democratic Party. Piker is everything wrong with young men—a testosterone-crazed radical who loves saying crazy things and wants to totally overthrow the social order.
Democrats can’t afford to go down that path. They don’t need young men; they can—and should—win with sanity and pro-growth industrial policy instead.
Awful take. Any analysis of American politics today needs to start with the fact that a majority of the country is stupid. We used to keep the stupids in check because they have low voter turnout and they used to be split between the parties. Trump’s innovation is that he got enough of the stupids to vote Republican that they achieved critical mass and ejected the old party establishment. Now we have to deal with stupids running the country 50% of the time in equilibrium.
Democrats remaining elitist doesn’t solve that. They need to peel off enough of the stupids so that they don’t control the Republican Party anymore, but not enough that they take over the Democrats. Then we can have perpetually ~25% stupid governance instead of wildly swinging between 0% and 100% every four years.
Young men vote for chaos when they don't believe that there's a future for them in the present order. Yes, young men have a certain martial urge, but they also have an urge to try to build things. The former can be sublimated into the latter given the opportunity. Today's young man believes the building he lives in is moldy and rotten and no one will let him try to fix it, so why not reach for the gasoline and matches?
Also, it's not as if most the Dems remaining demographics actually like the Dem leadership. They're just more scared of the GOP.
That said, of course the current Dem effort to woo young men is idiotic. Another focus grouped, data driven, heavily workshopped PR campaign isn't going to work. It's doubling down on a good part of the very reason that young men hate Dems in the first place.