Over the last few months, the writing and publishing world has been wracked by an acrimonious debate. Writers and readers complain that the mainstream publishing industry (‘trad publishing’), dominated by upper-middle-class, city-based, gender-studies millennial women, is obsessed with peddling chick-lit. Even traditionally male genres like fantasy and science fiction are dominated by ‘romantasy’ and ‘cosy SF’ (for instance, a female alien opens a coffee or bookshop shop in a city on a hostile planet, ‘builds a community’ and finds romance, invariably lesbian).
Even the cover art is shit: boring ‘minimalist’ designs that appeal to bourgeois women obsessed with Marie Kondo, but which leave book fans cold.
The trad publishing industry tries to defend itself by claiming ‘Men don’t read.’ No. They just don’t read the girly garbage trad publishers are churning out. Indie publishing, by contrast, is booming.
Trad publishing has a man problem.
In another sphere, so do the Democrats.
Since Donald Trump’s election victory, countless Democrats have lamented their party’s losses among men, and young men, in particular […] Trump carried men by roughly 12 points in November, including 57 per cent of men under 30.
Like the trad publishing industry, the Democrats have allowed their obsession with identity politics to translate into quotas that see the party dominated by wealthy women who are nonetheless convinced that they’re ‘victims’. And that men, especially young white men, are to blame.
Then they wonder why men aren’t interested in what they’re peddling.
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut also notes liberal squeamishness about masculine themes; he says the party is losing male voters in part because even talking about the need to improve the lives of men could run afoul of what he calls the “word police” on the left. Murphy told me […] “There is a reluctance inside the progressive movement to squarely acknowledge gender differences, and that has really put us on the back foot.”
Well, when they can’t even say what a woman is, why would anyone listen to what they have to say about men?
Worse, for Democrats, making themselves relevant to young, male voters would mean dismantling their entire worldview.
For Murphy, the right message might come from an earlier era – a notion that could seem antithetical to the very idea of progressivism. “We cannot and shouldn’t abandon some of the traditional ways that men find value and meaning: in providing protection, in taking high levels of risk, in taking pride in physical work,” he told me.
In other words, they’ll have to become, gulp… conservative.
Last fall, the Democratic strategist James Carville was “certain” that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump. If Carville had adhered to his own maxim – It’s the economy, stupid – he might have seen Trump’s victory coming. One lesson of 2024, some of the elected officials I spoke with said, was that Democratic power brokers were woefully oblivious of the economic struggles of working-class Americans.
It’d be easy to say that none of them understand working-class Americans because they’re entirely drawn from the ranks of the university-educated coastal elite. But so is Donald Trump. Trump, though, does something that Democrats resolutely refuse to: he empathises with working-class people. Democrats don’t just not understand working-class people, they actively despise them.
For Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, the party’s primary political problem is undoubtedly class – which is not something that a change of messaging from “the consultant-industrial complex” can fix, she told me […]
She stressed the importance of people knowing that their representatives “are actually living in the same reality” as they are – and that a white-collar professional is not always the best fit. She believes that people want to see themselves in their representatives.
These people just don’t get it. Where does a working Joe from Pennsylvania see himself in a billionaire from Queens? Yet, they voted for him, because he doesn’t sneer at them. He doesn’t talk down to them. When Trump congratulated the fry cooks he was working alongside at a McDonald’s, he meant it.
“I think about all the ways that I’ve seen this sort of unconscious disrespect for people in the trades,” [Gluesenkamp Perez] said. “I’ll hear people say, ‘Well, you know, my dad was just a janitor, and I’m the first person in my family to go to college,’ and I’m like, What does that sound like to everyone in the room who didn’t go to college? That you think you’re better than them” […]
She also told me that having a real values discussion is impossible until voters feel respected, and that a candidate is listening to them.
Which she clearly isn’t, when push comes to shove. She talks about how her constituents were especially fired up about men in girls sports, and how unfair it was to their daughters. Yet, she dutifully voted against Republican-sponsored legislation to keep transgender women and girls out of school sports.
And then she wonders why working-class men don’t vote for her party.
