Democrats spending millions to learn how to speak to 'American Men' and win back the working class

[Sympthsical]

67. We're losing the culture war

But people who experience America through partisan media are not at a vantage point that can see it.

We had been winning the culture war. I'd say the 90s and 2000's were peak ascension of left-leaning cultural issues. Choice, LGBT rights, racial and gender equality. Systems being reformed to allow for progress. President Obama's election will be seen as the high point of this rise in liberal cultural power.

And then something happened. Two things, actually, that worked in tandem to begin turning things around. After Obama's election, the Right began to reassert itself. We can point to the Tea Party as the first whispers of this stuff. Social media displaced liberal power in mass media culture and figured out that cultural power and influence could bypass mass media and make inroads through the far more individualized avenues of social media. The Left, long used to a comfortable seat at the helm of mass media, just never saw it coming. Hubris, laziness, complacency? Maybe all of the above.

While this was happening, left-leaning culture began over-stepping. I won't get into all the issues - it's literally not allowed in some instances - but having nothing better to do, bored ideological types in academia, media, and other spaces had to justify their jobs, and we started getting some truly wacky shit. Our identity politics went the only place they could go - into a toxic milieu of neo-segregation and racism, gender wars that alienated men, and a moral conviction that anything white, male, and heterosexual was by default evil, and apparently that needed to be centered in every conversation.

This shift made us alien to average Americans. We became cultural foreigners in our own country. People don't like it. Men, women, Black, White, Latino, AAPI, LGBTers (the ones who aren't screaming on Twitter all day). They. Don't. Like. It. Even when they vote for us, it's with the caveat, "Yeah, well I hate Republicans, but this shit sucks." People performatively declared "Hate will never win!" But in culture, it feels like all we do all day long is hate people. As long as it's the approved designated group to hate.

It turned people off. It signaled to young men in particular, white and otherwise, that we were not the place for them. I know I, as a gay man, really did not enjoy being told that my sexual orientation is just a construct, and I was a bigot if I was not open to a sexual partner who had a vagina. I got yelled at on dating apps by some of these activists.

That's how funhouse mirror it all got in the back end of the 2010s.

And there was the Right, on social media, with a very simple message. "We like you." That's it. That's the big secret. The Right didn't harangue anyone and everyone who didn't embrace an increasingly alienating ideological stance that had leaked into culture.

Now I get that this space is not the place for an honest conversation about this, primarily because it is as steeped in this 2010's cultural thinking as a place can possibly be.

But that is the secret. And it's an easy fix. Go back to being actual liberals instead of weird cultural authoritarians with an ever-changing list of cultural offenses people must be persecuted for committing. You can't forever keep expanding the list of heretics and still expect to have the most popular church.

Will we learn that? I'm not optimistic. There's just something in our DNA at the moment that disallows for questioning and self-reflection (also a marker of religion). So no matter how bad Trump is, we've somehow made ourselves less attractive. That should be a fucking bullhorn of a message.

But people continue to effect not to hear it. Messes with core ideological philosophy too much. So they press on. And keep losing people.

How's that working out?