Plain English with Derek Thompson - America's Young Men Are Falling Behind—and Shifting Right

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Today: the state of men and what's really happening in the gender divide in politics. Many young men are falling behind economically and socially at the same time that men and women are coming apart politically. What's really happening here? Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, joins the show to talk about the state of men, young men, working class men, the gender divide in the electorate, why Democrats seem to have a guy problem, and why Republicans seem to have a message that is resonating, especially for young men who are falling behind. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Richard Reeves Producer: Devon Baroldi LINKS: - “America’s Young Men Are Falling Even Further Behind" - The Tenuous Attachments of Working Class Men Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, this is a true story. I have a friend who once faked his own death so he could have more time to watch his favorite TV show. In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about the lies they tell, from forging new identities to taking their love of Game of Thrones a little too far. From Spotify and the Ringer podcast network, I'm Brian Phillips.

Listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever. you get your podcasts, October 15th. Today, we're talking about men. As we barrel toward Election Day, it's important to me that our coverage doesn't fall into the trap of poll watching and outright advocacy. You don't need me to tell you what the latest polls say on any given week. You can Google that. What I'd prefer to do is to offer context that helps people make sense of how the country is

changing and how electoral politics is both reflecting and driving. that change. And there are a few stories that fit this category better than the state of men in America. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a blockbuster story with the headline, America's young men are falling even further behind. Now, these kind of headlines have a habit of often being a bit hyperbolic, so let's ground this in some data to prove to you, prove to myself, that something real is happening here, something real and worth paying attention to. So we'll break this down into three categories. Education, living arrangements, and time use.

First, education. The share of male high school graduates who go onto college has declined sharply in the last 10 years. Women are now much more likely to graduate from four-year colleges and universities, but the long view here might be even more important. Here's a stat from the digest of education statistics, which really floored me. Go back 40 years ago. In 1984, men who graduated from high school were actually slightly more likely than women to attend a four-year school, 38% to 33%.

But in the last 40 years, this picture has totally flipped. The share of female high school graduates who go on to a four-year university surged from 33 to 51%. But the share of male high school graduates who go on to a four-year university surged from 33 to 51%. But the share of male high school graduates who go on to a four-year university. four-year school, went from 38% in 1984 to 38% today. Female education is a story of growth. Male education is a story of stagnation. And in an economy that generally rewards college degrees with higher wages, women are running

circles around guys when it comes to attending and graduating from college. At the same time that men have stagnated in terms of their college attainment, they've also stagnated in a more existential sense. The share of men between 25 and 34 who live with their parents has surged in the last 10 years to its highest mark on record. And according to the American Time Use survey, no group has increased their alone time more than young men in the last two decades. Now, that's a lot of statistics, and I know that stats can be rough on the ears, so let's just summarize it this way. Young men without college degrees are less likely to have families of their own, less likely to have a place of their own, less likely to have careers that pull them out of their

parents' home, and with every passing year, they're spending more time by themselves. I'd say that's something worth talking about. Now, moving this conversation to politics is tricky, and I have written and deleted this part of the open a few times, so rather than make it artful, I'm just going to make it honest. Everything that I've just told you is happening at the same time that polls seem to show a widening gap between the politics of young men and women. I really don't want to suggest anything as simplistic as men are shifting right because of economic anxiety. I think the full story is probably more complicated than that. But I do think that gender is a major factor in the political realignment that we're witnessing right now.

For many years, smart people who studied politics observed, I think correctly, that America was primarily polarized by race, with white voters mostly going to Republicans and non-white voters going overwhelmingly to Democrats. But in the last few cycles, something has changed here. white voters with college degrees, and especially college-educated women, have turned sharply left, while less educated voters, especially men without a college degree, have turned right, including black and Hispanic men. One way that I found it useful to think about this dynamic is that race is becoming less important to explain voting patterns, while education and gender are becoming different. more important. And again, since women are so much more likely to graduate from college in the

first place, you could fairly say that education polarization is gender polarization. So there's a lot of moving parts here. I'm not sure that I just went through this in the clearest way possible, so let me try to sum it all up in one sentence in the clearest way possible. I think many young men today are falling behind economically and socially, at the same time that men and women, are coming apart politically. Today's guest, return guest, is Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. We talk about the state of men, young men, working class men.

We talk about the gender divide that polls seem to show in the electorate, why Democrats seem to have a guy problem, and why Republicans seem to have a message that is resonating especially for young men falling behind. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Richard Reeves, welcome back to the show. Yes, great to be back on. Thanks.

So in September, the Wall Street Journal published an article that I read, and immediately, upon reading the article, thought, God, I wish I had Richard Reeves right here next to me to talk about this. The article was called America's young men are falling even further behind, and the deck reads, quote, men in their 20s and early 30s are much more likely than female peers to live with their parents, and many say they feel aimless and isolated. And for those listeners who are skeptical of qualitative claims that don't come with federal statistics, here is the relevant federal

statistic. The share of men between 25 and 34 who live at their parental home has increased by about one-third in the last 20 years. It's risen from about 13 percent to about 20 percent. Now, Richard, you were quoted in this journal article, and you said, quote, the sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society. What did you mean by that? What I meant by that is that the most important glue that many of us have to community, to our own sense of ourselves is, I think, neededness. That's a horrible word.

But I've come to believe that feeling unneeded, feeling surplus to requirements is actually, in some cases, literally fatal, if you look at the words that men use to describe themselves before they take their own lives. And through suicide, the two most common words are worthless and useless. And of course, that's a particularly tragically selected group. But I think even like away from the most tragic frontiers of unneededness, which is suicide,

what you see among a lot of young men and you see it in the friendship statistics that you're interested in, you see it in some of the drug addiction, you see it in the lack of geographical mobility, you see it in a whole series of social and economic trends, which is just this uncertainty that there are social institutions out there needing you to lock into them, right? I think at some level we all need to feel like we're a jigsaw piece that's going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere. And if you don't feel that, if you're not really pretty sure that there's a specific purpose for you in your community or family, then I think that leads to retreat. I think it leads to dislocation. I think it can lead to deaths of despair. And so at a root cause,

I've come to believe that that is what's driving a lot of these more surface level trends, which is a real question that a lot of young men have is like, do you need me? Am I needed? Or am I actually maybe a kind of nice to have rather than a must have. So just as you were speaking, I thought of three categories of neededness or social connection. One is social needness. So to have a best friend is going through a hard time, to have a wife, to have a baby.

My baby's 13 months old. So what I feel when I wake up every morning is a sense of profound, exhausted needness. I have a 13-month-old who refuses to walk and prefers to be carried and adorably hugged wherever she goes. So that's extraordinary needness, right? There's institutions that can create neediness, very separate from family or friends. So you can go to a church or you can belong to a club where you're an incredibly important member of that club or where you feel like your presence there is an essential presence.

And that makes you feel institutionally or even maybe, let's say, civically needed, right? So we have social needness. We have civic neededness. And then finally, I think we have to bring in economics. If we're talking about young men living at home, it seems very likely to me that these men are not thriving on an economic basis. A lot of them probably are struggling. Maybe they're unemployed or underemployed, cobbling together a few jobs. And maybe what you're describing is neededness is a stand-in for or a kind of synonym for a sense of personal success.

That I am, I feel like I am economically worthy because I'm working in a job that I see as meaningful, and I'm earning money from that job that makes my life comfortable. And when I think about and narrativeize my life, I say, oh, I am economically worthy. So are these the right buckets to look at sort of social neededness, civic neediness, and economic worthiness? Or is there another way that you'd prefer to talk about this concept of need? Because I find it a really powerful concept. Yeah, I really like that way of constructing it.

of course, it's like all of these things, there are different ways of constructing it. But I really like the fact that you've got the social, particularly the familial one, the community-based one, and then a labour market-based one. And I think that they, of course, they will very often overlap, and they will reinforce each other to some extent. But what's interesting, if you look at the work of people like Catherine Eden and others, who've looked at, particularly working class men, the tenuous attachments they've got, is that you do see that it's almost exactly, as you say, is those different kind of dimensions

of connection or neededness. And the reason I like neediness rather than just connection is I think connection is a bit bloodless, right? I think there's something more visceral going on here, which is a bit more tribal, something a bit more, okay, my people, my tribe needs me to do something. And I think that's somewhat more socially constructed and signalled for men than it is for women. And that could be a controversial thought. So let me say a bit more about that. But at least at some level, I think women have a pretty strong sense that they're going to be needed at the very least by their children, right, to bring life into the world.

I'm not in any way suggesting you're not an amazingly important father. But to some extent, even fatherhood is a bit more of a social institution. It's a bit newer. It's a bit more constructed. And so I think that those institutional frameworks, through which particularly male-neededness is communicated and kind of collude is even more important. And then what you see is with lots of great changes we've seen like the decline in the share of male breadwinners. So 40% of breadwinners now are women.

We've seen a huge rise in women's economic independence. And we've discussed before. We loudly agree with each other about what an amazingly positive thing that is in case anyone misses that point. But it does then say, okay, well, do we need you economically? right? Are you the breadwinner? Are you sure you're bringing much to the party economically? And then in terms of community institutions, one of the things that's happened is that, and again, these are for good reasons, but as we've said, actually, some kind of particularly male roles have now become much more co-ed, right? So I've talked a bit about, like, I don't, I don't like the fact that

boy scouts has disappeared and become scouting for America and that we've kept girls scouts. And that's not actually just because I think that it's good for boys to have some spaces that are single sex, but also because being a scout leader, and I've been one, and I actually am one again, if you have Boy Scouts, you need male leaders. And so what you're saying is, we need guys, right? And so when I became a scout leader, we actually, we need some guys to be the scout leaders, right? And so there was something kind of specific about that. It's like, oh, you need me, right? And then in terms of the family, connecting men to kids, connecting them to the sense of care and nurturing is hugely important. And I have this quote from the anthropologist Margaret Mead

that I just ended up using it so much that I committed it to memory where she said, every known human society has rested on the learned nurturing behavior of men. This behavior being learned is rather fragile and can disappear quickly in circumstances that no longer teach it effectively. And I love that, this idea of learned, So I think because it gets at this sense. Like, of course men are nurture. Of course men are generative. Of course, masculinity is about giving more than you get.

But it does have to become a little bit more learned and a bit more institutional and a bit more signalled. And I worry that we're not signaling strongly enough to young men now. We need you. Like we in very different spaces. We the families. We the mothers. We the labor market.

We the community. Not just we need people, but we need you. And absent that. sense of we need you, I think we see a lot of young men retreating. You mentioned the Catherine Eden paper, which is one of my favorite pieces of sociology in the last 10, 20 years. It's a paper called the tenuous attachments of working class men, and we're going to link to that paper in the show notes. What I got from that paper, and what I have never forgotten, is the sense that working class men, while they might have the opposite

politics of young people, millennials, and Gen Z, have done something very similar to young people in America, which is that they've cast off traditional institutions. These men used to go to church, now they don't. They used to get married in their 20s, now they don't. They used to have children with nuclear families, now that's much less likely. They used to associate with all sorts of local clubs and organizations and even pick up sports teams, but a range of athletic behaviors from youth sports to pick up games are much less common than they used to be throughout the country. And when those institutions go away. What you lose is something bigger than a church or a pickup game. What you lose is a life script. And I think you lose a sense of how to make it through a life. I've always thought that was such a

profound idea that traditional institutions for all their obvious flaws give people a life script, a sense of how to live without which people feel lost. I loved that part of the paper too. And they ended up talking about the improvisation that's required. Like if you see these institutional crucibles drop away, then you're improvising more. And the difficulty with this conversation is that it always runs the risk of sounding like super socially conservative. But I think you have to run that risk before moving on and actually talk about the importance of institutions or even this idea of formation. So a big idea in Christian theology, especially is formation. And I think that idea of how we're formed and who we're formed by and in what environments and to what ends. It's something we can

hold on to even as we think about the way in which the institutions and spaces in which we're going to form will change, but we should be careful not to just throw them all away and think that everyone can improvise themselves into a purposeful, well-constructed self on their own in the basement with just the internet, right? That it is going to take these relational structures within which we form ourselves. And so what does that mean? What it means is that we have to continue to think about fatherhood as an institution, a formative institution, and find ways through policy and through culture to connect men to their children, even if they're no longer married. And so this is a great example where people say, yeah, so what's formative? Marriage is formative. That's true. It is a

formative institution, but it's also now much less common. And in fact, most kids born outside of college-educated couples are born outside marriage, right? It's birth within marriage is the norm for the upper middle class, but it is not for anybody else, right? And so if we cannot think that for the vast majority of people and for the foreseeable future, that marriage is going to be a key formative institution for learned male nurturing behavior, men still need to learn it. So then what does that mean for fatherhood? What does it mean for paid leave for dads? What does it mean for the way we think about child support policies, divorce courts, custody arrangements, etc.? Dad's groups. What does it mean for things like sports? You mentioned the decline in sports. We're doing

some work on that now, but what does it mean for the role of coaches? And it's really come to believe that it is still true that one of the ways that young men especially, boys and young men learn are formed, is alongside shoulder to shoulder with adult men. I show, don't tell masculinity formation. That's how we think about it. There's a lot of telling, right? There's a lot of telling right now, especially online, but you just show it. And it's one of the reasons I'm semi-obsessed with the cratering share of male teachers, especially in high school and middle school, right? Tim Walsh was like one in three when he was a teacher in the 80s, isn't it?

Now down to 23% share of male teachers. A third of male teachers are also coaches. They're much more like to be coaches and run after-school clubs than female teachers. That is in no way a knock on female teachers. it just says that male teachers are also the ones who are running the after-school clubs, that are coaching, etc. And they've honestly come to believe that that kind of flesh and blood, showing, not telling, formation of masculinity in our institutions is usually important.

So we can lament or not lament the decline in traditional institutions like church, etc. But we can definitely do something about the institutions that we do have some way over, like schools. I want to layer on top of this analysis one of my obsessions, which is the remarkable degree to which Americans' lives have been transformed by solitude. So according to the American Time News survey, face-to-face socializing for young men in the last 20 years has declined by 40%. And in the same amount of time, the amount of hours in any given day that young men in America play video games has tripled in the last 20 years. When I think about the fact that young men and maybe men in general are much more likely to spend time alone, much more likely to spend time inside by themselves, I think it is very hard to feel socially and civically needed if you don't leave your house and you don't have a family. If you design a world where nuclear families recede and Americans withdraw into their homes, you are severing people from the ability to be. become necessary to other people. I'd love you to dilate on that point a bit and tell me how you

think your big idea of neededness collides with my big idea of aloneness. Yeah, what's super interesting about this is the addition of the sense of this being embodied in some way that this kind of, the relational structures that we, that we learn through and teach through and pass lessons on through to some extent having to be physical, having to have that kind of embodied nature. And one of the things I find quite interesting about that is that in different ways, you can think about the embodied nature of more typically male and female ways of interacting with each other and learning from each other. One of the things that I've learned recently, and I've become convinced by recently, I should say, is that it looks like pretty

clearly that boys and young men are more relational learners than girls and women are. And what that means is that they, the shorthand here is they have to know who before they care about what. And so they actually, their educational progress is somewhat more influenced by their relationship with their teacher than it's true for girls and women. That girls and women are just a little bit better at getting the work done, remaining motivated actually. But actually the boys and the young men need to have that sense of the teacher, right? The relationship with the teacher kind of being more important, which is one reason why I think

online learning can, at the average, be a little more difficult. for male learners. It's counterintuitive for a lot of people. I think they think, well, women are the embodied ones, you know, men are the brains on a stick, and they're the ones who are happy on screens and so on. But it turns out that actually that learning, literally learning through classroom learning,

but I also think cultural learning as well, is strongly embodied. And if you think about this shoulder-to-shoulder form of communication that men have, etc., and you think about the role of coaches, and you think about this image of the high school, football coach or baseball coach, whatever, sitting on a bench next to a boy or a young man, talking to him, right? Not in his face, therapyizing him, but, and then maybe if he's struggling,

kind of putting an arm around him or just kind of being physically present for him and then getting up and then helping him through that. What is that, if not an ancient, tribal piece of communication where a mature man with some status in community and with some skill and is helping a young man to develop those skills himself. Like if the high school coach with his arm around the young man who's struggling at home isn't an anthropologically moving thing for you to think about, I don't know what to say, because it's like that's, that's very, very deep. And it would be a bit different for women.

But what's interesting about that picture I've just painted is this incredibly embodied, this incredibly physical, this incredibly show, not tell. And it turns out, and I think people get this wrong all the time, that it's more true for boys and for men that that form of learning is embodied. Let's pivot to class. You recently published a report on the state of working class men. Tell me what you think the most important thing was that you found. I think I know this data pretty well, Derek.

You know, I've been talking and writing about class for a long time. I've been now talking about men and boys for a long time. And so I thought, well, I doubt if I'll surprise myself, but it will be a useful thing to put out there in the world. We'll show stagnant wages for men without a college degree. We'll show a massive gap in employment rates between men with and without a college degree, which is the main binary we used here, which is quite commonly used, and so on. But even I was blown away by a couple of our findings,

and they relate directly to what we were just talking about in many ways. And one was just, I knew that there was a class gap in marriage. I didn't know quite how big it had gotten. and they also didn't know how that had played out in the number of men with children in their families. And so I was genuinely shocked and had to run the numbers a few times before I believe the fact that if you take men in their 30s and 40s without a four-year college degree, only half of them are living with kids. And that was just, that that's a 30% drop just in the last few decades, right? And it has really 50-50. That's a seismic cultural change, right, to say that these guys in their 30s, 40s, which is the prime age, only half of them are kind of with kids now, as a result of this huge gap we see in marriage.

So that one really blew me away. And then another one was, and I knew some of this, but I hadn't again seen it quite starkly, which is there's this very big gap in Labor Force participation. You know a lot about this between men of different levels of education. So it's 80% labor force participation rate for men without a college degree, 90 for those with. So one in five men without a college degree are not in the labor force. But then when you ask why, that's actually a much more interesting. 50% of the men without a college degree who aren't in the labor force say it's because

they're sick or disabled. Ask the men with a college degree, why they're not working. Yeah. So it's half. ask the men with a college degree why they're not working, and the modal answer is getting more education. That's like one in four, right? So I've already got a college degree.

I'm getting a postgraduate degree, followed by, I'm looking after my kids, maybe exhausted from a 13-month-old or whatever. And then thirdly, I've retired because I've made enough money. And so back to this point about purpose and need and meaning, it's not just that there's this huge gap in employment rates between these men of different classes, but the reason they're not working is absolutely.

absolutely different world. And that really gets us into issues around substance abuse, drug poisonings, et cetera. And you do see just these huge differences by class affecting men. Let me make sure I have this right, because this seems very, very important. Of men who don't have a four-year college degree, who are not working, not in the labor force, half of them say it's because of a disability. When you decompose that 50%, what share of it is a physical disability versus a substance abuse problem versus something else. So that we don't know the answer to. This is what they're saying is self-report.

So it could be any of the, it could be any of those. But we know from other data and from separate data, we've actually just published even since that report won on causes of death. So this is a different measure. This is kind of, this is the most tragic outcome. And there you see these huge class gaps in drug poisoning. that's not suicide, right? Actually, the class gap in suicide is nothing like as big,

but actually if you look at the kind of rates of death from drug poisoning, which is like an accidental overdose, the rates for men without a four-year college degree are significantly higher than they are for any other group. And so you put those different things together, and you also have Alan Kruger's old work, looking at the number of share of men on painkillers out of the labor force, etc. It is quite clear that a big part of this story

that we're seeing among these men with less economic power is that it's related to drugs. And some of them are dying from those drugs, probably because they're now getting laced and so on too. But for me, that comes back to this broader story of retreat and unneededness. These are generally the sorts of drugs that men are dying from, and they're dying in much bigger numbers than they were.

So to put a very kind of sharp data point on this, the increase in drug poisoning deaths among men since 2001, So roughly for this century, the increase means an additional 400,000 deaths. So compared, if the level of drug poisoning deaths had remained flat since 2001, so it's not like we're not going to have any, right? Then we'd have had 400,000 fewer men die, which is about the number of men who died in World War II. Okay. So we've lost a World War II number of men because of the increase in drug poisoning this century.

And these are not, this is not people taking, by and large, by in large, a couple of lines of coke to improve their Saturday night in the club or an exeter, whatever. These are much more likely to be these drugs of retreat, which obviously, opioids, etc. And so I think this is all consistent with a story of retreat and uncertainty and unneededness, even when it's not a suicide. I think that the retreat to those kinds of drugs, which of course causes substance abuse problems. addiction, which causes problems of employment and causes problems of family. And so then you see this clustering of difficulties that many working class men are really struggling with. I want to move this conversation into politics, as dangerous as that might be, because what's happening with gender and politics right now is much discussed and I think absolutely fascinating. So there are a number of studies today finding a large and widening gap between the politics of young men and the politics of young women.

There's a lot of polls that show a dramatically widening gap. There's some polls that say the gap exists, but it's not widening. You understand this space better than almost anybody. What do you think is actually happening here? The obvious one is that young women have become, and you've written about significantly more liberal, significantly more Democrats supporting. The other one that's a little bit less clear,

but is still, to my mind, strong, is not the turning of young men to the right, but the detachment of young men from the left. And in some place, I think almost a place of almost like political homelessness to some extent, right? There's no evidence that men have turned against gender equality. There's no evidence they've shifted their view on policy. But it is quite clear that the presumption that young men will typically vote left is no longer one you can safely make. Now, let's see what happens in November.

This could have washed out, et cetera. but I think that the chance that more young men either sit it out or do end up voting a Republican is significantly higher than it was in different election cycles. That is, I don't, I can't look at it and not see that. It's, but it's almost a detachment. And it's very interesting to me. When I talk about the left, they say,

why are young men turning to the right? And I always say, are you sure they're not turning away from the left? Why do you always frame it that way? Wait, let's go on level deeper then. So if it's most accurate to say that young men feel left behind by progressive politics as they are practiced and articulated in the 2020s, what do you think is going on there? I think the reason why many young men feel left out of the current framework and rhetoric of the left is because they are left. out of the current framework and rhetoric of the left. They're not wrong. And I'll give you a couple of examples. One is if you go to the Democrat Party platform and you look up who we serve,

there's a list of demographic groups of people at the Democratic Party's is proud to serve, women, LGBTQ youth, many other groups, doesn't have men. Okay. I'm not suggesting that people are going to that website address and looking to see if they're included on it. I'll give you another example that just was pointed out to me at a meeting today, which is, have you downloaded and read the whole of the Harris-Waltz's opportunity economy paper yet, Derek? I have not yet made time, no. No. Well, next time you have your 13 months and you're struggling, is it a son or a daughter, I can't remember. As a daughter. Surely, as you'd say that, right? If she won't go to sleep, I suggest a great bedroom. Just read at the,

But the point of it is this, this person told me this. I didn't believe it. And he said, because I'll confess not to have read it either. He said there are seven images in that paper of either Harris-a-Waltz engaging with a voter. Every single one of them is a woman. There are no men. And look, I don't think someone deliberately did that. I don't think it was, but it is indicative of a mindset, which has,

prevented the people on the left from just acknowledging some of these issues that men are facing for fear that they'll somehow be seen as anti-women, etc. And the great tragedy of this is that so many of the policies being pursued by Democrats are very pro-male. Who is least likely to have health insurance? Young men, young working class men. Who was most helped by the biopartisan infrastructure bill? working-class man.

And so here you've got these things you're actually doing, but you would never say that. And you would never frame it that way. I think that's a huge missed opportunity because it is quite clear that a lot of men are just like, aren't much for me over there, and at least that lot over there on the right look like they kind of like me, right?

They think guys are okay. And it's not subtle, Hogan ripping off his shirt and whatever, it's not subtly done, is nonetheless communicating a bit more of a welcome mat on that side of it. And I think it's purely cultural right now. There's not a policy pitch that the right are making. It's not like the Republican's slightly different view on nuclear power is what's swinging young men, although young men are much more in favor of nuclear power.

That's not what's swinging them. So it's something else. And what is it? I think it's just this kind of cultural messaging about the fact that like we kind of like you. And we kind of think guys are good. There was so much in there, and I want to pull out some points of mild disagreement, and then one point of very profound agreement. So first, and this really is minor, I think you'll acknowledge that, like, word counts in the

Democratic policy platform or photographs in a paper about policies in the opportunity economy, these things, like, they have a collective readership of, like, 17 in a country of 350 million. They're probably not the things that are moving the male cohort. in any direction. But I will acknowledge that the Democrats are not foregrounding men in some of their campaign literature or in their rhetoric. I will grant that broader point. That said, much more interesting to me is your very insightful suggestion that the Biden White House pursued a subtly pro-male economic agenda. Right. So this was a very pro-blue-collar union administration, and yet blue-collar unions are moving away from Democrats.

This administration had historic investments in infrastructure, roads, bridges, the clean electric economy, solar farms, wind turbines, with the Chips and Science Act, semiconductor manufacturing facilities, all of those jobs, construction jobs, electrician jobs, clean energy construction jobs, they're all 90% male. and yet men are moving right. Democrats have pursued, in a way, a traditionally masculine economic agenda,

while at the same time they've been reluctant to cast themselves as friendly to traditionally masculine values or rhetoric. That's a very interesting juxtaposition that I never quite thought about. And I suppose it contains within it a suggestion that's also interesting, which is that today's male voters

are more post-material than they used to be. That is, they're less likely to vote on economic issues, job growth, taxes, tariffs, and more likely to vote on cultural issues, guns, crime, representations of masculinity. Is it your sense that male voters have become more post-material as a cohort? Well, I think the first thing to say is I suspect people are still doing, that to some extent, right? I mean, just thinking about, I had a conversation a friend of mine last

week. He said, I'm going to vote for Trump. And I said, why? And he said, because I made more money when he was president, right? I mean, he's a young black man. I didn't get into other issues that we didn't have time, but I would love to have done. But it was like, yeah, I made more money. So I suspect there are still some people doing that. Because this election, like many of the recent elections, is being played out more in a cultural plane than a materialist plane. Clearly it's both, and actually interesting, men seem to be more interested in materialist policies than women right now, right, because of the weight of reproductive rights, but also climate change. If you look at the young women, what women generally more concerned about some of the, oh, I guess climate change is not cultural issue, but issues around gender and particularly reproductive rights are playing out heavily. But I have wondered a little bit, and I even worry about framing it this way, because maybe it sounds too unfair.

But, you know, remember that book, What's the Matter with Kansas? The whole argument there was that lowering income Americans were being persuaded by cultural issues to vote against their own economic interest. That's the argument. And the Republicans have very successfully done that, particularly actually around abortion. And I wonder if it isn't a version of this playing out around some of these gender issues. So is there a what's the matter with Kevin? conversation going on here too, which is that precisely because this debate about gender, especially post me to, especially with Trump, especially with Dobbs, and especially some of the

discussions there have been about gender and the politics of gender and sex recently, has actually created a cultural opening here to persuade men to actually vote on the cultural issue of gender this time round, even though, I would say materially, many of the issues that the Democrats could be selling, like the infrastructure investment we just talked about, as kind of very pro-male policies, but won't. But on the other hand, some of them would go the other way. And so, for example, we do know from polling that canceling college student debt is pretty popular among women, but much less so among men. And that's for one obvious reason, right, which is that there's two-thirds of college debt is held by women,

because women go to college much more than men, right? So that's if you like a kind of surgical policy strike at your base. Like, if you wanted a policy that was aimed at your base, it is student debt. But men are not that excited about it, right? And so actually, they might be like, well, the Democrats just want to spend a gazillion dollars. That was an estimate on paying off, you know, student debt. Well, I didn't go to college. And I don't think, I also think, by the way, that if you took on that debt, you should pay it back. And this is a freebie. And so that could go the other way, right? And so it's not clear to me how that would play out. But I think it would be better. if it was being done on that basis.

It's just that these cultural issues right now, especially around gender, masculinity, reproductive variety, it's gender, sex, Me Too. They're so brothy right now that I think it's created a lot of turbulence. And I don't know where men are going to land, honestly, but it feels a bit like the kaleidoscope has at least been shaken, even if we don't yet know where the pieces are going to land. Let's say it's November 10th, and we finally have finalized results of the presidential election.

And Donald Trump is won, and the exit poll show that a meaningful contribution to his victory is a clear and unambiguous shift among young men, including white men, non-white men, educated, non-ambiguous. educated toward the Republican Party compared to 2020. And CNN has you on a panel that night, and they say, Richard, explain this to us. In a world where Trump wins the election in part because of a significant shift of young men toward the Republican Party, what would be your explanation for that phenomenon if it happens? It would be that the Republicans actively contested for the votes of young men, including young men of color, in various ways, but through their communications outreach, the sort of podcast that they went on, the performance, the affect, just the sense of, like, guys are welcome here sign that they hung out,

and that the Democrats did not contest that ground. They ceded that ground on the basis, that they could lose those men so long as they gained enough votes from young women. That was a political calculation that turns out not to have been successful. The contest for the votes of young men was one-sided. There was only one side going for their votes, and they got them. The other side was going for the votes of women, especially young women, and didn't get enough of them to counteract that effect. for my money, the winner of this election was always going to be the party that could manage to have a politics that honored the role of men in society without dishonoring women and vice versa.

And it was a close run thing, and it certainly looked like the Republicans were in trouble. And you saw a shift in their tone around this, even in the run up to the election. which was to try and move away from the sense that in order to honor men, in order to say guys are welcome here, that they had to somehow sound like they wanted to kind of turn their backs on women or go back on women, right? But the Democrats didn't even try to have a conversation publicly about guys, and guys are welcome here for fear that that would undermine their appeal to young women.

Richard, I'm going to be thinking about this idea for a lot, time, I think, this idea that the Biden-Harris administration simultaneously pursued a subtly pro-male economic agenda that was nested within a political message that was seen as indifferent or even hostile to the cultural attitudes and identities of men. That is really interesting. And the idea might be too fresh for me to deeply evaluate it at the moment. But I'm going to be thinking about that one for a long time. As always, Richard Reeves, thank you very much. Thank you. That was fun. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Beraldi.

Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week on Fridays. We'll see you next week.