GOP Must Embrace Anti-Woke Backlash Among Young Men

The ongoing rightward shift among young men promises to reshape the political calculus for both Democrats and Republicans. While Democrats’ progressive ideology offers only rejection and scorn for young men, and young white men in particular, Republicans have an opportunity to harness the male backlash against woke politics and advance core conservative values.

As Democrats are still trying to downplay the scope of their 2024 electoral losses, what stings them are the continuing revelations of just how much the electorate has shifted against them. Polls from NBC and CNN released this week found Democrats to have 27 percent and 29 percent public approval, respectively. Those mocking the party observed that more Americans believe in aliens than approve of the Democratic Party.

Simultaneously, despite a steady stream of propaganda to convince Americans that Trump voters are now experiencing regrets, including Soros-funded “GOP protesters” at town halls around the country, a new Fox News poll shows 92 percent of Republicans approve of the president’s performance. In fact, Trump’s overall approval rating is tied with his all-time high of 49 percent, set in April 2020.

If you’ve noticed Democrats seem crazier than usual these days, it probably has a bit to do with their desperation upon seeing numbers such as these.

That desperation increases with each new revelation of the details of Trump’s support. The Fox News poll shows the president “at high marks among key groups, including women, Black voters and voters under age 30.” Democrats rely on winning a supermajority of these groups to win elections. Given that younger voters usually shift more to the right over time, the loss of ground with those under 30 bodes particularly poorly for the Democrats.

This week, the liberal commentator Ezra Klein had pollster David Shor on his podcast to ask some of the hard questions about why the party that had been talking about an “emerging Democratic majority” is now talking about how “Democrats are getting destroyed among young voters” (Klein’s words). That shift is being driven (mostly) by a drastic shift in the views of young men.

Shor showed a chart of Democratic support broken down by age and sex. Among 18-year-olds, the only group that Kamala Harris won were non-white women. Donald Trump won non-white men narrowly, white women by a slightly larger margin, and white men by a landslide. As political analyst Christian Heiens wrote in a viral post on X/Twitter that featured Shor’s chart, “20 year old White men are now more Right-wing than 75 year old White men.”

It’s useful to pause to understand why Donald Trump, whom Klein and Shor both claim was just as unpopular on Election Day 2024 as he was on Election Day 2016, might have won so much of the young vote generally. The two liberals have a variety of reasons they adduce in the podcast, including a bit (but just a bit) of reality about how voters in general were upset about the economy, crime, and border security.

One of the biggest factors likely to be driving the shift among young voters, however, seemed to get no airtime in the Klein-Shor discussion: COVID-19 and the lockdowns that stole graduations, birthdays, youth sports seasons, and so many other formative experiences from young people.

Americans are finally receiving reluctant admissions from the media and even the medical establishment that the decision to close down these young voters’ schools and social lives in the name of a respiratory disease that bore little danger to them was based on lies and politics rather than truth. But Klein and Shor do not even mention it.

To ignore one of the most consequential and earth-shattering events of the last decade, particularly one that indicted Democrats in a very particular way, is to miss something that affected the lives of all young people—and accounts, in part, for the shift among almost all young voters. They experienced the obvious lies of our political and media class in a way that is difficult to shrug off.

Yet even more important in analyzing young men, particularly young white men, is to observe what kind of world they have been given. The outrage that resulted from Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments (that Americans just need to work harder in high school) during the December debates about H-1B visas was instructive. Despite having been told “replacement theory” is a pernicious, racist myth, young people in the tech world (as well as older ones) have seen how, even if they have “learned to code,” they have often been bypassed for foreign workers who will work for less.

Just as young men have been economically squeezed in many ways, they have also been the target of discrimination that has been obvious and public. It’s not just that we have incessant societal discussion of masculinity itself as “toxic.” Every initiative in both the private and public sector has made clear that more women must be hired in every position. Typical is a November 2023 press release from the National Park Service announcing that they have signed on to the 30X30 pledge, which sets as a goal that 30 percent of law enforcement officers in any given organization will be female.

Every young man under 50 (maybe even 60) knows that this has been the reality for decades. In fields attractive and suitable to men, such as police work, fire fighting, and military service, journalists and whistleblowers have produced plentiful evidence that standards have been lowered to get higher rates of women involved.

It is not just in more physical types of jobs in which men have faced discrimination. This writer was once told by an insider that he didn’t get an academic humanities job because the administration demanded that the department hire a woman. Men in every field (except for the ones they overwhelmingly don’t flock to, such as education and nursing) are finding closed doors—even if they have met or exceeded the qualifications.

White men, of course, face the most discrimination from woke HR departments and university administrators. The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo has been among the best chroniclers of how CRT and DEI have been used to persecute and shut out white males from corporate jobs in particular.

An article this week in Compact shows this most starkly in the context of literature. In “The Vanishing White Male Writer,” Jacob Savage chronicles how men, particularly white men, have been shut out of publishing. If they somehow slipped through, they are denied recognition of merit. Since 2020, he writes, the “doors have shut” for white American men younger than Gen-Z.

The New York Times “Notable Fiction” feature, he writes, has included only two white men out of 72 featured authors from 2021 to the present. The Times is not alone: “There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.”

In sum: from public service to military service, to corporations, to writing, young males—particularly white males—have found that the left and Democrats really hate them and will not allow them a fair shot. But now the political future may depend on how the two parties respond to this group.

Democrats show no inclination to move away from their own woke, anti-male/white male policies, even if they have some white men in powerful positions. Their white men—from Gavin Newsom to Tim Walz—are often the leaders pushing for these policies in the first place. No wonder: being more “progressive” allows older white guys to stay on top as they kick the ladder out from under them for guys like themselves who might compete with them.   

Republicans are in better shape, but they too will need to adapt. While they cannot preach despair to young men about their chances, they must acknowledge that the playing field has been tilted. The paths to success for young men are not there anymore.

Republicans must, like Trump and his merry band, be ferocious in destroying the anti-male and anti-white ideologies that have turned young men in their direction –thereby helping create the merit-based society that the Civil Rights leaders of generations gone by fought for. They must be unapologetic about doing so.

Republicans must also be open to thinking anew about the way in which the GOP and the modern conservative movement have negotiated questions of social issues, economic questions, and foreign policy. Simply writing off the younger men on the right as immature or radical (as an earlier generation treated Buckley and Reagan) is to miss the truth that we live in a new time seeking a new fusion of ideas.

These young men are sometimes angry about the failures of conservatives to conserve what is good and skeptical about the settled positions and policies of an earlier generation. After all, if the older generation could not protect them, why take their positions as self-evident?

More seasoned conservatives might be tempted to write off the young or scoff at them. That is a mistake. The kids are turning right for good reason. If the GOP shows they understand why, they will be able to put to rest any further talk of “emerging Democratic majorities.”

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.