Despair makes young US men more conservative ahead of US election, poll shows
Despair makes young US men more conservative ahead of US election, poll shows
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Various countries' intelligence services have started ringing alarm bells about this: disgruntled young men who feel like they don't have a future is, well, a national security risk.
It's a real shame, how we mortgage young people's future for tax cuts for the old & rich today.
What's a real shame is we're not doing anything about it simply because young men are people.
Feminism didn't arrive because women were "a source of trouble" or anything. It's because women deserve a life of freedom of choice, independence, and inclusion in society.
Why aren't we striving to provide young boys and men with the same sense of purpose and ideal? Shouldn't be borne out of a sense that they'll be a problem later but rather because it's just right.
Feminism absolutely arrived because women made themselves a source of trouble.
I just came back from the National Park at Seneca Falls NY about women’s liberation. Women are even still today working for equal rights, and women’s right to vote came after 70 years of activism and fight.
We will get improvements to housing, wages, health care, and every other good action we need from our leaders and wealthy powerful society, when we make it more uncomfortable for them to keep helping themselves than to change and help the rest of us — and not one minute before.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
--Frederick Douglass
The worst part is the guy they’ll vote for to “shake things up” will be taking even more from them. It’s a combined failure of education and success of social media disinformation and misinformation.
I don't think that's true (well, your second sentence; your first is absolutely correct).
This kind of thing has been happening before the advent of mass and social media: this is just basic human tribalism at play. The only difference is scale.
People want to feel like they belong, and the political Left has done a really bad job at talking to the anxieties of the poor, especially young, male poor. The populist Right, meanwhile, has had a plan and has welcomed these people with open arms.
The Left abandoned the poor because it's political leaders fell in love with neoliberalism. And I don't think I can blame them, because triangulation worked very well and made a lot of people very rich while also cutting the traditional right-wing parties off at the knees. The problem is that it left the Left vulnerable to being flanked by right-wing populists who were ready to give comfort and validation to disadvantaged people; answers that were simple, easy and appealing, and make them feel like they were being listened to.
I can see how the leadership of, eg, the US Democratic party, or the Liberals in Canada, might be shocked by this, but for anyone involved on the ground this has been brewing since at least 2000. The real warning signs should have been when people of colour and LGBTQ folk started getting nervous about how progressive governments were big on empty gestures but very quiet when money was on the line, but the loss of young, working-class men happened a couple decades before that.
It's like we have an entire political class that slept through how the 1930s and 1940s happened. Which is of course, facetious, but it seems true, and the reason is because they didn't, and still don't, want to see it because they have been making too much money off of the problem.
The Left abandoned the poor because it's political leaders fell in love with neoliberalism
Neoliberalism isn't Left...
The current Left isn't really Left, either. That's my point.
The real warning signs should have been when people of colour and LGBTQ folk started getting nervous about how progressive governments were big on empty gestures but very quiet when money was on the line
This summarizes the problem well. I've felt like this about voting Democratic my entire adult life: "They mouth the right platitudes, but we all know they won't act on them if the money people demand otherwise. But they're literally the only option I have... so I'm stuck in this shotgun wedding."
It really seems like there are two types of Republican voters at this point: true believers, and nihilists. The nihilists no longer believe in politics as a means of enacting needed change, and are thus fine with torching the whole thing in the hope of getting a fresh start. My dad, who is a well-educated person, was explicitly one of those: "Donald Trump is the hand grenade I threw at the Government, because nobody is fucking listening." And I can fully sympathize with that -- the way we have arranged the modern world does not work, and needs more than moderate reforms.
Unfortunately, the true believers use this nihilism as their path to power -- as true believers have always done, through all of human history. And I've been saying for months now that I 100% expect Trump back in the White House come November, because the nihilism, if anything, has only metastasized.