Month: June 2025

Michael A, Cohen for MSNBC writes about this new 20 million dollar strategy to reach out to young men and speak in their language so they will vote for Democrats again. The assumption is that Dems aren’t cool enough or macho enough or something. I’m sure there’s an element of that. The transgressiveness of Donald Trump is appealing to some men. But I think we know the answer, don’t we?

To be sure, there’s long been a gender gap in American politics, with women more inclined to vote Democratic than men. In 2024, Trump’s presidential campaign made it a priority to target men, particularly occasional male voters. And it’s worth noting that Democrats lost significant support with white college-educated men in the 2022 midterms (though they gained ground with white non-college-educated men). So perhaps the decline evident in the 2024 numbers is part of a larger electoral trend? Perhaps men were more aggrieved by the state of the economy in 2024? Perhaps they were more turned off by Democratic positions on cultural issues like abortion, trans rights, etc?

All this is possible, but there is one complicating factor: The decline in male support for the Democratic Party in 2024 looks a lot like what happened with male voters in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was the party nominee.

In 2012, when Barack Obama faced off against Mitt Romney, there was an 8-point gender gap, according to Catalist. In 2016, the gender gap increased to 12 points. In 2020, Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, it closed back to nine percentage points. And in 2024, it had increased to 13 points. By and large, female support for the Democratic ticket was constant throughout these four elections; only male support for Democrats fluctuated.

Again, this seesawing support is evident across virtually all demographic groups. Democratic support among white non-college-educated voters is perhaps the most striking example. The party’s support with white non-college-educated women has been nearly constant in every election since 2012. But among white non-college-educated men, there was a six-point drop from 2012 to 2016, a two-point increase in 2020, and then a three-point drop in 2024. A similar gender gap was also evident among college-educated men.

So over the last four elections, we see a similar pattern — Democrats lose support with men when there’s a woman on the ticket, and gain it back when they nominate a man.

The U.S. stands out as one of the handful of Western democracies that has never elected a female head of state.

I don’t know why everyone is so afraid to point this out but I appreciate Cohen doing it. I’m sure there is plenty of nuance in the numbers and it’s a small sample and maybe it’s just those women. But honestly, it’s a big part of it. It’s just obvious.

Yes, Trump has a particular, unique appeal. It may be that when he’s gone this will disappear too. But despite all the sturm und drang over the “Joe Rogan effect” and everyone making pilgrimages to every manosphere podcast on the internet to hang with the boys, I’m pretty sure a lot of that will even out if the Dems nominate a man next time.

Think about it. These young guys voted for a nearly 80 year old man who was completely out of touch with their “vibe” in 2020 when their alleged avatar Trump was on the ballot. It’s not like Biden was particularly appealing to that demographic. But he was a male and that was good enough.

I’m not saying it will always be that way. But we are, as noted, one of the only western democracies that has never elected a woman and there’s a reason for it. We’re a little bit slow on the uptake. We’ll grow out of it eventually but in the meantime, we are dealing with a fascist movement that is quickly accumulating power. Best put that on the back burner for now.

The Four Horsemen of Calumny

I’d just posted Conservatives Need An Intervention about them protesting too much about their own Americanness before I read Heather Cox Richardson’s offering this morning. She brings her historian’s perspective to the same topic.

On June 1, 1950, Maine Sen. Margaret Chase Smith spoke out against the damage her colleague Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was doing to her beloved country with his communist witch hunt.

HCR writes:

“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles, and the ones making those attacks were in her own party.

People were becoming afraid to exercise the freedoms that over 400,000 Americans had recently died to protect.

Senator Smith wanted a Republican administration, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

“I doubt if the Republican party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”

That was during the Red Scare. Now democracy itself is disposable in Republicans’ pursuit of the power to dominate and punish neighbors with different political beliefs. A different kind of madness has gripped enough Americans to hand the presidency to a madman.

“I do not want to see the Republican party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”

“As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

Pray that it doesn’t take another world war to do it.

Sen. Angus King (I) of Maine recalled Smith’s “Declaration of Conscience” in a recent floor speech condemning the dangerous acculumation of power in the White House. He called out Congress’ abdication of its responsibility to check Donald Trump’s attempt “to govern as a monarch, unbound by law or Constitutional restraint, not as a President subject to the constraints of the Constitution and the rule of law.”

King implored his colleagues to “reclaim our power…. You know, do our job.” He reminded them: “Each of us swore—swore, mind you—to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic’; [and that we would] ‘bear true faith and allegiance to [the Constitution].’ Clearly,” he said, “the Framers knew there might someday be ‘domestic’ enemies of the Constitution and made it our sacred obligation to defend the Constitution from them,” and he called for his colleagues to stand alongside him to do so.

While they sit on their hands, Trump is a domestic enemy who’s pardoning other domestic enemies. This, at the same time he’s calling for harsher punishments for drug users and criminals, just so long as they are not his supplicants. He doesn’t have friends. And he wipes his ass with the Constitution.

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Have you fought dictatorship today?

No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Jesus isn’t coming to save them

“The lady doth protest too much,” that famous line from Act III of Hamlet, may have had movement conservatism’s number long before Donald Trump and MAGA trampled it. Republicans wore American flag pins on their lapels and condemned those who did not. They performed patriotism with misty-eyed, Lee Greenwood gusto. They wrapped themselves in the flag and broadcast to the world that not only were they Real Americans™, but more American than political rivals. They were the true defenders of the American faith.

Jesus warned against praying in public “as the hypocrites” do long before Shakespeare warned not to take overactors seriously. Republicans not only didn’t get Christ’s memo. They didn’t grasp its meaning.

Peter Wehner in The Atlantic (gift link):

Not too long ago, many Republicans proudly referred to themselves as “constitutional conservatives.” They believed in the rule of law; in limiting the power of government, especially the federal government; in protecting individual liberty; and in checks and balances and the separation of powers. They opposed central planning and warned about emotions stirred up by the mob and the moment, believing, as the Founders did, that the role of government was to mediate rather than mirror popular passions. They recognized the importance of self-restraint and the need to cultivate public and private virtues. And they had reverence for the Constitution, less as a philosophical document than a procedural one, which articulated the rules of the road for American democracy.

Then along came Trump. Republicans dumped the Constitution for a “blonde” as though having a mid-life crisis.

It is “hard to think of a more anti-conservative figure than President Donald Trump or a more anti-conservative movement than MAGA,” Wehner continues. Nearly half the country reelected a convicted felon who incited a violent mob to sack the U.S. Capitol to attempt to overthrow a presidential election, for godsakes. “They want to empower the federal government in order to turn it into an instrument of brute force that can be used to reward allies and destroy opponents.”

Wehner continues with a litany of antidemocratic actions Trump 2.0 has taken in the few short months since recoccupying the Oval Office. And deadly ones for hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable around the world.

The Trump administration is a thugocracy, and the Republican Party he controls supports him each step of the way. Almost every principle to which Republicans once professed fealty has been jettisoned. The party is now devoted to the abuse of power and to vengeance.

Political theorists recognize that the governing approach of Trump and the GOP embodies the philosophy of Nietzsche and Machiavelli. It’s all about the world of “Anything goes” and “Might makes right.” Laws and the Constitution are as malleable as hot wax; they can be reshaped as needed. Limited government has been traded for the Leviathan, and there are no constraints. The state has become a blunt-force instrument.

While in public they waved their flags, in private they were gazing into an abyss and becoming monsters.

Trump’s evangelical supporters are trained from their earliest Sunday school lessons to want a king. They search scriptures for a sign of his return, write fan fiction about it, and make movies. But after 2,000 years of impatient waiting, they gave up on a heavenly one and settled for a golden calf. The original golden calf was another cautionary tale they didn’t take to heart. Nor did more cynical Republican operatives. All that freedom talk concealed subjects awaiting the return of a king.

“The Republican Party now stands for everything it once loathed,” writes Wehner. Where it all leads is not written. “The flame of liberty hasn’t been extinguished quite yet.”

What once was the GOP needs an intervention. Jesus isn’t coming to issue an altar call. It’s up to us, Wehner concludes. “And love of country demands that those who love America and her ideals stand up against a man and a party intent on destroying them.”

And that’s my sermon.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

No Kings Day, June 14th
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense