While a clear picture of what happened to the electorate is still settling after the cataclysmic U.S. election earlier this month, what’s clear is that young men may have played a large part in the red sweep observed on Nov. 5 — and bro-style podcasts could be to blame.
In 2015, an article in the Atlantic coined the term “Bernie Bro” in a last-ditch effort for the Democratic Party’s white-collar elite wing to demonize the Sanders campaign, as the article argued that Bernie supporters were often unconsciously misogynistic. After the release of the article, Bernie Bro started being used to designate a kind of belligerent white heterosexual male Bernie supporter who wasn’t consciously aware of their patriarchal and racist behaviour as they argued for… universal healthcare? Right.
The term was always a confabulation by the corporate class of the Democratic Party to make sure that their interests — corporate donors and their personal wealth — weren’t threatened by the one candidate in the race who centred class disparities as needing amelioration in American society. Sure, you could find some off-putting tweets here and there by rabid Sanders’ supporters on Twitter, as you can from the fringe supporters of just about any other large public figure.
The whole Bernie Bro smear campaign was an example of the worst kind of cynical deployment of identity politics among the elite of the Democratic Party to avoid confronting uncomfortable questions about where and why one sat in the brutally stratified pecking order of late-American capitalism.
Ever since the Bernie Bro episode, I’ve been almost instinctually hesitant towards any attempt from people on the left to characterize a kind of inherent male-identity pathology as driving political movements in any serious way.
However, what’s clear after the recent U.S. election which saw Republican nominee Donald Trump, the epitome of infantile male desires to the point of almost seeming like a caricature of them, win the presidential seat in a landslide — winning all swing states and the popular vote — is that young men and the way they relate to themselves and media provides a compelling answer for a large chunk of the success of the Trump campaign this election cycle and it’s worth looking at why.
According to USA TODAY’s reporting of a Wall Street Journal breakdown of voter data from the election, “Gen Z men shifted 15 percentage points rightward, the largest age/gender swing in this election.”
This is somewhat unsurprising considering that Trump appeared just days before the election on what’s surely the pinnacle of bro-style podcasts in the world, The Joe Rogan Experience, which pulls in millions of young male viewers each episode.
The podcast episode sits at 50 million views on YouTube as of writing with a comment section that is overwhelmingly supportive of Trump.
In the podcast, the eponymous show’s host Joe Rogan conducts a nearly three-hour softball interview with the then Republican nominee where topics like the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection incited by Trump and other pressing political subjects — y’know, things one might think to ask someone with a high chance of occupying the most powerful seat in the free world — comprise exactly zero minutes of those three hours.
Instead, the podcast is just guys talking about guy things like UFC and how woke everything is these days. When there are political issues discussed, Trump does his usual loose and often uninformed opining on global affairs while inflating his own sense of importance and success during his first administration; and Trump does this with basically no interruptions, corrections or requests for clarification from Rogan for the full nearly three hours.
But it wasn’t just Rogan’s podcast.
Trump was doing the rounds on other podcasts that draw large numbers of young male viewership as well, appearing on the likes of comedian Andrew Schulz’s podcast, influencer and streaming phenom Adin Ross’ podcast and a few more of that ilk. The same dynamic ran through all of these podcast appearances. The hosts all maintained a jovial if not a little overwrought attitude towards Trump as they humanized him and ignored basically everything politically important other than scratching the surface with no rigorous pushback if Trump lied on some issues.
While it’s still just a hypothesis to connect the huge right swing of Gen Z male voters to Trump’s appearances on lowbrow hyper-masculine podcasts, a live segment from MSNBC at a polling station during election day made mention of Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan being a commonly cited reason for why voters present there were casting their ballot for the Republicans if they were. And while this isn’t hard data, it’s corroborative in a way that bolsters an argument that diagnosing what’s going on in the strange matrix of the current social-media landscape, modern conservatism and masculine identity in young men is important to understanding contemporary politics in the U.S. and perhaps even further abroad, especially when one considers the existence of frat-coded, histrionic right-wingers like recently incumbent President Javier Milei of Argentina who is a fan of Trump and vice versa.
While a full-fledged diagnosis of the rightward swing of young men in America can’t be done in one article, my contribution is to make a concession on the identity politics of masculinity. While “toxic masculinity” has been a buzzword cynically deployed by ostensibly progressive but actually centre- to centre-right upper-middle class individuals to appear radically progressive while cynically protecting their class interests, as epitomized in the Bernie Bro debacle — it is a squarely apt descriptor for what drove a noticeable part of the appeal of Trump for young men this election season.
Some might argue there’s also a bit of a cynical knowledge with big podcasters like Rogan when they endorse and humanize Trump in that they know he’s going to gear policies to protect the classes they belong to by lowering their taxes and so on. This may be true for some of these podcasters, however, I don’t think, to the extent that’s happening, that that’s as contrived as some may believe. That is, I don’t think that reason is the primary driver behind the sycophantic friendliness that characterized the hosts’ attitudes during the Trump podcast media circuit.
The primary driver, I contend, is these podcasts identifying and capitalizing on the fact that for many young men, the stuff they’re seeing from the centre of the Democratic Party is alienating and the irreverence to stuck-up liberal elites that Trump represents provides at least some model for how masculinity can be constructed today.
The current social paradigm has seen the total desiccation of the traditional ideal of manhood in American society — the Fordist-wage husband that singlehandedly supported a nuclear family’s needs. This ideal was also rife with problems, mind you, but at least had masculinity tied to a kind of care for others, so that some kind of social altruism beyond the masculine subject himself was part of being a man, even if this altruism really only concerned one’s private family and not their neighbours.
Today’s masculinity is no longer able to easily formulate itself on the supportive-father ideal because that’s not necessary to value-extraction in a capitalist economy as liberal feminists — for all the faults they derive from this fact — have rightfully identified and proved. Therefore a new masculine ideal has emerged that retreats into a kind of histrionic male adolescence that is characterized by a perverse obsession and identification with the capacity for violence (hence watching cage fighting being a known favourite pastime with all the podcasters named and Trump), a subliminal belief in anti-intellectualism, a general crudeness and explicit misogyny.
This explains the appeal of Trump’s character that Gen Z men seem to identify with: a kind of edgy boyishness, which these Trump podcast appearances embody.
With this, it’s no longer an exaggeration to say that these hyper-masculine podcasts are acting as one of the primary media catalysts for the migration further right of young men in America, and potentially the West at large.