Can Democrats Keep Young Men From Turning Fascist?

Noted animal mutilator and brain-worm host Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hopes to run the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, or even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the second Trump administration. Not long after Trump’s victory, he started to lay out what the “big role” the president-elect promised him in the White House might entail: taking fluoride out of water supplies; dismantling mandatory vaccination programs; eliminating “entire departments” within the FDA. The Trump campaign reportedly tried to distance itself from him not long afterward.

Whether RFK Jr. gets a Cabinet post or not, how such a noted kook became a serious candidate for such positions is something people will likely be pondering for weeks, months, and potentially decades. Some piece of the story is how strongly young men—many of whom frequent the corners of the internet that champion RFK-esque mantras—have swung toward Trump. Fifty-six percent of young men nationwide voted for Biden in 2020. In 2024, 56 percent of them backed Trump. CBS exit polls found that Trump won young men in Pennsylvania by 18 points this year; in 2020, Biden captured the same demographic with a nine-point lead.

The Trump campaign seems to have done a decent job selling itself to the so-called manosphere: a sprawling informal online community encompassing a multitude of unrelated podcasts, YouTube channels, and Twitch streams whose content runs the gamut from half-baked, freshman dorm–style philosophical debates and anodyne self-help advice to virulent misogyny and fringe conspiracy theorizing. At its core is an aspirational masculinity loosely grounded in extreme notions of personal responsibility: rising and grinding, maximizing your physical attractiveness (“looksmaxxing”), driving up your own “Sexual Market Value,” etc. As Mother Jones and other outlets have noted, the sheer amount of that content means that young men looking to get in shape or upgrade their wardrobes can quickly get pulled into a bizarre web of right-wing propaganda stylized as lifestyle content.

RFK Jr. tried to appeal to these same disaffected young men in his own campaign for president. As Liza Featherstone has written for TNR, his emphasis on physical fitness and the dangers of certain types of environmental pollution—including when appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast—holds some appeal for young men rightfully concerned about their own well-being. While RFK Jr.’s bizarre claims that microplastics are causing people to become trans and nonbinary are obviously wrong and dangerous, Featherstone writes, “it’s legitimate not to want microplastics in your balls, and research does suggest that pesticides, PFAS, and microplastics are bad for people’s endocrine systems.”

The predictable irony of all this is that—if he does make it to a top White House post—RFK Jr. will be carrying water for the people responsible for depositing microplastics and all manner of other toxic chemicals into the balls of American men. In September, Trump reportedly offered microplastic-manufacturing oil and gas executives whatever policy changes they wanted in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions.

And that, as Featherstone suggests, points to a possible opening for Democrats and others on the left: Tackling toxic plastics production head-on could present an inroad to the manosphere and its preoccupations with clean living and virility. Ideally, that’d be part of a deeper project to figure out what ails men. Part of that would necessarily involve building a thriving, independent media ecosystem to counter the one that fuels right-wing and right-wing-adjacent influencers. As Taylor Lorenz argues, the financial incentives that have driven billionaires to invest in eccentric right-leaning podcasts just don’t exist on the left. “Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors,” she writes, “primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want.”

Taking that project seriously would carry serious political upsides for Democrats; the party faces a real risk of permanently losing young men to some of the darkest corners of the right—and maybe even losing young people altogether. While young people in the U.S. have leaned to the left politically in recent years, buoyed by Bernie Sanders’s Democratic presidential primary campaigns in 2016 and 2020, young people in other countries seem to be moving rightward. In Germany, the far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 16 percent of voters aged 16 to 24 in this year’s European elections—up 11 points from the previous election in 2019. Voters aged 25 to 44 moved toward the AfD, as well. Support for Narendra Modi’s ruling, pogromist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, among voters under 35 in India has been stubbornly consistent since 2019, hovering around 40 percent. Last November, nearly 70 percent of young voters in Argentina backed Javier Milei and his far-right party.

Yet the popularity of the manosphere’s most noxious elements might better be understood less as a partisan communications challenge than a symptom of a broader social crisis worth dealing with in its own right. Labor force participation among 25- to 34-year-old men in the U.S. has dropped over the last 20 years, when men under 30 spent an hour more of their waking hours alone than women in the same age range. Those figures have climbed steadily over the last several years, and continued to swell even after Covid-19 lockdowns eased. In 2019, young men spent 5.6 hours alone per day, according to the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, or AESG; in 2023, that had jumped to 6.6 hours per day. Two-thirds of men aged 18 to 30 surveyed by the nonprofit Equimundo reported feeling that “no one really knows me.” Roughly a quarter of unmarried men younger than 30 say they have no close friends.

Steve Bannon famously set out to take advantage of that fact and court “rootless white males” into the MAGA orbit. Progressives, by contrast, have barely even attempted to present a positive, fun, even aspirational picture of what it means to be a guy. While the Democratic Party bizarrely decided to embrace an album about being a woman who parties in your thirties, leaning hard on Charli XCX’s endorsement of Kamala as “brat,” its most prominent men are either wholesome Midwestern dads, cringey wife guys, or people who look and act like they play politicians on TV. This isn’t a problem that can be solved exclusively with better messaging, either: Winning young men means embracing policies that actually make their lives better. It’s not a coincidence that the rise of the male loneliness epidemic has coincided with a decline in union density and rising economic instability for young people saddled with student debt, rising rents, and unaffordable health care. Decades of bipartisan divestment from public goods like pools and parks means there are fewer inviting places to meet and hang out with friends—especially if you don’t happen to have a bunch of expendable income. If you’re working two or three jobs to afford car payments and insurance, letting YouTube autoplay might sound more relaxing than driving a half-hour to get a drink with a buddy.

The Harris campaign’s strategy of racking up endorsements from liberal celebrities didn’t work out much better than it did for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Going on Joe Rogan probably wouldn’t have saved her campaign, of course. But there’s a lot of work to be done to keep him and those even further to his right from turning a generation of young men into degenerate fascists.