I think progressives never thought about this because we banked on immigration and demographic change allowing us to win culturally and electorally but the issue is immigrants tend to be overwhelmingly male, that is how Trump won actually he won over a lot of Hispanic,Black,Asian and indigenous men who feel humiliated by a new culture, economy and world.
So what can we do rhetorically and policy wise to win more young men over ?
I get that this is upvoted a lot due to being constructive but it also reflects a lot of Republican media tropes about the left that aren’t really true - and that’s why trying to “fix” these things won’t work - because it misses the real problem.
Examples: No significant figure on the left is saying “men are rapists”, or telling men to be more like women, etc. Reducing suicide, safer workplaces, and reducing excessive prison sentences are all priorities for the left and not for the right.
I think the real problem is quite simple: Republicans have invested heavily in portraying themselves as the “masculine party”, and in driving the narratives I’ve mentioned. And because Republican leaders like the Murdochs and Elon tend to be men, they’re best at driving those narratives.
Which goes to the real underlying problem with the left as a whole - no ability to drive or counter a media narrative. The right has Fox news and Elon’s control over Twitter, which they can and do regularly use to create whatever narrative they want. Notice how for example they just made white south African farmer killings a topic all of a sudden. The left has a bunch of corporate media whose top priority is selling truck ads. Sure, maybe the reporters themselves are left leaning, but they have no top down guidance as to what narratives to build.
And until the left creates some sort of media capability to create and control narratives, the right will always have a leg up. And because of that, none of the well intentioned ideas here will actually work. If the left tries to appeal to men, the right will decide how those appeals will be interpreted.
I agree with you for the most part, but there is a thread you missed.
While there might not be a significant leftist media personality which says misandrist things, there are a lot of smaller people who do. There’s an air of “men are not welcome here, specifically cishet men” in lefty spaces. And people who try to speak out against it tend to be ousted. (Case study Erin Pizzey) There wouldn’t be a demand for “male tears” mugs out there if there wasn’t a demand for them.
Whether you think this behavior is acceptable or not, it doesn’t make the left seem appealing to young men, especially because it’s not called out by people.
But yeah, the top down media? A huge machine that’s a problem. The left will have a hard time replicating it, especially because when you live in hyper capitalism, it’s not really in the benefit of capitalists to try to fix it.