The Democrats are still treating men with contempt

A major political realignment is underway in the United States, and from sea to shining sea, a strange sound can be heard. What is it? The existential keening of Democrats finally realising that the entire country absolutely hates them.

Okay, not the entire country. They still have the blue-haired college harpies melting down on TikTok – and the rich parents who enable them, terrified to vote for anyone else, lest their Mini Mao offspring banish them from their own Thanksgiving dinners. That demographic is on lock for the Dems.

It’s the rest of the populace that has, to put it politely, moved on. According to a recent NBC poll, only 27 per cent of registered voters ‘say they have positive views’ of the Democratic Party. ‘Over a long period of time, our party overdrew our trust account with the American people’, Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for former vice-president Kamala Harris, told the New York Times.

That’s one way of putting it. Another way is: Democrats fucked around and now, finally, they are finding out.

Democrats are so desperate that they are doing the unthinkable: they are reconsidering their deliberate, gleeful, in-your-face vilification campaign against the working men of America. The New York Times reported this week that Democrats commissioned a report called ‘Speaking with American men: a strategic plan’, codenamed ‘SAM’. For just $20million, the Dems received advice from consultants ‘on the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality’ among men, as well as a recommendation to advertise on videogames.

The report featured ‘among the strategy discussions’ at a conference earlier this month at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Half Moon Bay, California, where party luminaries tried to figure out how to win back their old working-class base, while nibbling on lobster rolls and heirloom tomatoes. Even liberals think it is ridiculous that a once-dominant party needs to spend a fortune being schooled on something so basic, while being served delectable hors d’oeuvres at a luxury resort.

Still, it’s clear the Democrats have a lot to do if they’re ever going to win back the trust of ordinary men. Arguably, the nadir was reached with a shockingly bad-taste advert they ran right before the November election. It featured a young man masturbating to porn in his home, before a stern, old, white man appears from nowhere and snatches the phone out of the young man’s hand while he’s mid-stroke. ‘I’m your Republican congressman’, the old man says. ‘Now that we’re in charge, we’re banning porn nationwide.’

Never in my life did I think I’d see a political ad in which someone was rubbing one out, but clearly there are no depths to which the Dems will not sink. Yet even though the ad did not get them their – ahem – happy ending in that election, they still think that porn, of all things, is their way to gain back male voters’ trust. Only this week, Pete Buttigieg, former secretary of transportation in the Biden administration, suggested that Democrats should warn voters that Republicans will ‘regulate porn’ as a way of getting men back onside.

As has been widely noted, Donald Trump won last year’s election in part thanks to major gains among the working class – including young people, black voters and Latinos. To think that a pressing concern for the people who keep America running, day in and day out, is their ability to wank without restriction is not just ridiculous – it’s also deeply offensive. It seems the Democratic leadership cannot conceive of male voters in any way except as rage-prone dolts with no control over their impulses and emotions.

Last year, Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, told an interviewer: ‘There’s too much masculine toxicity out there… You’ve got this trope out there that you’ve got to be tough and angry and lash out to be strong.’ It sounds to me like someone put Mr Kamala Harris in a sleepy-time headlock in the 1600s and he has just woken up, confused. Even the most alpha men don’t think it’s a good idea to ‘lash out’ and be angry for no reason. Normal adults can control their emotions, even if they are male.

There are, of course, exceptions – like Doug himself, who infamously was accused by an ex-girlfriend of slapping her so hard, in public, that she spun around. Side note: Doug also impregnated a teacher at his children’s school while he was still married to the children’s mother. So maybe go easy on the man-to-man advice there, Doug.

The pathetic spectacle of Democrats trying to win back the people they vilified for so long actually reminds me of a philandering, abusive partner, trying to win back a long-suffering ex: ‘C’mon baby. Just come back. What we had was special. We might never win another election without you.’

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here