Our intelligentsia has abandoned our illiterati
I enjoyed the recent Bloomberg analysis of nine podcasters who are “mobilizing America’s men to lean right.”
I also think it misses a point that is at least as important as the one it makes.
The authors frame the piece as helping to explain why men, and especially young men, swung hard for Trump in the last election.
My issue is that this implies that these podcasters had a roughly equal influence on all young American men.
They didn’t. I think these channels were mostly watched by, and mostly influenced, young men in the bottom-half of the education and income distribution.
I’m going to tell you why I think this, of course.
Before that, though, I’m going to briefly explain what I think is on the line here.
Basically, ceding young, bottom-half men to reactionaries hasn’t been a winning strategy for progressives or liberals and probably won’t work much better in the future either.
The Bloomberg reporters pointed out that these nine podcasters’ combined audience was 80% male. Also not shockingly, only 12% of their guests were female.
They don’t mention that YouTube as a whole also skews heavily male.
More interesting than that is the reason that might be.
One reason is that podcasts and videos are easier ways to take in information than text, especially for people who can’t read good.
One-fifth of US adults can’t read well enough to compare and contrast information, paraphrase, or make low-level inferences based on written text.
The majority of that fifth is male.
At every level of formal education, average boys perform worse than average girls. The very bottom of every measurable outcome — test scores, grades, graduation rates, behavior — is overwhelmingly male. Boys are especially bad at reading. (For more info and sources, I recommend Boymom and Of Boys and Men.)
Of course plenty of YouTubers are, if anything, too literate. But the average YouTube viewer has less education than, say, the average Substack reader.
These podcasters are no exception. Looking at the breakdown of the kind of guest each podcaster interviewed, the percentages for “intellectual” are tiny.
You could call these guys the “illiterati.”
(Don’t tell them I said that, since I know they’re not reading this.)
“Manosphere” isn’t a totally inaccurate generalization of these nine podcasters. But it ignores the class angle.
Because even among men, literacy is unevenly distributed.
Growing up in poverty is strongly associated with adult illiteracy. Boys are less likely than girls to escape their childhood circumstances.
The nine podcasters, according to Bloomberg, mostly cover purely entertaining topics like sports, comedy, and dating advice. Just 37% of their top-performing videos (one million or more views) even mentioned voting or politics.
“Conservative talking points were sandwiched between free-wheeling discussions of sports, masculinity, internet culture, gambling and pranks,” the reporters wrote. “The content is billed as entertainment for men.”
It’s not though. It’s entertainment for men who don’t read.
And here’s why that’s an important distinction.
“Swing voters,” as the name implies, swing elections. The swing part comes from the fact that they are more likely than the average voter to vote for a different party’s candidate each election.
Some swing voters are very knowledgable about and interested in electoral politics. But the majority know very little, and care even less, about politics. They don’t watch pundits. Swing voters are also, not coincidentally, disproportionately male and much more likely to be in the bottom-half than reliably partisan voters.
It’s not merely men who the nine-podcaster-strong shitterati has captured and swung right, but the specific cohort of men the Democratic Party most needs to win back to win elections.
And there’s far more at stake here than just that.
When these podcasters did discuss politics, many of their most-discussed topics also featured prominently in the discourse leading up to Trump’s election.
Of course Trump guested. When he did, it was often each channel’s most-watched episode. Together, tens of millions of accounts subscribe to these nine channels.
In the runup to the election I saw a billboard here in Alabama that said there were no US wars under Trump. I wondered where that lie came from. Over the two years Bloomberg reporters examined them, eight of the nine podcasters described Trump as pro-peace.
In addition, despite making up far less than one percent of the population, trans individuals were a top-10 topic on these podcasts. They also frequently discussed immigration, medicine, and the economy.
The podcasters also hyped “traditional masculinity” and the evil plot by Democrats to disempower men. Bloomberg didn’t mention whether anyone else saw any irony in performing masculinity by claiming victimhood.
The hosts interviewed alleged sex-trafficker Andrew Tate. Another guest founded Patriot Front, a white supremacist organization. The hosts offered little pushback as guests touted white nationalist conspiracy theories and election denialism.
The utter lack of nuance on topics of class, identity, and power in the Bloomberg story is a good-enough micro-example of a macro-level problem.
As I just wrote, the Democratic Party exists to win elections, not to tell people how they should feel about trans people.
That work is best suited to intellectuals, writers, activists, influencers, academics, and, yes, podcasters. But the US intelligentsia isn’t doing our job. Bottom-half men like different stuff than women and top-half men. And they need it presented differently. Someone will always step up to give them what they want. The right understands what’s at stake. The left has largely ceded to reactionaries our sacred duty to give swing voters what they need while talking about the stuff they care about in a way they can hear it.
This is part of the “vibe shift” MattY and Tyler Cowen (yuck) have written about. Bottom-half young men have neither lived in a Republican-controlled, pre-Obama America nor read much accurate, useful history. So of course they think Trump is edgy and countercultural and Harris is staid and institutional. The fact that few liberal and progressive influencers are willing to discuss race, sex, or class with any real ambiguity or nuance doesn’t help.
Nor does it help that these podcasters do not lack for real instances of well-educated, upwardly mobile Democrats calling bottom-half men sexists and racists.
This hasn’t won us many elections. As it turns out, you win elections by informing people who are willing to be persuaded that the Democratic Party candidate agrees with them more than the GOP candidate about A, B, and C.
There’s no reason Democrats can’t copy the shitterati formula. We can do long-form interviews with broadly appealing celebrities from sports, music, comedy, business, and media.
We just don’t want to.
I’m the worst offender. I would do terrible things to avoid having to listen to a professional athlete talk about their job. Same for 99% of professional musicians, comedians, CEOs, and “influencers.” My revealed preference: Spend all my time trying to get one of the writers I admire to notice me. Spend zero time trying to persuade the persuadables.
There’s a whole book about how much progressives love to out-progressive each other in ways everyone outside our little hierarchies finds profoundly alienating.
There are writers who do more than preach to the choir.
, for example, is radicalizing former Trump supporters. She’s slowly waking them up to the sexist abuse their husbands and the broader culture is inflicting.I know that radicalization of conservative women is possible, and I know that it begins with getting women to see how their apparently personal, individual problem are highly political.
That’s what I’m doing here every day.
But that’s for women.
, as I’ve written, is patiently explaining gender to people who have never thought to question it.
But she’s writing, not making videos better suited to reach bottom-half men.
My advice to anyone who has a little time, talent, and/or money to throw at misogyny, transphobia, national security threats, mass deportations, medical quackery, economic stagnation, sex-trafficking, white supremacy, white nationalism, or Trumpism:
Stop demanding that Democratic Party candidates and spokespeople change people’s minds about the issues they care about. They’re not good at it and it’s not their jobs. Not only will they continue to fail at that task, but in attempting to do it they’re alienating the people they absolutely must win over to do their one, actual job, which is winning elections.
Stop writing Substacks for other liberals and start a YouTube channel that is 70% entertainment for bottom-half men with a few not-horrible ideas sprinkled in.
I’m working on number one. I’m absolutely not going to do number two.
The last thing I need is for folks who can’t read good — and aren’t ready to laugh about it — pointing their screen readers in my direction.
The problem is just that we don't want to do that,. We also just aren't well suited to do that.
I don't know how to appeal to those men, and they are pretty primed not to like me. I'm also not sure how much you can astro turf something like that vs have it grow organically.
I am also curious how much of the problem we are in is due to the illiterate vs the evil nerds.
I liked this piece a lot. Strong core argument with layers of insight throughout