Trump’s won. Cue collective shock from the usual quarters.
The Mystified – “How can this man have been elected? I just can’t understand it. America is so racist.” The Amateur Anthropologists and pop psychologists – “I don’t understand it, but I’m going to analyse Pennsylvania as if it were a mob of wild animals and explain it.” Both will be layered with sneery moral superiority. Often the insinuation will be some form that these people are desperate, stupid, or hold repugnant views. That America is crazy. If that’s your bag, listen to James O’Brien for a flavour of that. The Guardian’s Monbiot is already straight out the gate with the horrible take of “Trump is king of the extrinsics”. Catchy take there, George. If you want comfort, those quarters will provide it for you.
Now the scale of this political achievement is utterly shocking to be fair. A defeated sitting President. 78 years of age. A convicted felon. Found guilty of sexual assault. Half his cabinet campaigning against him. Someone who incited an insurrection. Impeached. Out-raised money-wise 3 to 1. A man who has spewed vile view after vile view. A truly odd looking man who dies his skin orange and weaves his hair in some strange form of combover. He is a man, in my view, so manifestly unfit for high office on a individual level I can understand the shock.
But while shocking, it’s not surprising. To me at least. I had money on Trump. Some consolation.
I’m an old-school socialist. I have been in the Labour Party for all of my adult life and probably always will be. I’ve always been socially liberal. The left is my home. You might expect me to be in with the suprised crowd. But a strange mixture of interests has given me a window into this win not on an anthrolopological level, not on a intellectual level, but on a visceral one. So while the left is my home, I’ve taken a trip or two.
I love combat sports. I always enjoyed boxing after picking up an Ali biography bored on a holiday at 14. As I got into uni this morphed into UFC, particularly when a certain Irish bloke broke onto the scene, and now I roll around with men in pajamas trying to choke one another. I’ve loved stand up comedy ever since I destroyed a pirate copy of Dave Chapelle’s Killin’ Them Softly playing it on repeat as a kid. Then add to that a mild interest in sports gambling as well as long form podcasts and – boom – there’s a pretty sizeable chunk of my algorithm in recent years that is very ‘manosphere’. Rogan, the Barstool universe, Lex Fridman, Shane Gillis, Bryson DeChambeau, Dave Portnoy, Theo Von are all regulars on my feed. Throw in a Gary’s Economics, Modern Wisdom and Triggernometry and you’ve got the podcast boyfriend every woman fears, apparently. But the manosphere is a big part of why Trump won.
Slowly at first, gradually and reluctantly in places over the last few years, the manosphere gravitated towards Trump, until he outright courted it over the summer, appearing on many of the above, and garnering an outright endorsement from the manosphere king, Joe Rogan.
If these names are strange and unrecognisable to you, duh, welcome to our splintered algorithm world. Just because they aren’t famous or well known to you, doesn’t mean they aren’t at all (I have no clue who or what a Molly Mae is either but I don’t dispute she’s famous). And just because they are a turn off to you, doesn’t mean people aren’t listening. About 5 years ago I used to feel apologetic when bringing Joe Rogan up and felt I had to explain who he was to people. I gave that up. If you don’t know the world’s largest podcaster, your problem. Over the last week of the campaign, many of you will have heard about a comedian make an insulting joke about Puerto Rico named ‘Kill Tony’. I watched the coverage of him somewhat amused as the main stream media depicted him as if he were some obscure figure – newsflash – he ain’t. He gets millions of views every week on his YouTube show. Insulting is his schtick.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve found it enormously frustrating and depressing that this manosphere has gradually gravitated to Trump. Whether through outright support or even ambivalence for his flaws, I’ve had to skip past plenty of episodes where I heard support for him grow and grow. Stick to the men in pajamas choking one another chat, bro. But skip though I might, I certainly sensed it coming, and I sensed that the manosphere represented the tip of the iceberg, that there was a huge silent majority sitting underneath these podcasters that the traditional media simply doesn’t give voice to – unless it’s a vox pop or ‘get out of our bubble’ docuseries. The movement to Trump centred around a few themes.
The Stitch Up
The fact the Democrats have consistently shut out a fair contest for the nomination of their party damaged them significantly. Harris was not a good choice because she wasn’t chosen by the people. Biden should have dropped out earlier and allowed a fair contest. Bernie Sanders would have absolutely creamed Trump tonight, not to mention in 2016. It was antidemocratic and a stitch up not to even have a contest. The coronation cost them. And the manosphere was unhappy about it. The manosphere does not like lack of competition. And neither do most people. They hate a stitch up.
Wokism
With the current left-wing establishment (in America in particular) you are likely to get a mixture of social radicalism, economic liberalism, and unfortunately, incompetence. There has been a huge amount of animus and motivation for identity politics across the last decade, so much so that it has become almost a secular religion across many of our institutions to the exclusion of almost everything else. Working in a quango a few years ago, we missed all our major contractual targets, but our CEO never failed to send an email about a current affairs story that spoke to identity politics. The powers that be sort of gloss over the important stuff that most people actually need and want. Many western electorates want the exact opposite of what they’re getting – they want social conservatism (“Leave us alone, stop lecturing us”) and economic reodering (“I want to be able to buy a house and afford my groceries, and I want you to tax a billionaire and coporations to do it”) while things are run well (“My bins are collected and the water isn’t polluted”). That general sense that our leaders aren’t very good at their jobs of actually running the country (see prisons, schools, healthcare, homelessness…) make people pretty annoyed. They can stomach the more radical or controversial progressive social views as long as they see economic progress and competent government. Failing that, the manosphere and the electorate it represents will willingly vote for the guy who punches the socially liberal elite in the face on the woke front, even if just to spite them for getting the other stuff wrong. They lent Joe Biden their vote when the first Trump administration went to hell in a handbasket, but the change they wanted did not come, and so they have handed it back to the demagogue.
Immigration
People are tired of being ignored in what is supposed to be a democracy on the topic of immigration. Whether you think it is racist or not, it is very clear a sigificant portion of the electorate, across many western nations, have not wanted or consented to the immigration levels we are seeing for a very long time. So you are either a democrat and try to genuinely understand and address the view, even if you disagree with it, without dismissing it as racist or misinformed, and do something about it… or you’re not a democrat. It all contributes to this sense that leaders are focused on the wrong things. If the left doesn’t come up with a left-wing solution to immigration, you will see right-wing populists rise again and again. Le Pen in France, the AfD in France, Reform.
Masculinity
You should be able to concede that Trump getting shot and rising, bloodied, with his fist in the air was a striking image. It was at that point that I knew it was over. In recent years, a growing theme on even the more sober parts of the ‘manosphere’ has been the crisis in masculinity. And not the crisis of ‘toxic masculinity’ the left depict it as. A genuine crisis where men have been resoundingly leapfrogged by women and are falling behind in almost every sphere such as education, employment and family life. I won’t bore yo with the detail here, and it might be hard for those on the left, and women in particular, to stomach, but men are suffering (before you leap down my throat, try reading The End of Men by Hanna Rosin or Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves). Whether you buy that men are in crisis or not, I’m telling you the image of Trump defiantly rising from the deck after getting shot, chopping it up with Rogan about boxers and MMA fighters, having crushed a round of golf with DeChambeau all in one summer spoke to the “male malaise” and helped rehabilitate him. And yes, that is depressing, because machismo is a poor substitute for healthy masculinity.
Final Thoughts
I shook my head watching The Rest is Politics live coverage with Campbell and Stewart last night. I have enormous respect for the both (Rory’s book Politics on the Edge captures the governance malaise I mention above perfectly) but when their panel almost wholly predicted a Harris win last night before I went to bed, and this morning they were scambling to analyse a Trump win it made me despair. People are just not getting it. Stop condescendingly analysing from afar and genuinely try to engage with the opposite side. You might actually need to talk to your ‘gammon uncle’ instead of just slating him on Twitter if you want to win elections.
As far as I’m concerned Trump’s reelection is not an indictment on the right. It’s an indictment on the left. ‘Fool me once’ tones. The fact we can’t beat a felonious, lying, sexual assaulting, orange joke of a man is a poor reflection on the left, not the right.
So we need to learn a lesson or two here. Or else we’ll get another Trump.
And his name rhymes with garage.
Gin Lane 