I read this article about politics in Canada, largely because it is about the right wing political shift of young men in other countries, beyond the US, but also because I am curious about whether the new, very centrist head of the Canadian Liberal Party is going to manage to keep Canada from going full on conservative in their next election…and that does seem possible…for now. But, as much as Justin Trudeau always struck me as a bit of clown, he definitely took control of the Liberal party by appealing to a strongly left-leaning progressivism that was very popular with Canada’s youth. His cabinet was the first in Canadian history to include as many women as men, and was very much a shining beacon of Diversity when he was elected. In many ways, it feels to me, as a US citizen, that the “woke” ideology that Trump has had so much success attacking in this country was much more prevalent in the Canadian Liberal Party than it has ever been in the US Democratic Party.
So I find it really interesting that this article reports that 17 percent of folks ages 18 to 35 say that a man who stays home to look after his children is less of a man. That might not seem like a lot, but only 13 percent of those between 35 and 49 felt the same way, and only 6% of those 50 to 74 feel the same way. 40% of people under 35 in Canada say that women’s rights have gone far enough. This seems to mirror data I have seen saying that the youth are veering right in Europe, Israel, and the US as well, often largely around issues related to race and gender.
This article claims that much of this shift stems from the growth of right-wing social media platforms, and I think that is probably true, at least for a big part of the story. The authors of that article are convincing in their claim that Right-leaning online shows have almost 5 times the followers and subscribers as left-leaning shows, and that a lot of media that is being labeled as nonpolitical, and focused on topics like comedy, entertainment and sports, were overwhelmingly showing a right-leaning political bent. The article also goes on to claim that people really trust the information they learn on podcasts, with 87 percent of people saying that expect news they hear discussed on a podcast to be true. So it is pretty easy to see that if many of the most prominent podcasters and other online media makers are describing “American men as victims of a Democratic campaign to strip them of their power,” that that is is information that is going to gain a lot of traction. If scroll down that article, you can see a chart of the followers that various online media personalities have, and it is overwhelming how many of the most followed content makers lean heavily to the right, or at least into a camp that is patriarchal and misogynistic. Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, Theo Von all have more followers than Trever Noah, who has twice the number of followers of any other left leaning online shows.
Looking at those numbers, it is hard to argue against the role that social media has been playing in shifting young folks political views, especially around topics like family values and gender roles. So while academics like me were starting to feel like our colleges and universities were really starting to get anti-misogynistic, gender egalitarian ideas out to our students, it turns out that students were growing to place less and less faith in anything educational institutions had to say about social issues and had other media sources that were answering their questions in ways they wanted to hear. That all makes sense to me.
At the same time, I think that overall global skepticism for the future is a factor that is getting too often ignored in these conversations. Between Climate catastrophe, war, and economies that youth are told are the best that have ever been, but exclude them from getting jobs that will ever let them own houses, or really any property at all, it is not hard to see that people are desperate for ideologies that offer them a more hopeful future. For now, the right has really managed to monopolize that by scapegoating groups like immigrants for the destruction of economic opportunities and turning Trans rights into the ultimate boogieman of gender ideology that is destroying young men’s social and romantic futures. The left has massively failed to offer any of the large scale social and political solutions that it has in the past, in response to economic and social uncertainty, and instead seems pretty content in just placing its faith in global capitalism to just keep making so much wealth for the richest people in the world that enough excess keeps trickling off the top to keep people in line, then act shocked and outraged when the richest people keep trying to figure out ways to trickle less and less down stream.
I am very skeptical that more left-leaning online media is going to make a dent in youth political leanings. Right-leaning online media works because it sells insecurity to young people with just enough disposable economic capital available to them to make those young people a marketable audience that will justify advertising and support from larger social media platforms. Their right-wing content will remain free because they are so attractive to advertisers, and they have no issue letting any and all companies use them to sell products. Short of some kind of nationalized social media platform that never allows any kind of advertising incentivization, but remains dedicated enough to free speech and accessibility to let its users post content without concern for censorship or algorithmic manipulation, I just don’t see a left-wing social media presence overtaking the right. It is a win-win situation for the billionaires that run the existing social media platforms to keep running them the way they are running them, and a minefield for governments to try to regulate without looking like fascist censors. I applaud left-leaning content makers who are trying to do the best they can, but the infrastructure of their platforms is leaning heavily against them, even if there were not ideological considerations like worrying about presenting factual information fairly in appropriate contexts, instead of focusing on generating clicks and drawing in advertisers above all other considerations.
Maybe I am wrong, and would love to be called out for it, but it feels like the last 10-15 years of the left entrenching in colleges and universities, only to place responsibility for enacting change on the backs of their students individually, while focusing all other efforts towards electing elitist politicians who were never fully on board with seeing radical changes to the system…hasn’t worked out very well. The left has to get back into the conversations happening in work places and people’s family homes, and in the coffee shops and bars and streets of the country if it wants its ideas to compete with online media platforms. I don’t think an obscure blog on the fringe of nowhere is the best way to do that, but I will keep trying to solidify my ideas here so that I can share them with others better in the future.
This post was much lighter on the Patriarchal Misogyny talk than I intended it to be. It skated it, and I think the world has to deal with why the internet is such an economically rich environment for patriarchal misogynists to exploit, as well as how to challenge that. But I think that might have to be a topic I address more in a future post.