2025 Resolutions: Time To Embrace Frat Boy Liberalism

On How To Win Back Young Men

One of the important dynamics out of the 2024 US election was a considerable swing right amongst young voters. Some of it is the swing right amongst minorities, which necessarily flows down the age scale more as younger voters are significantly less white than seniors, but even outside of that, it’s pretty true. White voters 18-44 - an imperfect measure for what I’m really trying to measure, but a useful start - swung 7 points right from 2020 to 2024. College campuses even in relatively white states saw Democratic support crumble. Many previously left trending areas full of well off white social liberals either stalled their shifts or moved right. Not nearly as much as the country often, and in general a certain overconfident Theory of Everything of mine did okay.

But for all of the overconfident explanations that young voters weren’t shifting right and that to the extent they did it was bad turnout or Gaza that can explain it seems to be a comfortable lie that is easier to accept than acknowledging that the theory that progressives would run the world as soon as the progressive and young flexed their political muscles sufficiently is flawed. And that’s now a problem for progressives in America and Canada too.

In Canada, we’re seeing the decimation of the Liberal brand with many of the voters who elected Justin Trudeau in the first place. As a 1997 birthday, I was the youngest birth year that got to vote for Trudeau in 2015, and anecdotally even Liberal voters that year I talk to when I run into them at a grocery store or whatever are done with him. The party, and his leadership, feels stale, but what is also staggering is the visceral nature of the anger. It’s both amongst the clued in and the apathetic, so no, your screed about the rubes being duped isn’t an answer.

The honest truth is that we have overestimated the appetite for progressive social governance. The success of gay rights and the lack of effective trans panic backlash made it seem like the march towards justice was being won, and with relative ease. The problem is the strength of the progressive movements of the mid-to-late 20th Century was a rigorous eye to not moving too fast or going too far. In the last decade, we’ve abandoned that, with a key, destructive focus on redefining language and then getting mad when people don’t follow the new rules. Homeless people have become “unhoused”, illegal immigrants have become “undocumented”, we have created a minefield for even my gay ass on queer issues, and people feel like they’re walking on eggshells at all times. Hell, even minorities have been rebranded as “equity-seeking communities”. It’s unsurprising a movement that tells them they’re not a bad person if they don’t get it all or don’t always say the right thing is appealing.

Like, let’s be real - does anybody actually know what all the parts of the new, various iterations of the various versions of the acronym formerly known as LGBT? My knowledge taps out after those four letters, and I am nominally interested as a matter of solidarity as a gay man. Does it really matter? No, and it shouldn’t matter - I am still going to vote Liberal despite finding a lot of the rhetorical shifts of the left moronic. But it’s not just bad word choice.

The left’s obsession with using minority status as a shield, and as a virtue in and of itself is also hugely damaging. You can be a committed feminist or a fervent believer in gay rights or a strident anti-racist and think that the use of those statuses as a get out of jail free card from accountability for dumb decisions and hurtful actions is ludicrous. That anytime I wrote saying that the government needed to consider firing Chrystia Freeland I was called a sexist, even though I literally wanted the government to replace Freeland with noted woman Anita Anand, is but a low stakes example of this. It’s alienating, and it’s incredibly patronizing to think that being a woman, or Black, or gay, or some combination therein, shields you from all criticism.

In a vacuum this stuff isn’t hugely important, and in better economic times it was a lot easier to roll your eyes at the performative shit than it is now. But if the Liberals, and Democrats, want to salvage their position with young voters, and especially young men, they need to reckon with their failures. Housing policy is obviously one of them, and it is great to see the YIMBY cause grow more powerful. But it’s also a cultural question. Democrats and Liberals want the votes of young people, and nominally there’s a lot of overlap of values. Voters my age and younger are generally much more relaxed on homosexuality, much more understanding of the concept of systemic biases, and just generally more on the ball than others. Anecdotally, 22 year olds are likelier to understand that strong women are often called “cold” or “uncaring” for behaviour that is considered “strong” and “decisive” in a man, to pick an example, than 42 year olds. But that’s not enough.

There was a town hall in the Ontario public service last year, where a Deputy Minister openly told straight white men looking to apply for promotions a sarcastic “good luck” in the context of saying (essentially) that only women and minorities were getting promoted anytime soon. That same public sector is asking people to check boxes inside their internal employee portal with all the minority groups they are a member of, to make their affirmative action easier. We allow people to self-ID as Indigenous to cut the line to get government contracts, and it only gets caught if the asshole doing it returns to the Liberal caucus at the election after he lies. And all of this makes people think there’s two different sets of rules.

I’m not here to present a snazzy 5 point plan that will get the Liberals back to majority territory. This is, hopefully, the beginning of a conversation. But when David Coletto rolled up every Abacus poll from September to early November into a big sample mega poll and broke out 18-29 Men with a University degree, 49% of them were voting for Poilievre’s CPC. This is a group that was supposed to take us to the promised land, a group that is supposed to get it and have learned from their University years the virtues of diversity and inclusion and had new experiences and been exposed to new things. Even then we’re still screwed.

Again, much if not most of this is housing. I get that. But the fact that we talk about white people and men - and especially the double - as though race and gender carries implicit, and negative, meanings is alienating. What we need isn’t to roll out Tim Walz to do a big standard progressive pitch in the veneer of a football coach, but we need to start talking to people in a way that doesn’t involve condescension nor crap pandering. A Frat Boy Liberalism, as it were.

What the left needs to do is not convert people who disagree with them on fundamental things, but just do a better job at pitching to people who are generally on the same side as us. So much of the discourse on the left these days is picking apart people for their supposed flaws, but there are far more people who agree on the big stuff that can put a winning tent together. If you actively want to watch the big game with your gay buddy and his boyfriend but find land acknowledgements to be idiocy on stilts then you should have a place in progressive politics. If you understand that Amy Klobuchar probably isn’t in the top 50 worst bosses in Congress but she got tagged with it because she’s a woman, but also think it’s dumb that we changed the Canadian anthem in the name of “gender equality”, there should be a place in our parties for you. Right now I don’t know if there is, or at least I don’t know if parts of the Liberal Party want there to be.

The politics of purity have failed. We often talk about meeting communities where they are, but when the community in question is white and male we seem to think talking at them, and not to them, is good enough. It’s not. We need to find a way to make broad liberal values the focus, and not specific beliefs designed to mollify activists. A forceful articulation of liberal values - of pluralism, of tolerance, of compassion, and of inclusion - does not mean abandoning communities. But it does mean acknowledging that standing behind a community doesn’t mean pretending to yourself and to others to support idiocy solely because of who said it. It means taking the wins where we can, and looking for reasons to bring people into the tent. And it means sometimes accepting half a loaf in the name of not bleeding votes to a fundamentally dangerous party.

I don’t necessarily love this, but it’s the best idea I’ve got. Frat Boy liberalism, baby. Let’s roll.