I read an article today about how a “multicultural coalition” of young male voters appears to be forming in favor of Trump. Here’s a quote from it:

… a majority, if not all, of these young men were brought into their nascent political awareness by issues relating to their masculinity and manhood. An archetype emerged: these were young men who never thought about politics until politics knocked on their door and made them aware of its existence. Like so many, personal grievance is what drove them into the political arena and what was driving their politics. The gist of their beef: When the hell did it stop being okay to be a regular dude?

When indeed? As it happens, a new poll out shows that even 45% of what we might call “irregular dudes”(though the poll described them as “queer”) are planning to vote for Trump. Trump’s support among black men is on track to break records for a Republican candidate; even the NYT’s Charles Blow is raising alarms about the trend.

Why is this happening?

Well, maybe it’s that Trump is Trump. Perhaps his achievements (huge steps forward in Middle East peace process! actual progress on criminal justice reform!) are male-friendlier, or maybe his antics are entertaining in a peculiarly, masculine way? Isn’t it suburban women who statistically find him most offensive?

I suspect it is mostly because the Democrats have lurched far to the left and the left is—not to put too fine a point on it—anti-male.

Ignore, for a moment, the fact that, from what we were assured was the most “diverse” field of primary candidates in history, America’s non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic Democrats still threw their support behind an old white male. Democrats can comfort themselves with the thought that Biden has obviously become a place-holder for Kamala. (Even Biden seems to accept this.)

Though as a primary candidate she couldn’t garner enough votes to make it even as far as Iowa, Harris possessed the skin color and gonads explicitly declared the sine qua non for the VP slot, and is now poised to be the Historic Not-A-Man President. And yes, you’re a racist and a misogynist if you aren’t just over-the-moon about that.

Meanwhile, “male” or especially “white male” remains an acceptable, denigratory epithet, even in (especially in) polite society. Yes, men continue to perform the hardest and most dangerous work, suffer much higher rates of workplace injury and death, are even more likely to die of COVID-19 … but y’all are still privileged and suck and deserve ours (and your own) contempt.

In established, mainstream media, we find articles like these:

• The White Guy Problem
• White Men Must be Stopped: The Very Future of Mankind Depends on It

Without the efforts, brilliance, and enduring goodwill of first some and then most white American men, there would be no civil rights for women, black people, or, indeed, for most anybody … but gratitude is not a leftist value. (Prove me wrong … find me a speech from the DNC where a Democrat proclaimed himself or herself grateful?)

The left is not, however, hostile only to white men. Even “black males” appear primarily to be of instrumental rather than intrinsic value. #BLM, which links its activism to the death of young black men, hasn’t much use for black guys otherwise. If you go to the official, #BLM website, you’ll see a lot of urgent concern for “centering” black women (especially, for some reason, queer and trans women). Families are described in exclusively neutral or feminine terms—there are “parents” and “mothers” and “the community,” but no mention of fathers. The young black American men for whom homicide is the leading cause of death? No positive role is imagined for them in the future as planned by #BLM.

Leftism—which is ultimately state-ism (“everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state)—tends to be destructive (either violently or solicitously) toward any and all alternative sources of personal or community power. This is why the impulse of the left is to be deeply suspicious of any institution that can sustain itself outside of government—churches, schools, charities, social service organizations, small businesses, and so on. (And yes, the right wants the government to be small not just to keep taxes low, but to maintain space for those independent institutions).

The family is one of these extra-governmental institutions that provides individuals with meaning, support, and identity outside the state. Historically, socialists, both international (USSR) and national (Nazis), sought deliberately to undermine family connections and co-opt the nurturance, guidance, and education of children. For obvious (to non-leftists, anyway) biological reasons, it is difficult to separate women and babies. But men have always been vulnerable to such separation. A child can survive (if not thrive) without a dad. “Alternative families,” with rare exceptions, are female-headed. And female-headed households are not, by and large, as capable of self-sustaining independence.

There was a famous (or infamous) Obama campaign ad called “The Life of Julia” that beautifully summed up the social vision of the left. The eponymous heroine goes through childhood, youth, young adulthood, and old age, encouraged and supported at every stage by … Obama’s government programs! She goes to Head Start, to government-run public schools, gets government-funded healthcare, Pell grants, finds a job through a government program, gets birth control thanks to Obama, decides to have a child — thank goodness for government childcare! But Julia has no husband. Just as no mention is made of Julia’s own father, her child is apparently fatherless.

It is often said by those on the American right that a woman in a welfare state—Julia, for example— is married to the government. It is the state that provides and protects, the state whose demands must be met and boundaries observed, and the state to whom the presence of an actual man in a woman’s home is punished as a betrayal.

At the moment, here in America, inner-city black neighborhoods provide us with a real-life example of what a totalized socialist state would look like. Whether this was the plan or just the inevitable result of “well-intended” policies, in inner-city Chicago, DC, Baltimore, etc., all service, all protection, all goods, all help, all hope are provided (not, we might point out, particularly effectively) and controlled by the state. And here, men are worse than superfluous. Absent a war in which they might be “profitably” expended, men are a problem, a nuisance, a threat.

Unfortunately, the state makes a crappy dad. Since a peacetime socialist state does not and can not encourage fathers, instead it must imprison sons. We should not mistake the current, lefty enthusiasm for releasing convicts and “dismantling” prisons and abolishing cops as a move toward the empowerment of men. The Nazis and the Soviets did the same thing. By any means necessary, they fomented social chaos. The resulting disorder prompted calls for and tolerance of their own “strong” leadership. And, by the way, while mothers were celebrated as producers of cannon-fodder, fathers were … dispensable. The Nazis, for example, gave medals to mothers who bore four or more little Aryans for the Fatherland, but fathers got called up.

A man under National Socialism was a soldier, serving the Leader.

A study of policing under National and International socialism would be fascinating. Police work, like fire fighting, is a classically male job, since “served and protect” is a traditionally male function. And there were, of course, plenty of cops in the USSR and Nazi Germany. However, once in power, both Bolsheviks and Nazis purged the stubbornly professional police officer from law enforcement agencies left over from the previous governments (Tsarist, Weimar). These were replaced by quislings, party thugs, and toadies primarily expected to enforce ideological conformity.

Ah, but that was then! We don’t have to worry about that sort of thing happening here, right?

Maybe not. “Regular Dude” culture is still pretty strong in America.

Across the pond in Britain, where socialism is a bit more advanced — and “white male” similarly serves as a shaming prod to keep men busy “checking their privilege” and apologizing for things they didn’t do — how are the regular British dudes (black, brown, white, queer) doing?

Well, suicides are hitting record highs. Violent crimes are shooting upward as well, though the Home Office reassuringly reminded Britons that “only” one in five citizens reported having been the victim of a serious crime in the past year. The prison population is increasing, particularly since 2007. Males are, of course, are far more often the victims as well as the perpetrators of violent crimes; “Peter Fahy, the Chief Constable of Cheshire and a spokesman on race issues for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said it was a fact that it was harder to get the media interested where murder victims were young white men.”

And speaking of British bobbies, the once-exemplary British police are demonstrably no longer capable of effectively defending the public from the aforementioned huge increase in violent crime, but are nevertheless being deployed to the homes of ordinary Brits accused of using “hate speech” on Facebook and Twitter. In other words, the police are being used to enforce ideological conformity.

Meanwhile, #BLM/Antifa (with no sense of irony) is tearing down statues of Winston Churchill. (Now there was a regular dude. )

So what do you think? Can I say that socialism isn’t just anti-individual and anti-family…but is specifically anti-man?