. . .

He put his feet up and reached for a fresh Zyn pouch. “Young men, like a lot of Americans, feel increasingly alienated,” he continued. They can’t afford college or rent, they can’t get a date, they can’t imagine a stable future. “The right is always there to tell them, ‘Yes, you should be angry, and the reason your life sucks is because of immigrants, or because a trans kid played a sport.’ And all the Democrats are telling them is ‘No, shut up, your life is fine, be joyful.’ ” No one has ever accused Piker of being a moderate, but in this case he is trying to forge a compromise. “My way is to go, ‘Look, be angry if you want. But your undocumented neighbor is not the problem here. You’re looking in the wrong direction.’ ”

In 2015, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton wrote that “white non-Hispanics without college degrees” were experiencing an anomalous spike in mortality from opioids, alcohol, and suicide. They later called these “deaths of despair.” In 2016, J. D. Vance, then an anti-Trump conservative, published a memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about the struggles of white rural families like his own. Promoting the book on PBS, he explained (but did not yet excuse) why such voters were drawn to Trump: “I think that the sense of cultural alienation breeds a sense of mistrust.” The first Trump Administration didn’t deliver many material gains to the rural poor—deaths of despair continued to rise, and wages continued to stagnate—but at least Trump spoke to their anguish and seemed outraged on their behalf. In retrospect, the question may not be why so many non-urban non-élites became Trump Republicans but what took them so long.

Around the same time, social scientists started to notice an overlapping crisis. The statistics were grim—twenty-first-century males were, relative to their forefathers and their female contemporaries, much more likely to fall behind in school, drop out of college, languish in the workforce, or die by overdose or suicide. The title of a 2012 book by the journalist Hanna Rosin declared “The End of Men.” The following year, the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan published a paper called “The Trouble with Boys.” In one survey, more than a quarter of men in their teens and twenties reported having no close friends. When Covid hit, men were significantly more likely to die from it.

“In the fifteen years I’ve been looking at the statistics, the outcomes for men have not changed,” Rosin told me. “What did change, tremendously, is the culture.” The last Democratic Presidential candidate to win the male vote was Barack Obama. When Bernie Sanders ran for President, he had a zealous male following, but many top Democrats treated the “Bernie bros” less like a force to be harnessed than like a threat to be vanquished. A “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call raised millions for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but it would have been anathema to her base if she’d given a speech about what she planned to do for white dudes. This was, meanwhile, a key part of Trump’s appeal.

. . .