Donald Trump won the 2024 election with unexpected help from young white men. Fifty-six percent of young white men voted for Trump, compared to only 41% of young white women.
The surprising results have led reporters to suggest a number of reasons for the switch from 2020 when 56% of young men voted for Joe Biden. One article says, “You can thank growing media bubbles, extreme political apathy and economic fatalism.” Another suggests a confused male identity: “Gen Z can’t stand inequality. Why so many of its men voted Republican is a lesson in understanding male identity.”
More specifically, young Gen Z white men — mainly those without college degrees — voted overwhelmingly for Trump (67%), which is eerily similar to their just-older millennial peers (also 67%).
Nic Sumners, a 21-year-old cosmetic car repairman from Virginia, says Trump talks about the American people in a way that resonates with him, without — in his opinion — faulting him for his gender and sexual orientation. “I’m a straight white man, and I feel like we take the blame for a lot of things,” Sumners says.
“This election was about Trump’s uncanny ability to get people to feel he was on their side as their strong protector.”
The cultural politics of emotion had more to do with the results of the 2024 election than policies, racism, sexism or immigration. This election was about Trump’s uncanny ability to get people to feel he was on their side as their strong protector. He bragged about being the smartest man in the world. He offered bullying suggestions to thorny foreign policy issues. He recently warned Hamas to release the hostages in Gaza in two weeks or “all hell will break loose.”
There seem to be two major reasons young white males supported Trump in 2024: Masculine gendered performance and shame and blame.
Masculine gendered performance
Jennifer Mercieca reminds us Trump is a rhetorical genius and a marketing genius. He is a creature of television, and his rhetoric and actions sound and look scripted. His use of social media attracted young white males already fans of Joe Rogan, for example.
Trump’s masculine performances are more than what we hear and see on the surface. His coarse, vulgar, indecorous and unapologetic rhetoric feeds a collective fantasy that he is a big, tough man who will get things done by shaking up politics as usual. Robert Ivie says, “His act is political theater that stymies rather than presages positive change.”
He then observes, “Trump’s performance of carnivalesque rhetoric provides a kind of pleasure in spectacle that merges entertainment with politics, skepticism with fantasy, and violence with authoritarianism.” Like a modern P. T. Barnum, Trump sold his supporters sheer entertainment.
Trump speaks and acts the way young white men wish they could speak and act. They feel empowered by Trump’s act of sheer maleness. One Trump voter said, “I hate the way he talks and the way he treats the presidency, the way he treats women and minorities and everybody — but nevertheless I voted for him because of some of the promises I saw in his administration.”
Since Trump looks, sounds and acts like a man’s man, he won the admiration and votes of the majority of young white males. His caricature of a real man would be laughable if not so dangerous.
One young Trump voter attempted to make logical sense out of his support of Trump: “He’s a character with a strong belief. And I think a strong belief is what a lot of young men need to get behind because they don’t see that. Specifically with men, they’re told being a man is a problem. And so having a male figure who is just strong and loud and talks a lot and says whatever, that’s someone they can get behind.”
“There’s nothing in that defense except emotions.”
There’s nothing in that defense except emotions. The Trump emotion machine produces “feeling good, feeling free” every day. Instead of policies, promises or even a political philosophy, there’s a certain image that Trump is strong, loud, talks endlessly and says whatever he wants.
Trump’s gendered performance was an Oscar winning moment for young white males. His maleness undergirded his populism. His ostentatious masculine posturing won him respect. As an outsider and a bad boy but also a good father, he appealed to young white males.
Trump excited deep feelings of worth and meaning into the lives of frustrated young white males. One such supporter shouted, “We’re so back.”
This begs the question: Back from where? Trump convinced young white voters he could give them back something they had lost. This is a sort of “lost cause” philosophy for young white men.
Trump’s performance included hateful, violent and misogynistic bar talk, boasting and bragging. He played the role of an old vision of the American male as a bootstrapping, butt-kicking, in-your-face individual unafraid to face the world.
Young white males feel they have been the “98-pound weakling on the beach,” getting sand kicked in their faces. Trump, their new daddy and protector, has shown up to put the bad guys in their place.
Shame and blame
Young white males protest about the burden of being white in a culture they believe shames and blames them for everything.
“I feel like there’s this cultural frustration that young men have that they’re not allowed to be young men,” says 26-year-old Benji Backer from Arizona. “We feel really blamed for things that we haven’t had an opportunity to impact.” He added, “Well, I can’t change the fact that I’m white, I can’t change the fact that I’m a man, I can’t change the fact that decades or centuries ago, people made bad decisions. All I can do is do what I can do now. And what I’m doing now is treating people as fairly as possible because that’s what I firmly believe in.”
A sense of shame hangs over young white males and probably most whites, especially the previous masters of shame (conservatives) like fog on a coffin lid. Donovan O. Schaefer argues the success of Trump’s rhetoric emerges in part through his mastery of a circuit of shame and dignity, in which supporters who feel ashamed find, in his verbal and visual style, a repudiation of that shame and so mobilize behind him.
Trump’s macho, manly man style and rhetoric matches perfectly with his ability to transform felt shame into a kind of dignity. Young white male voters refer constantly to being made to feel ashamed and blamed. Trump replaces this as he attacks “wokeness” and goes after feminism and liberalism.
“Trump taught young white males as a preacher who offered freedom from guilt, shame and blame with no repentance.”
There’s little doubt the political left traffics in a pedagogy of shame. The civic morality of our culture teaches whites to be ashamed of past transgressions. Trump taught young white males as a preacher who offered freedom from guilt, shame and blame with no repentance.
Trump effectively communicated to young white males that the politics of gender, race, queer emancipation should not make them feel shame.
Shaefer points out, “In fact, we might even say that this orientation to shame is one of the cardinal principles of progressivism.” Progressives understand the necessity of shame, but this distinction is lost on young white males.
Feminist Elsbeth Probyn confesses: “I’ve been shamed by feminism. What feminist hasn’t?” She sees this as a positive. It is an openness to being taught a better way in the future.
Yet Trump taught young white males to see shame as a completely negative experience. Left and right political ideas diverge on the level of feelings. Being shamed, to a conservative, is something they are no longer willing to tolerate. This is a major reason young white males voted for Trump while not liking his rhetoric or his action. He freed them from shame and blame.
Voting for Trump became a way to repudiate the shame of leftwing pedagogy. Instead of shame, young white men were offered a felt sense of dignity and pride.
Young white males cared about Trump making them feel good about being men. Someone as wealthy and powerful as Trump made them feel good. This is why they were not bothered by Trump’s lying or bad behavior or his criminal convictions — because he showed them he could do as he pleased, get away with it, and still be president. That puts us in jeopardy of being swamped by an authoritarian strong man who makes voters feel good. Not a good place for democracy.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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