The problem with writing about a presidential election is that everyone is writing about the presidential election. You run the risk of retreading well-trodden ground. Worse, for a columnist, you risk not only making the same argument others have made but also making it in a way that is not quite as good. Being unoriginal is perhaps worse than being wrong.

Here is, I think, one of the most important but unsurprising aspects of the outcome this year: President-Elect Donald Trump won men by 10 points according to early exit polls. That number could change after this column goes to print, but it’s safe to say, as does the left-leaning online magazine Vox, that if the 1992 election that sent record numbers of women to Congress was “The Year of the Woman,” then the 2024 election can be called “The Year of the Man.”

This fact carries with it political implications that can and will be ceaselessly parsed in the ensuing weeks and months. But it also carries cultural implications and opportunities. Ahead of the election, there were indicators, some obvious and some subtle, that signaled which way American men would break. More on that later.

It’s worth noting that the redshift among men wasn’t a strictly white phenomenon. There was movement among black and Hispanic males as well, with Trump winning about 20 percent and 54 percent, respectively. Again, that’s according to exit polls and subject to adjustment as more accurate data land. Still, left-leaning media is blaming everything from racism and sexism to the “epidemic of loneliness” among men that, according to them, isn’t hitting women in the same way. One of the rare times you will hear outlets like Vox express concern over the psychological and emotional well-being of men is when they vote the wrong way—a sign that their psychic architecture needs further reworking. The ideological beatings will continue until the Democratic Party’s margins improve.

But why is anyone shocked that men would be alienated by a party that makes such flogging central to its coalition? It’s as if the people obsessed with policing masculinity are completely incapable of understanding it. Of course they are. And that is why they missed the warning signs in the culture about what would happen on Nov. 5.

In September, The Federalist published an analysis of recent video games, a market in which men are still the main consumers. Approximately 55 percent of U.S. gamers are male, and they overwhelmingly rejected titles laden with progressive themes. Some of these offerings cost studios hundreds of millions to develop and market. They would have been better off lighting that money on fire than pushing that investment. It would have cost them less and at least have kept them warm for a minute.

To be sure, I don’t believe the mantra “go woke, go broke” because it underestimates the vast resources some people are willing to incinerate in the service of ideological quests. Still, the fact that titles larded with “woke” messaging utterly bombed was a sign of attitudes in men, who were just waiting to express themselves politically at the polls. In contrast to the duds mentioned above, you can open Instagram to find no shortage of clips and memes from games that are conservative-coded. For example, Helldivers II surged to become a bestseller swiftly after its release this year. The game is essentially a video game version of Starship Troopers, taking after Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 movie, not Robert Heinlein’s 1959 book. It glorifies patriotism and manifest destiny among the stars and was easily one of the most viral entries of the year. 

Verhoeven wanted his film to satirize Heinlein’s source material. He said he stopped reading the novel “after two chapters because it was so boring” and “a very right-wing book.” I doubt actually finishing it would have changed the film much, or the fact that many people did not care that Verhoeven tried to poke fun at the worldview of Robert Heinlein, because his attempt at satire ended up resonating with viewers in exactly the way Heinlein intended. The film became a cult classic, particularly among men. It would do even better at the box office if it were released today. 

Increasingly, contemporary films seem to be incorporating little jabs at the left and themes that could be interpreted as conservative. In the fall, Deadpool & Wolverine featured jabs at the “woke mob,” as well as an alternate version of the death-defying superhero as a disempowered, effete liberal who is utterly useless in combat and obnoxious in his mannerisms. Self-sacrifice and finding peace within a hierarchy that underpins civilizational order are the themes at the heart of the story. That’s not to say it’s a “right-wing” movie. But it’s a notable shift from the 2018 sequel, which included a gag about killing a villain who looked like a member of the Trump family.

And that’s really what I’m getting at: there is a growing appetite for a new culture, for items that are both free from ideological shackles and expressive of values and virtues divergent from those that have come to dominate the mainstream under the thumb of progressive hegemony. Now is the time to create and patronize new things. In particular, I think the market for literature looks promising. 

Back in August, Alex Perez, a Cuban-American writer based in Miami, lamented the lack of masculine fiction in the literary scene—and struck back at those who criticized him for pointing out what is an obvious problem. Much of what passes for fiction today is dreck. If it features men at all, they are too often portrayed as weak, incompetent, villainous, or some combination of all three. Man is allowed to exist in the pages of today’s novels only if “he writes apologetically and shamefully” about being an American man—the worst kind imaginable. For Perez, “American man” doesn’t necessarily mean right-wing, either. He writes:

The American man I’m talking about may be a conservative or a liberal or apolitical, but that’s not what matters most to him. It’s about audacity and courage and ridiculousness and love and beauty and the willingness to fall flat on your face and embarrass yourself in the service of your art. It’s Henry Miller. It’s Ralph Ellison. It’s Phillip Roth. It’s Barry Hannah. It’s Truman Capote. It’s Charles Portis. It’s James Alan McPherson. It’s all those truly vulnerable, beautiful boys.

In contrast, white male authors are expected to mortify their flesh as penance for their sins. Meanwhile, the literary establishment will only embrace black and Hispanic men in ways that are contingent on whether their work centers on the suffering of nonwhites in an evil America:

But this disgust for American men also affects men of color who reject the victimization story, or at the very least don’t want to make it the hallmark of their work. There isn’t a singular American male experience, of course, but more often than not, American men from differing backgrounds can break bread and connect over their common kinship suffering under a generalized American malaise. This is a beautiful thing. I love watching a game at a bar and talking with dudes I don’t know or meeting a random guy at a coffee shop and bonding over our shared American experience.

It turns out that the cure for male loneliness is allowing men to be men together without shame and distortions.

Some people have already undertaken the work of creating literature with men in mind. In 2022, Brendan M. P. Heard launched a quarterly called Aegeon. It’s a throwback to the weird fiction of old that includes short stories, reviews, fan art, and scantily clad women on the covers, calling to mind the illustrations of Margaret Brundage for the most famous pulp magazine of all, Weird Tales. Passage, a new publishing house, has also released a set of novels, including Something of the Springtime by John King Spiezio, which follows an American scholar’s attempts to find his place at Oxford and the world. All of these efforts are laudable and are helping to spark renewed interest in a sclerotic scene.

But why read, let alone write fiction? Surely, you’re better served burying your nose in political treatises and works of philosophy? Well, you are, sometimes. But then I am reminded that Plato’s Gorgias, a dialogue about rhetoric, persuasion, knowledge, and justice, includes a myth about the afterlife presented by Socrates as “proof” of why the righteous should have no fear of death. “I should like to tell you a story,” he says to Callicles, before delving into the judgment and partition of souls that were sent to either the Islands of the Blessed or the abyss of Tartarus. 

Stories, in other words, are more than just a way for us to share and reflect upon the self and the human condition. They are also an important way for human beings to transmit and reinforce our culture. Reading them shapes us, and writing them shapes the world around us. This November made it clear that there has never been a better time, particularly for men, to help shape the American story. ◆