The left is willing to admit it has made mistakes. It isn’t willing to admit that it has been mistaken.
The bad news keeps coming for the Democratic Party. The New York Times reported Wednesday that the party “faces a voter registration crisis.” Among the 30 states and Washington, D.C., that register voters by party, Democrats dropped 2.1 million registered voters between 2020 and 2024. Republicans added 2.4 million.
Nevada contributed its share to that 4.5 million voter swing. In January 2020, Nevada Democrats had an 83,000-voter lead in registration. Earlier this year, Nevada Republicans briefly obtained a voter registration edge, although Democrats currently have a small lead.
“In Nevada, which releases particularly detailed data, Republicans added nearly twice as many voters under 35 to the rolls as Democrats did last year, state records show,” the Times reported.
These shifting political realities have led to months of introspection among Democratic powerbrokers. One of their conclusions is that liberals have neglected men, who are struggling badly. That is obviously true. Young men are increasingly disconnected, lonely and more likely to engage in a variety of destructive behaviors.
Even if their motives are transparently political, things are so bad that even some liberals now want to help men.
Last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on the “urgent need” to address “the challenges affecting men and boys.”
“I will be directing my entire administration to begin implementing targeted solutions to uplift our men and boys,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said earlier this year.
The good news is that there’s a proven roadmap to do just that. In the early 1900s, there was a broad concern about the plight of young men amid rapid societal change. Writing recently in the New York Times, Robert Putnam and Richard Reeves describe how the solution wasn’t another governmental program, but new civic institutions, like Big Brothers and the Boy Scouts. The Young Men’s Christian Association started in Britain, but it helped many young men in America, too.
“More than a century ago, reformers recognized that the most effective solution to the boy problem was to build civic institutions and spaces where men could help boys to navigate their way successfully to a mature, pro-social manhood,” they write.
Over the decades, those organizations helped tens of millions of boys. An indispensable part of their success was limiting membership to males. There was a societal understanding that boys and men needed single-sex spaces because boys are different from girls.
That understanding is no more. Over the decades, the left attacked male-only institutions as sexist and discriminatory. They brought political and social pressure on these organizations. And slowly, these boy-oriented organizations opened their doors to females.
In 1978, the YMCA banned discrimination based on sex. In contrast, the YWCA openly states it is “one of the oldest and largest women’s organizations in the nation.” There are around twice as many Big Sisters as Big Brothers. Perhaps most notably, in 2017, the Boy Scouts announced it would begin accepting girls. Today, the group is called Scouting America. Meanwhile, the Girl Scouts remain focused on girls.
This was a major error, especially as millions of boys grow up without their dads.
One solution is obvious. Society should encourage the reformation of male-only groups. But doing so would be an explicit rejection of modern feminism, which holds that men and women aren’t innately different. Any differences are imposed by the patriarchy, which must be destroyed. And there’s little that’s more patriarchal than a club that’s exclusively for males.
Even though single-sex groups would help boys, don’t expect Democrats like Gov. Wes Moore and Gov. Gavin Newsom to be man enough to push this proven approach.
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