National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, said there are “two problems” with the “pathetic and embarrassing” masculinity ads recently put out in support of the Harris-Walz ticket.

“The first is in the execution,” Cooke said. “It doesn’t work . . . because the people who made it don’t know the sort of people to whom they’re trying to appeal. And so it was a facsimile of masculinity.”

Cooke said that “the bigger problem . . . is that that ad and many of the other efforts that we’re seeing to appeal to men from the Harris-Walz campaign suffer from the same problem that has caused the Harris-Walz campaign’s deleterious position with men in the first place, that being an embrace of identity politics, a belief in the superficial over the substantive.”

He points out that Democrats’ problem with men “is the product of long-standing rhetoric and policy,” just as the Republicans’ problems with women “is the product of long-standing rhetoric and policy.

“The problem here for the Democrats,” Cooke said, “is that as a conscious choice going back to the early 2010s, they have decided to appeal to women. . . . They have kept the focus on women and women’s issues and women’s rhetoric and women’s assumptions while jettisoning men — and to some extent, not necessarily the Democratic Party writ large, but the movement that sustains it, criticizing men and masculinity.

“The result has been predictable: Men have started to move away from them.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.