By Steve Segner —
Sedona, Az — At today’s fundraiser, surrounded by Democrats from across northern Arizona who were supporting a state Senate candidate, I found myself returning to a question from my marketing career:
What do people want, and why do they make the choices they do?
At its core, marketing studies people—how they see themselves, where they belong, what they value, and what they fear losing. Politics is no different. Yet we can get so caught up debating individual issues that we overlook the deeper anxieties shaping people’s choices.
One of those anxieties is the changing place of men in American society.
Since the 1960s, men’s and women’s roles have changed dramatically. Men are no longer automatically assumed to be the sole providers or natural heads of households. Women have entered professions once dominated by men, earned college degrees in growing numbers, and built independent lives. Access to contraception has given women greater control over their futures.
These changes have expanded women’s freedom and opportunity. But they have also challenged the expectations many men were raised to meet. For generations, men were taught that if they worked hard, supported a family, bought a home, and fulfilled their responsibilities, they would earn security, respect, and a recognized place in the world.
Let’s be honest: much of the prosperity postwar baby boomers enjoyed came from the Allied victory in World War II and the economic boom that followed. A person’s birthplace, race, gender, and luck mattered as much as hard work.
That promise is no longer reliable.
Jobs disappear. Housing slips out of reach. Marriage and family life look different than they once did. The social status many men expected to inherit from their fathers is no longer guaranteed.
The problem is not that men have become obsolete. The old script no longer works, and we still haven’t proposed a compelling new one.
We also need to confront another part of this story: our expectations of prosperity.
For much of the postwar era, Americans experienced extraordinary economic growth. The 1950s and 1960s helped establish a powerful national narrative: each generation would do better than the last. A comfortable home, a stable job, and a better life for one’s children seemed not simply possible, but almost inevitable.
But an exceptional period of prosperity is not a permanent guarantee. The conditions that made that era possible did not ensure that every subsequent generation would enjoy the same advantages.
Today, when someone says, “I will never be able to afford the lifestyle my parents had,” that may accurately reflect their circumstances. Still, it raises a more important question: Why have we come to believe that our parents’ standard of living is the minimum measure of a successful life?
America has a problem with expectations—not because people should stop working toward a better future, but because we have confused a particular historical moment with a permanent promise. We have narrowed the American Dream so much that millions feel they have failed before they even had a fair chance.
That disappointment creates fertile ground for political resentment.
Donald Trump understood this. He recognized the anger and insecurity of people who felt the world they were promised was disappearing. Some men, particularly in communities experiencing economic and cultural change, believed that people who looked down on them were dismissing the values they had built their lives around: work, family, faith, and community.
Trump offered a simple, emotionally powerful explanation: America had been taken from them. Someone else was responsible—and only he could restore what they had lost.
The contradictions between his personal conduct and the traditional beliefs he invoked mattered less than the story he told. He offered certainty in a time of uncertainty, a scapegoat for complicated problems, and the promise of returning to a familiar world.
Trump did not create all this resentment. He recognized it, gave it a target, and turned it into political power.
Democrats should understand that dynamic rather than dismiss the people caught up in it.
We often talk about progress in terms of inclusion, equality, and expanded opportunity. These are essential goals. But if people experience progress as a competition in which someone else’s advancement means their own decline, we should not be surprised when they resist it.
We cannot build a wider coalition by telling people, implicitly or explicitly, that their concerns no longer matter. Nor can we expect people to embrace an uncertain future simply because we tell them the past was unfair.
The challenge is to show that a more inclusive society can also be more secure, meaningful, and rewarding for everyone.
Men do not need to be restored to the top of the table. They need a meaningful place at it. They need opportunities to contribute, work that offers dignity and a future, relationships based on mutual respect, and communities that value them for more than their income, authority, or ability to provide.
They need to know that changing gender roles do not make them less valuable, that asking for help does not make them weak, and that their future does not depend on someone else having fewer opportunities.
They need more than a lecture on adapting to change. Telling people to swim harder doesn’t replace making sure there is a shore worth swimming toward.
Democrats have an opportunity to offer something better than nostalgia. We can argue for an era in which economic security is attainable, family life is supported, work is respected, and everyone has a chance to contribute to something larger than themselves.
That means addressing the material realities of people’s lives while also recognizing their need for identity, purpose, and belonging. People do not make political choices based on policy alone. They also make choices based on whether they feel noticed, respected, and hopeful about the future.
That is the lesson my marketing background keeps bringing me back to: to understand people’s choices, we must first understand the needs those choices are trying to meet.
The question for Democrats is not simply how to persuade people to accept a changing world. It is how to build a world in which they can see a place for themselves.
Progress can scare people. What some of us see as moving forward, others may experience as an attack. We should talk more about the core issues people face every day—and less about issues some voters see as symbolic or peripheral. We should talk about food, wages, and health care, and make clear how a fairer society can improve people’s lives.
That’s one man’s opinion.
Steve Segner
1 Comment
“Trump offered a simple, emotionally powerful explanation: America had been taken from them. Someone else was responsible—and only he could restore what they had lost.
The contradictions between his personal conduct and the traditional beliefs he invoked mattered less than the story he told. He offered certainty in a time of uncertainty, a scapegoat for complicated problems, and the promise of returning to a familiar world.
Trump did not create all this resentment. He recognized it, gave it a target, and turned it into political power”
Hitler and Mussolini did the exact same thing as Trump. They created a boogeyman out of the Jew, Romani, Gay, Judge, Journalist, Scientist and opposition party Politicians rather than except the fact that the people who supported them were the very same people who created the problems in the first place. There’s nothing special or magical about the horrendously evil lies they have all (including Trump) created about their fellow citizens and mankind in general. Anyone can start a riot over nonsense and lies. Few can lead with honesty and integrity and the ones who do get targeted by the Hitlers, Mussolini’s and Trump’s of the world so they can get them out of the way of their criminal ambitions.
MAGA is worried to death about whites disappearing (which isn’t happening) and their men becoming gay or trans. Why do they worry so about the masculinity of others? Why do they insist upon bulking their men up with harmful steroids like the Nazi’s did their men in addition to giving them methamphetamines to make them hyper aggressive as their penis’s shriveled and fell off. Why can’t people be whatever they decide to be rather than being pressured into conformity by hate filled fear mongers who fear their own shadows? They want TRAD or Traditional wives who stay at home, cook, clean, raise kids and wait for their “man” to come home drunk and rape them and or punch their lights out like TRAD husbands used to do. “To the moon” TRAD husband Ralph Norton used to tell his TRAD wife Alice as as he threatened to knock her senseless for disagreeing with him.
Under Trump we have lost more civil rights and liberties than during any other Presidency. He has eliminated reproductive rights, civil rights, DEI initiatives meant not to give minorities the upper hand but to allow them to compete upon a level playing field. He has stifled Journalists and has attempted to silence any and all of critics to include politicians in his own party.
There’s no impending doom of men dying out. No white man crisis other than the ones made by themselves. It’s all fear mongering propaganda and lies told so we won’t notice the daily lies and crimes of Trump and his MAGA sycophantic minions (of which there are fewer and fewer daily as they awaken to his lies and bullshit). This doesn’t eliminate the fact that Trump would never have taken office if they weren’t complicit in getting him elected. Like Thom Tillis who recently woke up but still doesn’t quite understand that he is the reason Trump was ever allowed to play King in the first place. He voted for Hegseth as SEC DEF but doesn’t understand how sorely unqualified and very immature Hegseth ever became SEC DEF? We have to hold all those like Tillis accountable for creating the Frankenstein monsters he so fears now. Remember all the people who got fired for calling a misogynist, xenophobic, homophobe exactly what he was following his assassination as he spread the word of hate? Perhaps everyone who voted for and donated to the MAGA hate machine should also lose their jobs? After all fair is fair is it not?