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