Men, and Michigan

It’s primary day in Michigan, and on the ballot are a middle-of-the-road, unexciting moderate Democrat backed by moderate Democratic money in Stevens, and a DSA-adjacent candidate with an economic message in El-Sayed. It’s the classic Dem on Dem internecine quarrel that almost always churns out a candidate committed to Democratic orthodoxy: the way to win power is to offer voters more money, more of the time.

But I haven’t seen either candidate pay lip service much less meaningfully address the key problem Democrats have had post-Obama: they don’t value male identity. This is ironic, wrong-headed, and electorally stupid given the obsession on the left over identity in general. A young man who cannot afford a home or support a family face real obstacles. But I have become convinced that we are answering the wrong question. The deepest hunger among young men is not for comfort or even for success. It is for necessity. Men want to be needed to do things for others that they cannot do on their own.

Looking back over my own life, I don’t think I was ever attracted to jobs because they looked easy. It was the opposite. Every meaningful decision I made was driven by the promise that someone, somewhere, would someday need me on a really bad day.

I wanted to become a Navy SEAL because it was impossibly difficult, and I wanted to earn a place in a community where failure had consequences and where other men would someday depend on whether I had prepared well enough. I was never drawn by the title itself; I was drawn by what the title represented. I wanted to be a champion who was sent as a champion to do champion things that others could not do.

Emergency medicine held exactly the same attraction. Nobody comes to an emergency department because things are going well. The people who truly belong there, with real, life-threatening emergencies, arrive on the worst days of their lives. They do not need sympathy; they need competence. They needed instant central access, or a crash intubation, or someone to ventilate their chest with a finger thoracotomy now. I wanted to be that someone, and then to casually eat an apple at my computer while I charted. I never wanted medicine because it was comfortable. I wanted medicine because it mattered.

The same is true, albeit in a less high-stakes way, of entrepreneurship. Starting a company is, of course, a pursuit of wealth and independence. Those things can certainly follow, but they are rarely what sustains someone through the grind I am only a year into. What drew me to building a company was the chance to burn the boats, to say I was going to succeed or fail in a new industry with enormous upside but with the very real possibility that I’d someday be crawling back to the hospital begging to work at Urgent Care. The risk wasn’t the necessity; the feeling that I was doing something that needed to get done or I was well and truly fucked was.

The common thread between all three experiences is not prestige. It is usefulness. I wanted to be needed, and so do almost all men. And if you’re willing to stand in line and vote, and participate in your democracy, above all else you are casting a ballot to show that someone needs you. Voting may seem small, but it’s a simple chance to show you matter. And far too many men, because of Democratic malpractice, go into the booth with a chip on their shoulder.

That grudge is not about taxes; it is about identity.

I suspect that is true for far more men than our culture recognizes.

Until my lifetime, boys were taught a path toward becoming indispensable. On a wooden ship, in a factory, in a mine, and on a battlefield, young men were taught that adulthood meant becoming someone other people could rely upon. The details varied from one generation to the next, but the message remained remarkably consistent: your value to the tribe comes from the responsibilities you willingly accept for the tribe (please, if you’ve not done so, read Sebastian Junger’s book on the topic).

Many of those traditions deserved to change. Women’s opportunities were unjustly constrained for centuries, and expanding those opportunities makes our society richer, fairer, and stronger. Equal opportunity for women never required less for men, but it is an easy sell to men that it does. In this century, we have told men they are no longer special for what their unique gifts offer society, and we have done so at scale. This cannot help but have a backlash.

Instead of telling boys what they should become, we became much better at telling them what they should avoid becoming. They heard plenty about arrogance, aggression, entitlement, and domination. Those warnings were often justified, but the Andrew Tates and Matt Gaetzes of the world are a tiny handful and will always be present. The battle is not for them; it is for those who have the ability to accept or ostracize them. A list of prohibitions is not an identity. Men need something to run toward, not merely something to run away from.

When swaths of society stop telling men that they are needed, someone else inevitably steps forward to fill the silence. The details hardly matter because they are always the same. What matters is that they answer the question respectable society has neglected to answer: We need you.

This is the massive hole in the Democrats’ big tent: these men are not voting primarily for economic interests; they are voting for identity. They are choosing the people who appear to believe that they still have a role to play. This is the disconnect between Trump’s moronic policies and the success his movement has had; voters aren’t reading the fine print of Project 2025, they’re voting for the back-slapping and sense of belonging they’d been missing.

Every healthy society must find honorable ways to tell boys that they are needed, because every civilization depends upon people willing to shoulder burdens, protect others, master themselves, and accept responsibility before seeking recognition. Those virtues are not exclusively masculine, and women embody them every day. But boys still need to hear that these qualities are expected of them and that the world will be better if they develop them.

Healthy masculinity has never been dominance; it is about responsibility.

I am very curious today to watch my childhood friend Steve Kornacki parse the returns tonight in Michigan. I suspect the candidate who will do best amongst men will be El-Sayed. Not because of his chromosomal makeup, but because he, more so than the mainstream Democratic Party, seems to understand that very often in 2026 America, the chip on the shoulders of men melts away the second someone turns to them and asks them for help.