Essayist: AJ Seker

For the past year, Democratic circles have been asking a familiar question: “How do we win young men back?” The shift in male engagement to the right is often framed as sudden or inexplicable—as if young men simply woke up one morning and chose a side as though they emerged from a vacuum. But no generation forms itself. Young men are shaped long before they ever cast a ballot. And today, that shaping is increasingly outsourced to systems built not for human development, but for engagement and profit.

At thirteen years old, I was not searching for radical politics. I was searching for orientation—adolescence is disorienting by nature. Insecurity, isolation, desire, status, and a growing awareness of my own inadequacy crowded my still-forming mind. The algorithm in my hand recognized those vulnerabilities before I could name them. It translated normal developmental uncertainty into grievance. It supplied a villain. It supplied a narrative. It supplied certainty.

This is how the so-called “pipeline” works. It does not impose an ideology outright. It begins with emotional targeting and subtle value manipulation. A boy feels rejected, overlooked, uncertain. Instead of understanding those feelings as part of growing up, he is told they are proof of dispossession—that something has been taken from him. And the most immediate embodiment of that loss becomes women: classmates, girlfriends, sisters, even the abstract idea of feminism itself.

By the time figures like Andrew Tate were being casually defended during my senior year of high school, the groundwork had already been laid. The boys invoking his name were not political theorists. They were rehearsing a posture, mimicking a kind of confidence that disguised insecurity. It was less about belief than belonging. The algorithm had supplied a script for masculinity at a moment when many of us were unsure what masculinity was supposed to mean.

The uncomfortable truth is that our digital infrastructure shapes young men more effectively than our cultural institutions. It offers hierarchy in moments of ambiguity. It offers dominance in moments of insecurity. It offers clarity when many boys feel morally suspect simply for existing. 

In progressive spaces, we have done essential work confronting sexism and structural inequality. But in that necessary critique, an unintended blind spot emerged: we became fluent in diagnosing toxic masculinity, yet hesitant to articulate a constructive vision of manhood.

If you are a young man today, where do you go to ask what your strength is for?

The right answers that question decisively—even if destructively. It defines strength as control, status, and defiance of cultural change. It turns private confusion into public grievance. And because it speaks directly to young men—not about them, but to them—it fills a void that no other voice reaches.

I was fortunate to have counterweights. I was raised by a mother who instilled empathy before the internet could replace it with armor. I had a sister who held me to a higher standard and refused to let frustration metastasize into resentment. Those relationships interrupted the narrative that the algorithm was building for me. They grounded masculinity not in dominance, but in responsibility.

Many young men do not have those anchors. Some grow up in environments where grievance is already ambient. Others navigate adolescence largely alone, with their phones as their primary companions. In those conditions, a recommendation engine becomes a formative authority, interpreting their pain before they can interpret it themselves.

In my work organizing young men in Wisconsin, I rarely encounter hardened ideologues. I encounter disorientation. I encounter a desire for structure, for brotherhood, for seriousness. I encounter young men who want to matter. The tragedy is not that they are irredeemable. It is that we have often ceded the language of purpose to those willing to weaponize it.

If we want to interrupt this trajectory, we must move beyond condemnation and toward formation. Young men do not need to be flattered, nor do they need to be shamed into silence. They need to be called into something higher. Strength must be redefined not as domination, but as disciplined service. Authority must be understood not as control over others, but as stewardship of self. Masculinity must be articulated as responsibility—to family, to community, to the vulnerable—rather than as perpetual grievance.

We should be deeply unsettled by the fact that a profit-driven algorithm has become one of the most influential architects of male identity in the United States. A generation’s moral imagination is being shaped by engagement metrics. That is not a political problem alone; it is a civilizational one.

The question is not simply why young men are drifting. The question is whether we are willing to reclaim the work of forming them. If we do not offer a coherent and compelling vision of what manhood can be, others will continue to offer a counterfeit version.

Young men are not inherently reactionary. They are responsive to formation. The future of our politics—and of our society—will depend, in no small part, on who steps forward to do that work. If we fail to offer a coherent, compelling vision of manhood, others will continue to provide a counterfeit version, shaping a generation not by guidance, but by grievance.