‘White Dudes for Harris’ Was a Missed Opportunity. The Atlantic - Politics by Tyler Austin Harper

Kamala Harris fundraising Zoom events

/ Jul 31, 2024 at 8:45 PM//keep unread//hide

The White Dudes for Harris group call sounded like a very bad idea. The group’s organizer, Ross Morales Rocketto, acknowledged as much when he kicked off the video fundraiser—which featured Jeff Bridges, Mark Hamill, and other celebrities, as well as a spate of vice-presidential hopefuls—Monday night. “Throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on,” Morales Rocketto said.

My sentiments exactly. I’m generally hostile to any form of racial identitarianism, and I’ve spent the past few years watching—and criticizing—liberals as they’ve peddled condescending, divisive, and often bizarre rhetoric in the name of “anti-racism,” fighting sexism, and generally militating for progress. I thought the event would be the kind of thing that played well with the college-educated voters who already make up the Democratic base, but that might repel the swing-state and working-class men the party needs to court in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan.

So imagine my shock when I found myself, slowly but surely, charmed by the White Dudes for Harris call. Morales Rocketto tugged at my heartstrings with a story about male suicide and his simple observation that “there is a crisis of loneliness in this country.” His plainspoken opening set the tone for the entire affair, where speakers fluctuated among earnest (dads, straight and gay, talking about what IVF meant to them), jocular (far too many jokes about J. D. Vance, couches, and dolphins), and wonkish (an unexpectedly sober and comprehensive rundown of Vice President Kamala Harris’s accomplishments courtesy of the comedian Paul Scheer). Labor rights came up again and again.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: What the Kamala Harris doubters don’t understand]

But the more I realized I was enjoying the event, delighted by the kind of frank, sharp-toothed talk that Democrats rarely permit themselves to indulge in, the less I was persuaded by its supposed raison d’être. There was little to be gained by framing the call as an event for white men rather than for men in general—the Democrats have a problem with appealing to male voters that cuts across racial lines. The “White Dudes” name risks solidifying the public’s impression that the Democratic Party is for overeducated elites with laptop jobs and performative progressive politics, which is particularly shortsighted at a moment when the GOP is on its way to achieving a multiracial working-class coalition, cobbled together with increasing shares of Black and Hispanic voters driven by male defections from the Democratic coalition. The way to contest this trend is not through bizarre rituals of racial balkanization but by reasserting a commitment to the kind of liberal universalism that lifts up all Americans.

The White Dudes call was the latest in a series of identity-based video-call fundraisers for Harris. Jump-started by a Black Women for Harris Zoom event last week, which was followed by a corresponding fundraiser organized by Black men, things took a stranger and more scrutinized turn after a recent White Women for Kamala event provided plenty of cringey discourse fodder, fueling discussions about the role that white identity groups should play in progressive politics. By the time the White Dudes for Harris Zoom was announced, the practice of racially siloed video calls was already ginning up debate and being cast as a liberal version of segregation.

Many non-white-dude writers were quick to joke about whether they would be allowed into the virtual fundraiser if they tried to enter. The journalist Zaid Jilani quipped: “Can I join the White Dudes for Harris call? Do I have to prove I’m white, like I need to dance to Phish or splash some Tabasco on boiled broccoli and then start sweating and heaving after I eat it?” The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang tweeted, “Oh shit I made it through security,” accompanied a screenshot of his RSVP to the event, while I made a similar joke about using subterfuge to sneak onto the call. Shadi Hamid of The Washington Post laid out the more serious question underlying all this uneasy banter: “Maybe I missed the memo but when did white affinity groups become an okay thing on the left?”

In the face of this mounting skepticism, defenders of the Zoom hammered one talking point again and again—“everyone is welcome!”—but this assertion felt faintly preposterous. After all, events that are open to everyone generally do not signal said openness by singling out a particular racial demographic in their very name. If a grocery store was named Natural Foods for White Guys but a small sign was placed in the window that read “But everyone is allowed in!,” how seriously would we be expected to take this reassurance?

Marketing materials put out in advance by White Dudes for Harris did little to allay my concerns. The organization’s “social media toolkit,” passed along to me by an acquaintance, provides a list of “message points” for supporters of the event. Couched in the kind of therapy-speak that has become endemic to the liberal professional class, the flyer is rife with social-justice jargon, including invocations of male “toxic entitlement” and exhortations to create “spaces of honesty and trust.” Thinking of the blue-collar white men I grew up around in central Pennsylvania—the kind of place Democrats desperately need to win—I found it impossible to believe that many of them would be moved by that kind of language. I sent the toolkit to two left-leaning white male friends who grew up working-class to see if they had a similar reaction: One responded “Oh my God, what are they thinking?” while the other replied simply “oof.”

Logging on to the call, I steeled myself for several hours of self-flagellating “white privilege” and “toxic masculinity” blather, but my (admittedly very low) expectations were exceeded, and then some. An unstated but implicit theme of the night was an attempt to counteract Republican messaging that voting for Democrats is feminine. Some speakers, Pete Buttigieg among them, pointed out that issues that can seem female-coded, like abortion, also have an impact on American men. Meanwhile, celebrities including Scheer and Tim Daly focused on pushing back against the GOP’s racist and sexist “DEI” attacks against Harris, speaking eloquently about her policy achievements and qualifications. Others adopted the kind of aggressive, bellicose language that is common on the right but that can feel less welcome in left-leaning spaces. Referring to Trump, a red-faced and animated Tim Walz tapped into his former high-school-football-coach background, encouraging listeners to be motivated by a competitive desire to stick it to Trump, inviting them to imagine how dejected the former president would feel the morning after losing another election.

[Adam Serwer: Why some Republicans can’t resist making vile attacks on Harris]

And it wasn’t all just vibes and rhetorical strategies designed to appeal to college-educated men who sit at desks. Though my democratic-socialist heart was rankled by periodic references to corporate titans making big donations, I was pleasantly surprised to hear a robust discussion of labor issues. Jimmy Williams Jr., Philadelphia-raised president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, spoke especially movingly about what Biden’s administration has meant for workers. He observed that unions are more popular than at any time in recent memory, before adding, “I am scared to death of what the future could look like if we go back to another Trump administration, one that truly left working-construction white men behind.”

Williams’s comments illustrated what was so powerful about the fundraiser, which frequently focused on the needs of working-class men, but also what was so dispiriting about it: the ubiquitous and almost invariably unnecessary application of the adjective white.

What was so refreshing about the call was its acknowledgment that men not only face different challenges than women—such as heightened suicide rates and being disproportionately impacted by offshoring and deindustrialization—but also are susceptible to different kinds of political rhetoric. The Democratic Party has a long-simmering problem with retaining male voters, and political polarization between men and women becomes more acute by the year. But the issues that appear to be driving working-class white men to Trump also appear to be the same issues driving an increasing share of working-class Black and Hispanic men to Trump. I have yet to see a convincing reason that White Dudes for Harris shouldn’t have instead been called Dudes for Harris. Supporters of the event will no doubt point to the millions of dollars the call raised as vindication, but I have no reason to believe that the event would have enjoyed less enthusiasm from small donors had it not been cast with an explicitly racialist framing.

Fighting right-wing white identity politics with left-wing white identity politics does not strike me as a method that aligns with liberal values. It doesn’t seem to make much strategic sense either: Segregated video fundraisers are odd and uncomfortable—as alluded to by the long-shot VP hopeful J. B. Pritzker, who admitted on the call that a white-dudes event is not normally his cup of tea—and they seem doubly unproductive when Democrats are trying to paint themselves as the normal alternative to weird Republicans. Above all, this kind of racially tailored approach, which divvies up the party into a series of micro-constituencies sorted along lines of skin pigment, accepts the implicit narrative framing of our conservative opponents: that this country is subdivided into warring factions, more different than they are alike, who can be reached only by appeals to tribalism.