December 3, 2024 - 7:00pm
After their electoral defeat in the 2024 election, various figures on the establishment Left and Right are now going through the predictable motions of soul-searching and finger-pointing. The new target are the so-called “Barstool conservatives”, who, according to Matthew Walther in the New York Times, are becoming a dangerous proposition.
In Walther’s piece, titled “I Viewed the Rise of ‘Barstool Conservatism’ With Alarm. And Rightly So”, readers are warned that Barstool conservatives “swung hard” for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. He sees this as a cause for alarm because they will ensure that Trumpism will last — even after the President-elect leaves the White House.
But who, exactly, are Barstool conservatives? According to Walther, they are mostly men who look to Dave Portnoy, Joe Rogan and ESPN personality Pat McAfee as their figureheads. They value “autonomy and ambition but are not doctrinaire about it” and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, have no problem with pornography, homosexuality, drug use, and legalised gambling. Back in 2021, Walther wrote that “on economic questions […] they embrace lower taxes on the one hand and stimulus checks and stricter regulation of social media platforms on the other”. Do these things really sound so bad?
This might sound like a Republican issue, but it’s Democrats who should see an opportunity here. As Walther notes, the people he talks about are not really very political, at least in a partisan way, which is best exemplified by Rogan, who announced his intention to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary before endorsing Trump in 2024. If someone like Rogan was willing to be so ideologically flexible, that means there could be hundreds of thousands of voters just like him.
The truth is that “Barstool conservatives” are simply not a political force. A vanishingly tiny amount of people inside this putative ideological bloc would apply this label to themselves, because very few are actually very interested in politics. A much better term for these sorts of people would simply be normal American men. This is why people like Joe Rogan: he’s normal. He also has the same sort of idiosyncratic, non-dogmatic and often contradictory political positions they themselves have.
Sure, Barstool conservatives have some ideas. They didn’t like Covid lockdowns, and they don’t like it when groceries are expensive and homes are unaffordable. They might not be huge fans of some of the more screeching aspects of “woke politics”, but as Walther points out, these opinions are not particularly strongly held. If Democrats returned to focus on bread-and-butter issues instead of hard-Left cultural issues then they might even start winning them back. Normal people, after all, have normal concerns.
If and when Democrats (or Republicans) fail to do this most basic of all political tasks, then they will be punished at the ballot box by non-partisan moderates like Barstool conservatives. The people in America who simply vote for the guy they think is best on issues they care about — regardless of whether that person has a (D) or an (R) next to their name — are hardly “threats” to the democratic system: they are the reason it exists in the first place.
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SubscribeI believe the barstool conservatives are too intelligent for the Democratic Party. The latter has been captured by a vocal woke and won’t be attractive to such as I for another generation. You see, the woke don’t have a sense of humour which is one of the characteristics of the barstool when they take the mickey out of the woke. the woke just don’t get it.
Yeah, you’re just so funny and charming….
I sure am. Thank you comrade.
Case in point.
Conservatives just don’t do humour.
Ha ha. I just won $20 for predicting your reply, comrade.
There’s rent covered for this month!
Champers, I never realised the Woke could be so cruel.
Poor old Poo Fash. Have you still got blue hair, or have you shaved it all off? How many TikTok videos have you made of yourself sobbing in your car? Have you started wearing a mask again? Are you troubled by chronic infections from your bull-ring? Have you mislaid your huge glasses? Is your morbid obesity completely out of control? Has the thought of your wife’s Trump-supporting boyfriend driven you to overdose on milk and cookies?
You guys are super weird!
Keep it coming, Dickie, I always get a laugh from the bizarre nonsense that you post!
“Has the thought of your wife’s Trump-supporting boyfriend”
I think this little fantasy says a lot more about you than it does about me, sport!
And you are not.
And don’t forget toxic feminization
This is pure rubbish. There are many “vocal woke” who get a lot of attention and then there are Democrats who keep on living life, don’t plaster ourselves in maga type vult worship, question most things, live, laugh, love and know far better than you that democrat no more = woke than woke = whatever you’ve been spoon fed to believe it does. Barstool liberals are far too intelligent to not call out your regurgitated blathering.
“I Viewed the Rise of ‘Barstool Conservatism’ With Alarm. And Rightly So”,
And the Left wonder why they lost
Every state in America swung Republican. That message doesn’t seem to have got through to the Democrats.
And they will swing right back in 2 and 4 years when everyone remembers what a joke Trump is.
But Trump had a fairly good first term. He only lost in 2020 because of the pandemic.
Lost voters often don’t swing back.
He lost in a landslide that dwarves the recent result. I guess some of those voters swung back, eh? You just keep on telling yourself it was all about Covid though…
I think you will find Trump will not be running in 4 years despite the Hysterical Democrats suggesting he is an anti-Democrat determined to cling to power until the crack of doom. Democrats will have a different Republican opponent to invent horror stories about. Who knows it might be another refugee from the Democratic Party that has seen the light like Tulsi Gabbard or RFK jr
“I think you will find Trump will not be running in 4 years”
Again, Jezbo, you really need to work on that reading comprehension!
Here’s a clue for you – I didn’t say anything about Trump running again in 4 years!
I thought you lot believed that if Trump won this would turn out to have been the last ever election and he’d be dictator for life.
Allow me to suggest that you address Poo Fash as “you people” rather than “you lot”, and then stand back and watch the development of they/them’s hilarious woke tantrum.
Like most of what you peopel think, that is completely wrong.
Want to try again?
Revenge of the incels.
They’ll snap out of it when they realize that being MAGA is not good for your sex life. Unless you’re Matt Gaetz or Pete Hegseth I suppose….
Where’s the connection ?
Think harder, Tone, you’ll get there eventually!
The Democrats Cult are now promising sex for votes are they? Is that to be the new policy to win back black and Hispanic males that have gone red?
You may wish to work on your reading comprehension, Jezza!!!
I think that the reason we’re seeing people talk about “barstool conservatives” at all – even though by definition the bloc lacks strong ideological commitments, and under normal circumstances would be a political nonfaction – is that the woke Democrats have just done such a thorough job of alienating young men – normal young men who look up to tough people, and have a sense of humor, and don’t want to obsess about race and sex and victimhood status all the time.
I’ve written about it before – for instance in this American Thinker article a week after the election entitled “Identity Politics Blows Up in the Democrats Face.”
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/identity-politics-blows-up-in-the
Even among Hispanic and Black men, whom Democrats used to take for granted, Trump/Vance have made record gains, just because everyone is so fed up with the Dems and their hysterical victimhood narratives.
Just think of Joe Biden saying, over and over, “I want to be inclusive, so I am only considering black women for this position.” First VP, then Supreme Court, and so on. And then there are all his imitators further down the hierarchy. Sooner or later, if you’re part of the 90% of the population that’s white OR male, then you realize these people don’t have a place for you in the version of America they’re trying to build.
The “barstool conservatives” are just normalcy trying to preserve its own existence.
I think of them as small and medium-sized business owners, managers or employees in such businesses as opposed to corporate liberals. My impression is that those remaining Democrat voters are either graduate women 25-55 years old or male employees of large corporations who have all gone to the same liberal colleges- prestigious ones too.
”I viewed the rise of ‘Barstool Conservatism’ with alarm. And rightly so.”
That’s funny.
“I viewed the rise of ‘Barstool Conservatism’ with alarm. And I found out that I agree with me.”
I strongly suspect that Walther is a metrosexual, a direct descendent of the Continental cheese-eating surrender monkey. In evolutionary biology such males are known as Sneaky Fu—ers because their strategy is to emulate female ways so as to be non-threatening to them. They are sly seducers, unlike the bar stool brutes, who wouldn’t be caught dead with a Merlot in their mitts.
The Sneaky Fu—ers’ politics follows from this.
Thank you Malcolm Kyeyune on this article on the demographics of the men who delivered victory to Trump and who left the Democrats because of their move to wokery and activism. The Democratic Party I remember from fifty years ago living in the US was full of barstool conservatives whose values were local as well as ideological and voted accordingly. It is difficult to see how they can be won back from the Republican Party as the Democrats have moved ideologically to the left. It is also a good summary of the difficulties the Democrats face at a local level.
Yes, thanks Malcolm. They are just “normal American men”. I feel quite comforted that they are still out there.
I think that what tends towards keeping ‘barstool’ people relatively sane is the fact that they won’t have been sheep-dipped in lefty groupthink at some institution of so-called ‘higher education’. Hugely ironic really. They’ve not been so affected by our 20/21st century Western Madness of Intelligentsias.
Well put. The problem for the Democrats, of course, is they need this stuff explained to them in first place.
As for Joe Rogan… how many of his detractors have ever sat through one of his podcasts. The bloke is astonishingly open-minded. Maybe that, for the left, is the problem.
Well, he is certainly open minded about psychedelic drugs.
I disagree with the author on one thing. I don’t think Trumpism will survive Trump. After Trump is gone, there will just be a bunch of cardboard-cutout wannabes.
If it is true that “normal American men” have no problem with , have no problem with pornography or drug use, this does not speak highly of them.
I note there are still a lot of ppl below who use the old spelling for “democrats” – its “dem rats” now, don’tcha know. Srsly there is a place in the USA for a political party that wants the sweet spot of equality higher than the equivalent mark for individual freedom. Demrats are not this party. They are very much back in their Robert E Lee/KKK phase from the mid 19th century. They are obsessed with skin tone as causative of character and see sexual deviance as a positive lifestyle. They support extremists in Hamas, into FGM and God knows what else. Their corruption knows no limits – Hunter Biden ffs! – Whoopsie Goldbags charging $millions to “campaign” for the rats when if she actually believed in socialism (democratic or otherwise) surely she’d wave her fees?Also once a political movement forms a strategic alliance with the Mara Salvatrucha then its really game over for them. (As i think it was for Reagan with Iran/Contra/Cocaine) Hopefully as with the UK labour party there must be enough ppl in these groups that believe in the rule of law and one nation, under God or Gods, with liberty and justice for all? Now is their time to rise up before its too late. The likes of biden, harris and obama shame their own party and anyone who believes in fairness and the rule of law. I hold no candle for Trump BUT these clowns make him look like the Dalai Lama.
Ah, yes, voting as “punishment.”