Dudes abide

Organizer Ross Morales Rocketto on his goals with White Dudes for Harris, and what it means to build a tent big enough to include the men Democrats have left to the right for decades.

Ross Morales Rocketto is a veteran organizer, campaign manager, co-founder of Run for Something, and a white dude from Texas. And this week he put all of that together as the lead organizer of White Dudes for Harris — the latest and perhaps most surprising in a series of identity-group-focused fundraising calls aimed at building and bolstering support for Kamala Harris and the reenergized Democratic campaign, and maybe the beginnings of righting a series of historical missteps by the Democratic Party in its approach to men.

With a huge range of mostly white male star power — from actors Jeff Bridges and Mark Hamill to vice-presidential contenders Pete Buttigieg and Tim Walz to political veterans like Mitch Landrieu and Steny Hoyer —  the call brought together some 200,000 attendees; what actor Brad Whitford called a “rainbow of beige” for a surprisingly touching (and near three-and-a-half hour) discussion of men’s roles and responsibilities in American political life that raised some $4 million on behalf of the Harris campaign.

Morales Rocketto recognizes that bringing together white men to act politically typically strikes a disturbing note for Americans, especially progressives. As he put it on the call, “Across American history when white men organize, it's often been with pointy hats on.” But as so many people we’ve talked to this year in this newsletter have told us, there’s a very real crisis facing American men, with roots in the loss of economic opportunity under neoliberalism, and in a societal inability to manage the impact of social change. But whatever the underlying cause, Democrats have largely left the process of addressing the emotional fallout of that crisis to the right, with disastrous results. And thus far, nobody’s come up with a great progressive story for men — primarily white men — to what’s on offer by the authoritarian right. And it’s felt dangerous to even try.

The path out of that crisis may not be clear, but the short-term goal is: in an election decided by slim margins in states with a whole lot of white dudes, to get enough of them — especially those who don’t feel seen by the Democrats, may not like Donald Trump, but haven’t felt like they’ve had a real home in either party — to vote for Kamala Harris.

We caught up with Ross Morales Rocketto to talk about the new wave of Democratic identity politics, the promise and pitfalls of organizing white guys, what it really means to build a big-tent movement, what place the language of “traditional” masculinity and notions that men should be “providers and protectors” has in the Democratic future, and just how significant it is to have hundreds of thousands of white men come together at this stage to support the first Black woman, the first South Asian woman — the first woman president.

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The first question is the obvious one. What does it mean to organize white men today? Why is it important?

The left is a really broad tent, but it has been ignoring white men for way too long. We've just completely ceded them not even only to the right, but to the MAGA right. And the way I think about the MAGA right is as sort of a shorthand for what's been going on in the Republican Party for years now. 

I think that includes the Tea Party, for example. And I think it goes even further back. It wasn't as organized, but the Reagan strategist, Lee Atwater. He recorded tapes with an academic and talked about the Southern strategy. And what he said is that they traded using the N-word for all these other dog whistles, like low taxes and welfare queens and shit like that.

And so I think that this sort of weaponization of identity politics has been happening in American history for a long time now, at the very least since the late 1970s. I think the opportunity that exists right now is because we've just been feeding white men to the Republican Party and honestly to the fringes of the Republican Party for so long, there are a bunch of white dudes out there who are just like, "I don't see myself in this, but these are the only people who are talking to me. These are the only people who seem to want my support." 

So we wanted to do the call because we wanted to present other options to those folks. And not everyone's going to be interested. We're not going to get everybody. We're not going to convince every Trump supporter to come over. That's not the point. 

The point is we need to start being in conversation and talking to these folks because a lot of them don't actually like Donald Trump that much. But they don't feel like they have another option. 

We've been talking to a lot of people in the newsletter, people like Arlie Hochschild, about these deep interviews she’s done in eastern Kentucky, Vivek Murthy, Chris Murphy. And they’ve all talked about this crisis of loneliness, this lack of belonging for men, lack of direction for young men. And it has a lot to do with the reduced role of labor in American life, with real material conditions that have left men's options very limited. Do you see it in that context too?