The skid steer’s hydraulic breaker rose up toward the sky, then plunged into the street below, rupturing the concrete and the yellow paint overlaying it. The jackhammer’s staccato thundered over the din of passing traffic. It was a Tuesday morning in March, and people walking by covered their ears. Others took out their phones to capture the destruction. The bright-yellow paint, now fragmented into a growing pile of concrete, had spelled out the words Black Lives Matter over two blocks on 16th Street Northwest, about a quarter mile from the White House.

The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted.

Many believed that it would become a permanent fixture in the district, and originally, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that it would be, so it could serve as a “gathering place for reflection, planning and action, as we work toward a more perfect union.” But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” D.C. was already facing funding uncertainty and has been shaken by layoffs of federal workers in the thousands. Mayor Bowser decided that fighting to preserve the mural was not a battle worth having.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X.

I made my way to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday, the day after construction crews began removing the mural. I have spent the past several years writing about our collective relationships to monuments and memorials that tell the story of American history. I have watched statues being erected, and I have watched others taken down. In both the United States and abroad, I have wrestled with whether monuments are meant to perform a shallow contrition or honestly account for historical traumas. Part of what I have come to understand is that such iconography can rarely be disentangled from its social and political ecosystem. Symbols are not just symbols. They reflect the stories that people tell. Those stories shape the narratives people carry about where they come from and where they’re going. And those narratives shape public policy that materially affects people’s lives.

The removal of the mural is not the same as a change in policy, but it is happening in tandem with many policy changes, and is a reflection of the same shift in priorities. It is part of a movement that is removing Black people from positions of power by dismissing them as diversity hires, rescinding orders that ensure equal opportunity in government contracts, stripping federal funding from schools that teach full and honest Black history, and suing companies that attempt to diversify their workforce. This goes far beyond an attack on DEI; my colleague Adam Serwer calls it the Great Resegregation:

What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy.

Near the construction site, I walked up to one of the workers holding a stop sign near an intersection. Antonio (he asked me to use only his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters) wore a highlighter-yellow vest, his dreadlocks falling down his back from beneath his white hard hat. He told me he lives in Southeast D.C. and remembered feeling a sense of pride when the mural was painted. When he found out that he would be part of the team removing it, he asked not to be behind the wheel of any of the machines. “I just told them I don’t want a part in touching it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at the jackhammer pummeling the concrete on the other side of the street. “It was a memorial for the culture, and now I feel like something is being stripped from the culture.”

On the other side of the street was a woman in colorful sneakers and a green beanie. Nadine Seiler stood alone holding up a large cloth sign above her head that read Black Lives Matter Trump Can’t Erase Us.

“The reason that this is happening is that people want to ‘make America great again,’” she told me. “But the same people who want to ‘make America great again’ don’t want white children to know how America became great in the first place”—by “exploiting people who are not white.”

“They’re trying to erase everything,” she said.

Seiler doesn’t blame Mayor Bowser for removing the statue: “She has been put in a difficult position, because ultimately she’s going to lose anyway.” She blames President Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people themselves who are standing by and allowing democracy to erode all around them.

While I was there, Seiler was the only person I saw rallying against the removal of the mural. She came to the United States from Trinidad 37 years ago, and has become something of a full-time protester. She has history with the Black Lives Matter Plaza: She was among the activists in 2020 who hung hundreds of signs affirming Black lives and inveighing against Trump along the fence that surrounds the White House. On multiple occasions, people came and tore the signs down, so for three weeks Seiler “lived on Black Lives Matter Plaza” to protect them. She told me she’s since become the custodian of those signs, and holds many in storage.

I told Seiler I was surprised that more people weren’t there protesting. She said that she wasn’t surprised, but she was disheartened. It was reflective, she said, of the tepid resistance Americans have put up to the new administration more broadly. She’s attended protests over the past several weeks focused on some of Trump’s earliest executive actions: the dismantling of USAID and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization; the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers; the blanket access the president has given Elon Musk and his DOGE team to sensitive and classified information; the assault on the rights of trans people; the effort to end birthright citizenship; the pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists; and more. At those protests, she told me, she’d seen maybe 100 or 200 people. This is wholly inadequate given the gravity of what is happening, she said: “There should be thousands of people in the streets. There should be millions of people in the streets.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: How the woke right replaced the woke left]

Someone drove by, slowed down, and took a picture of Seiler’s sign before driving off. “We’re not rising up,” she continued. In many other countries, she said, there has been more robust resistance to the rise of authoritarianism. “We’re just sitting here and taking it without barely any pushback.” She added, “It’s very disappointing to me, because I’m an import, and I was sold on American democracy, and American exceptionalism, and American checks and balances”—she lowered her sign and folded it up under her arm—“and we are seeing that all of this is nothing. It’s all a farce.”

Seiler, despite having gotten citizenship two decades ago, doesn’t think that it will protect her if the Trump administration starts going after dissenters. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who led protests against Israel at Columbia University and is now in immigration detention, has only reinforced a sense that her days are numbered. “I feel eventually they’ll find a way to come at me,” she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes.

Behind us, the pulverizing of concrete continued. Clouds of dust rose up and surrounded the machines that were cracking the street open. It will take several weeks of work for the mural to be completely destroyed and paved over again. I looked down at the fragments of letters in front of me. The first word they chose to remove was Matter.

Chances are low that Joe Rogan will save your soul—or your party. Since Donald Trump’s election victory, countless Democrats have lamented their party’s losses among men, and young men, in particular. One refrain has been a yearning for a “Rogan of the left” who might woo back all the dudes who have migrated to MAGA. If the wishfulness is misplaced, the underlying problem is real: Trump carried men by roughly 12 points in November, including 57 percent of men under 30..

I recently spoke with Democrats across different levels of leadership to see how they were trying to address this electorally lethal gender gap. Two theories for how to win back men, I found, are bubbling up. One is to improve the party’s cultural appeal to men, embracing rather than scolding masculinity. The other is to focus on more traditional messaging about the economy, on the assumption that if Democrats build an agenda for blue-collar America, the guys will follow.

These approaches are not necessarily in conflict, but they each present a challenge for the modern Democratic Party. And as pundits and consultants peddle their rival solutions, they highlight another risk: Even if Democrats can settle on a message, will voters believe they really mean it?

[Jonathan Chait: Democrats show why they lost]

Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is one of many Democrats who believe that the party has to make a serious, sustained outreach effort to connect with men. What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss, a former Marine, told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.”

What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.”

Even as he disavowed the idea that solving the guy problem should involve some promotion of testosterone-laced pandering, Auchincloss suggested that the party ought to find its way to a more positive, inspirational message. “We need to embrace a culture of heroism, not a culture of victimhood. Young men need models for their ambition,” he said.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut also notes liberal squeamishness about masculine themes; he says the party is losing male voters in part because even talking about the need to improve the lives of men could run afoul of what he calls the “word police” on the left. Murphy told me, “There’s a worry that when you start talking about gender differences and masculinity, that you’re going to very quickly get in trouble.” The Democratic Party, he thinks, has not been purposeful enough in opening up a conversation with men in general and young men specifically. “There is a reluctance inside the progressive movement to squarely acknowledge gender differences, and that has really put us on the back foot.”

For Murphy, the right message might come from an earlier era—a notion that could seem antithetical to the very idea of progressivism. “We cannot and shouldn’t abandon some of the traditional ways that men find value and meaning: in providing protection, in taking high levels of risk, in taking pride in physical work,” he told me. “There’s a lot of worry that all of those traditional male characteristics are somehow illegitimate.”

So far, the GOP seems to be doing a far more effective job of engaging male voters in ways that reflect the reality of today’s popular culture. Trump has embraced UFC’s Dana White, and has made grand entrances at MMA fights. (Years before he ran for president, Trump would appear at pro-wrestling events, and he is a member of the WWE hall of fame.) “We have to go where people are consuming culture and sports and entertainment,” Auchincloss told me, “and talk about issues of the day in a way that is coded for political orientation but that is more broadly accessible and interesting.”

Last fall, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona tried this Go where the men are concept. “We should do anything to reach out to voters,” he told me. “And that means men.” Gallego argues that Democrats have been too hesitant to directly address men’s everyday reality, and that this is a grave mistake. “Black, Latino, and white men are not doing well in this country. They’re not obtaining college degrees,” Gallego said. “If we were to look at the numbers and just take out the gender, we would say, Wow, that group of Americans needs some attention. But all of a sudden, if you add the little m next to that, it’s somehow something that we shouldn’t be worried about—and I reject that.”

Gallego’s Senate-campaign stops included boxing gyms, soccer watch parties, and Mexican rodeos. Trump won the state at the presidential level by more than five percentage points, but Gallego defeated his Republican challenger, Kari Lake, in the Senate battle with a 2.4 percent margin. “I think the voters, the male voters, understood that I understood them and what they were going through,” he said.

The conundrum for Democrats that Murphy identifies is that they are ill-equipped to compete with Republicans for a jacked-up version of manhood because doing so would cut against the interests and rights of a crucial bloc of their coalition: women. “Now the right is offering a really irresponsible antidote, which is to just roll all the progress back and return to an era in which men were dominant politically and economically,” Murphy said. But as cartoonish as MAGA hypermasculinity is, it sends out a signal that “matters to a lot of men—that only the right really cares about the way in which they’re feeling pretty shitty.”

No one I spoke with suggested that the Democratic Party would (or should) ever abandon its positions on women’s rights. “I don’t think you have to move away from anything to be inclusive of other things,” Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina told me. One possible Democratic plan, so far as I could discern it, was to keep expanding the parameters of acceptable discourse and opinions, rather than box themselves in. Clyburn said he was surprised to see so many young men break for Trump in November. He believes that his party has gotten itself into a quagmire. “We’ve set ourselves up for this messaging war that we’re losing,” Clyburn told me. “In the last election,” he said, “sound bites that developed around gender inequity caused serious problems. And they’re still causing problems.”

[Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars]

Or maybe sound bites are not the problem.

Last fall, the Democratic strategist James Carville was “certain” that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump. If Carville had adhered to his own maxim—It’s the economy, stupid—he might have seen Trump’s victory coming. One lesson of 2024, some of the elected officials I spoke with said, was that Democratic power brokers were woefully oblivious of the economic struggles of working-class Americans. They also suggested that the project of winning back the working class and the project of winning back men were one and the same.

Voters, the admittedly simple theory goes, will support the candidate and party that they believe will improve their daily lives. The MAGA movement has done a keen job of tapping into the discontent and resentment that many men feel over declining job prospects. Democrats need to compete by offering a material path out of despair.  

“The young men that I’m talking to are not in love with politics, period,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia told me. “They want their lives to work. And it’s important that people feel you walking with them and hearing them.” Warnock was adamant that, contrary to certain media narratives, Trump did not triumph in a landslide victory. “He won by the margin of people’s disengagement, because they feel the ways in which the democracy is becoming increasingly undemocratic,” he said. “And my job is not for them to hear my voice; it is to give the people their voice.”

The crucial way to reengage disaffected men, multiple Democrats told me, is to champion an economy that “works like Legos, not Monopoly,” as Auchincloss put it. “An economy where we are building more technical vocational high schools, and we are celebrating the craftsmanship of the trades so that young men have a sense of autonomy and being a provider.” Murphy said that his party should aim to build the sort of middle-class prosperity that enables one breadwinner to support a family of four, allowing one parent to choose to be a homemaker.

But if Democrats believe that Lego economic policies could be popular, they also know that many voters associate the party with government handouts and top-down programs, which, on the whole, are not very popular. This is something the MAGA movement has figured out, painting all Democrats as out-of-touch, coastal elites.

For Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, the party’s primary political problem is undoubtedly class—which is not something that a change of messaging from “the consultant-industrial complex” can fix, she told me. Rather, authenticity is the only way to make true connections. Voters don’t want to be humored, she believes; they want to be heard. “People who are trying to signal some kind of an alignment with the working class are just undermining themselves,” she said. “The donor class needs to pay more attention to how rooted a candidate is in their community, and less about whether or not a candidate ticks every ideological or policy box.”

She stressed the importance of people knowing that their representatives “are actually living in the same reality” as they are—and that a white-collar professional is not always the best fit. She believes that people want to see themselves in their representatives. “There are so many nonpolitical ways to communicate your values that haven’t been respected or exercised,” she told me. Gluesenkamp Perez has gained a national profile for the way she aims to speak for the sort of blue-collar America that many Democrats realize they’ve become disconnected from. She and her husband own an auto repair shop in the Pacific Northwest, and she won reelection in a Republican district that’s supported Trump in the past three elections. “Being able to make a clutch last for 500,000 miles—that’s really cool to a lot of people,” she told me.

“I think about all the ways that I’ve seen this sort of unconscious disrespect for people in the trades,” she said. “I’ll hear people say, ‘Well, you know, my dad was just a janitor, and I’m the first person in my family to go to college,’ and I’m like, What does that sound like to everyone in the room who didn’t go to college? That you think you’re better than them.”

What became clear from my conversations was that Democrats want to get back to eye level with their potential voters, particularly men. But, as Clyburn and others acknowledged, the party’s progressive social agenda can be an obstacle to its moderate wing. At her town halls, Gluesenkamp Perez told me, she has found her constituents especially fired up over the rules about trans women in sports—an issue that Trump has inflamed.

“What I saw was that those people were mostly people that had been driving their girls to sports practice for 12 years, and their kids’ best shot at going to college was a scholarship,” she told me. “This was an argument about resource access, not about morality.” Gluesenkamp Perez has sometimes crossed over to side with the GOP, but she recently voted against Republican-sponsored legislation to keep transgender women and girls out of school sports.

She also told me that having a real values discussion is impossible until voters feel respected, and that a candidate is listening to them. A genuine curiosity about the lives of the people who send you to Congress is not a mere nicety but an essential quality for Democrats who seem remote to the people they represent. “A lot of my colleagues just go out there and try to explain stuff to people all the time,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “A lot of us don’t really have confidence that the spreadsheets they’re pointing to are the full picture.”

Just being real could help Democrats appeal to voters of all stripes, but they have to hope that it will resonate with disaffected men—particularly young men—who may have turned toward Trump. Democrats may not have to bend their values completely out of shape to suit the political environment, but they can’t afford to write anyone off.