How should the women who didn’t vote for Trump go about their lives, knowing that a majority of Americans voted not just against their immediate health and well-being, but for a candidate who actively sidelined and maligned people like them? After months and months of watching Donald Trump and his band of bros belittle Kamala Harris and all women generally—the childless, the childbearing, and the post-childbearing—55 percent of male voters supported him, according to CNN’s exit polls. So did 45 percent of female voters. What are the other women—those who feel that they’re living in a nation that is hostile to their very existence—to do?

The answer is something different from what they did the last time.

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s loss sent thousands of women into the streets of Washington, D.C., with their signs and their pussy hats, many assumed that the sexism Clinton had experienced was a bug of the Trump era. That if women banded together, expanded their notion of feminism to include experiences across race and class, and fought back, they could change things.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

And in some ways, they did. That collective strength laid the foundation for the #MeToo movement in 2017. More women ran for office, and won, in the 2018 midterms than ever before. But the ground has shifted in the intervening years.

Sexism, it turned out, was not a bug but a feature of the Trump years. Misogyny certainly appears to come naturally to Trump, but it was strategically amplified—through surrogates and messaging—to attract supporters, particularly younger men of all races. Elon Musk’s political-action committee even put out an ad referring to Harris as “a big ole C-word”—and Communist was only one of its intended meanings. Trump has always been good at exploiting the ugliest aspects of America, and the growing isolation and rightward drift of young men was a perfect target.

American men are lonely—in 2021, 15 percent were likely to say they had no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. They are also more likely to not be in a relationship: In 2022, six in 10 men under 30 were single. In a 2023 survey of men ages 18 to 45, a majority agreed with the statement “No one really knows me.” Many find solace online, where they consume their news on Reddit and X and soak up content from influencers such as Andrew Tate, Adin Ross, and Joe Rogan. The content, like its creators, is often blatantly misogynistic.

Many of these young men apparently see Trump—with his microphone-fellating pantomime and his crowds chanting the word bitch—as presidential. He spoke to young men, in a voice they recognized. More than half of men ages 18 to 29 voted for him.

But Trump didn’t just pick up support from young men; he picked up support from almost every group. For many older white men, and the many, many Latino men who broke for Trump—well, the misogyny may have seemed macho. And what about his female supporters? Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president, wrote in 1970 that “women in America are much more brainwashed and content with their roles as second-class citizens than Blacks ever were.” This remains true today. No matter the number of marches women hold or memes they post online about sisterhood, many women are unswayed: 53 percent of white women (and a growing percentage of Latinas) voted for Trump. Women can enforce patriarchy just as well as men, as the “trad wives” on the internet have demonstrated.

Many had hoped that as president, Harris would have reached across not just the political aisle, but the gender divide. In her concession speech yesterday, she listed women’s rights as one cause among many, speaking of the need for women to “have the freedom to make decisions about their own body,” for schools to be safe from gun violence, “for the rule of law, for equal justice.”

No such repair will happen under a second Trump administration, for the obvious reason that division benefits him. Misogyny helps disempowered men feel empowered. After Trump’s victory, the right-wing activist Nick Fuentes tweeted: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” It really is a man’s world now.

The situation isn’t hopeless, but it may require new tactics. The time for thumping on our chests and railing against the patriarchy might be past. The protests that felt so powerful in 2016 may have backfired to some extent, by causing the people women most needed to listen to their message to tune them out instead. But women can’t simply retreat, either—their lives and futures depend on it.  

The answer is engagement: soft diplomacy in everyday life. “We will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts, and in the public square,” Harris said in her speech. But “we will also wage it in quieter ways.”

Start easy: Thank the men in your life who supported Harris; thank them for trusting and respecting women and believing that they can lead. It seems small, but millions of men apparently don’t feel that way, so let’s encourage the ones who do.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

For mothers and aunties of young men and boys: You may not be able to control what they are reading on the internet, but you can combat it, through conversation and counterprogramming.

And most important, women who voted against Trump should talk honestly with the men in their lives—their cousins and fathers and colleagues and friends—who voted the other way. Talk to them about women’s lives and values. Better yet, enlist other men to help you. One reason fewer Black men drifted toward Trump than Latino men is because, in the months leading up to the election, on social media and in private conversations and at church, many Black people talked honestly about the importance of valuing women. They addressed voters’ hesitance about female leadership directly, by discussing the long history of excellent Black female leaders. Minds can be molded by the internet and its algorithms, yes, but minds can be changed by conversations as well. As Harris reminded everyone, “You have power.”

Despite what many say, the modern woman doesn’t need a man. But women’s lives can certainly be improved by men not hating them.

After the last time Donald Trump won the presidency, in 2016, The New York Times confronted its readers with a vivid illustration of how out of touch most of them were with their fellow Americans. In a series of maps, the newspaper color-coded the United States by TV-viewing preferences, highlighting which parts of the country preferred Game of Thrones (cities) and which ones preferred American Dad! (rural areas). The starkest factoid: Trumpland’s favorite TV show was Duck Dynasty, a hunting-themed reality series that many liberals had never seen one second of.

The Times feature was just one of many pieces of media meant to serve as a wake-up call to blue America, bemoaning how the nation had split into silos. Pundits agreed that restoring unity—and curbing Trump-era extremism—would require voters to get out of their comfort zones in order to understand, connect with, and persuade the other side.

Eight years later, with Trump taking the White House in part by bringing young people to the right, it may seem that those calls were simply never heeded: that liberal America instead drew itself further inward and is now facing the fallout. But that’s not quite right. Trump’s first term was marked by concerted cultural efforts that spread “resistance” ideology into conservative enclaves. Hollywood’s endorsement of the #MeToo movement rippled into everyday workplaces; calls for racial justice were turned into prime-time football spectacles; enormously popular children’s movies and blockbusters made the case for multiculturalism. These were attempts on the left to do what it knew how to do best—influence whatever remained of “the mainstream.” But the very shape of culture was changing, and it’s now quite clear that only one side knows what to do about that.

Arguably the key architect of this ongoing political era was Andrew Breitbart, the conservative pundit—and compatriot of Trumpism’s most cunning culture warrior, Steve Bannon—who founded a series of online publications in the 2000s and died in 2012. The so-called Breitbart Doctrine stated that “politics is downstream from culture”—that is, the ideas conveyed by popular entertainment shapes consumers’ worldviews. This proposition called for conservatives to build a shadow Hollywood that tells conservative stories and raises up conservative stars (Duck Dynasty’s un-P.C. patriarch, Phil Robertson, won an award named for Breitbart in 2015). In the long run, though, the doctrine’s biggest impact has been encouraging the right to get creative with online culture.

Social media’s role in the 2016 election—helping bundle a variety of grievances into one exciting, factually pliant narrative of elites oppressing regular Americans—has been highly publicized. What’s less talked about is that it triggered a strangely regressive counteroffensive. Democrats, of course, made memes and organized online during Trump’s first term, but they also channeled energy into reforming social media through content moderation and regulatory efforts. These efforts were prudent, and notionally bipartisan. But while Democrats seemed to yearn to bring back a less anarchic paradigm, Republicans railed against perceived liberal bias in tech—meaning they wanted, in effect, an even better mouthpiece. As media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan have long argued, new communication formats change the way a society thinks of—and speaks to—itself. By all rights, an effective political movement should prioritize harnessing such changes, not reversing them.

In the 2020s, as many Democratic voters and politicians stepped back a bit from partisan warfare, the gears of culture were being refitted yet again. The old social-media platforms had been somewhat defanged, but action was happening on emerging platforms like TikTok, livestreams, and podcasts. These hypnotizing microforms—which captured most of young America, but also cut inroads across demographics—made old cultural fault lines, such as A&E versus HBO, look quaint. Conservative ideas popped up in a flurry of new fads and scenes: the manosphere, the tradwives, anti-woke comedians playing to cryptocurrency conferences. Livestreamers saw an influx of money from right-leaning interests (and, in some cases, Russian ones). When it came time for Trump to mount his comeback campaign, he could plug into a booming world of sympathetic influencers with enormous followings.

[Read: Trump’s red-pill podcast tour]

By contrast, Joe Biden’s signature effort in regard to TikTok was his administration’s support for banning it. When Kamala Harris became the nominee, she did unleash a wave of coconut-themed memes that, more than anything, excited fans of the pop stars whose songs were in the background. Late in her brief campaign, she and her surrogates also made some forays into popular podcasts. But in any analysis, these were marginal efforts compared with the old-school influence methods her campaign relied on: ad campaigns, door-knocking, and rallies headlined by mainstream celebs.

Now that she has lost, one of the many what-ifs to argue over is this: What if Harris had tried to court the millions of subscribers to Joe Rogan’s bro-beloved podcast? Trump and J. D. Vance each did their own three-hour conversation with Rogan. The host wanted to talk with Harris, but he and the campaign couldn’t agree on the logistical details: Harris’s camp had wanted Rogan to travel to her from his Austin studio, and to chat for only an hour. These were reasonable requests when judged by the standards of a traditional politician at the height of campaign season, but they were also a sign of the Harris side’s inability or unwillingness to play by the rules of the new media. The refusal may have also been a strategic move to avoid the possibility of making a gaffe on mic—but given who ended up winning the election, this, too, seems like an antiquated concern.

After all, the hottest commodity of today’s online cultural ecosystem is open conflict. Chitchat on podcasts and livestreams is transfixing because it’s unruly, argumentative, and unafraid of causing offense. (Note how videos of dozens of voters engaged in free-for-all debates, produced by the media company Jubilee, took off this election cycle). Theoretically, it’s not hard to infiltrate the new conservative information environment: Rogan tried to talk to Harris, and the similarly influential podcaster Theo Von booked Bernie Sanders. But most Democratic surrogates seem stuck on a 20th-century performance style, defined by slick sound bites or soaring, cinematic monologues. They seem reluctant to do what these new formats require, which is fight.

One example came when Rogan recently interviewed John Fetterman, the senator from Pennsylvania whose entire brand is allegedly being no-nonsense. Rogan presented him with the conspiracy theory that Democrats were importing undocumented immigrants to swing states, and planning to give them amnesty, in order to expand their voter pool. Fetterman could have debunked that idea in any number of ways, and forcefully. Instead he did what politicians have long been trained to do in contentious interviews: find a point of agreement—“you know, immigration is always going to be a tough issue in this nation”—and change the subject. Rogan, and probably many of his listeners, took this gauziness as evidence that the conspiracy theory was right. The day before Rogan endorsed Trump, the podcaster posted the clip of the exchange with the note “I think everyone should understand exactly what is happening.”

Harris wouldn’t have won just by going on a few more podcasts—but if more Democrats had spent more of the past four years in the mix, figuring out how to spar, complicating the right’s narratives about inflation and immigration, finding ways to redirect attention toward their own agenda, who knows? This new ecosystem is now so visible—and so obviously connected to the rightward shift among young people that helped reelect Trump—that to label it alternative seems ridiculous. Still, the temptation to ignore it, for people who are less than enchanted with Trumpism, will only grow under the new administration. Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.