Americans have a manhood problem. One of the hoary cliches of our politics is that the Democrats are the Mommy party and the Republicans, the Daddy. Today, however, the Republicans are the Master Party, defined by a man who radiates dominance, cruelty, unchecked impulse. Donald Trump is on the cusp of regaining the Presidency not despite, but because of, the kind of manhood he incarnates. Byron Donalds of Florida, Trump‘s most important Black supporter, recently explained that Black men are gravitating to Trump because he’s “a hustler” who “just says what he thinks.” A Gallup poll found that while voters consider Joe Biden far more likable and more empathetic than his Republican rival, Trump dominated on one attribute: “is a strong and decisive leader.”
Enter the grifter
Donald Trump’s combative machismo is precisely what a great many working-class men are looking for right now. Young men fill right-wing paramilitary organizations like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Two Percenters. Trump himself has greatly expanded the GOP gender gap and has now begun to attract serious support among Black and Hispanic men. And yet, as Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment points out, working-class American men “are much more likely to be politically apathetic” than they are to be active authoritarians. “They look for belonging, purpose, and advice, and find a mix of grifters, political hacks and violent extremists who lead them down an ugly road.” That’s the manhood problem.
Donald Trump has a special genius for intuiting the dark, unspoken things that people want and need. He understands that the era when American men looked to Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart–men who protected, sacrificed, stood tall in the saddle–is over. That old role has been inherited by angry loudmouths like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan (and Elon Musk, for that matter). And the reason for that is not simply that life has grown coarse but that men, and especially men without college degrees, can no longer count on the ancient roles that long defined masculinity. The jobs that required masculine strength have given way to jobs that depend on feminine sociability. A college education is the passport to success, but women are now far more likely than men to graduate from college. Men without solid jobs have trouble finding marriage partners; and under-employed and unmarried men have a lot less sex than married and fully employed men do. Wouldn’t you be mad?
There are two very different ways of thinking about our manhood problem, just as there are two very different ways of thinking about the illiberalism problem of which it is a part. One is to persuade, or somehow compel, people to stop behaving in bad ways. We have to put an end to “toxic masculinity.” We have to stop glorifying violence, gunplay and football. We need to show boys that it’s okay to try out for the school play, or read books. We need to hold up more positive role models like. . .Tom Hanks. Or Sweden.
Blah blah blah. As Richard Reeves observed in his 2022 book Of Boys and Men, accusing reckless teenage boys of the vague and vogue crime of “toxic masculinity”--an expression virtually unknown in public discourse until Donald Trump first ran for president–is likely to ”send them to the online manosphere,” where Andrew Tate will reassure them that the real problem is rampant feminism and its liberal enablers. The more witting among them might ask whether his accusers even believe in non-toxic masculinity. It’s only a modest caricature to say that blue-state masculinity is predicated on the principles that all differences between the sexes are cultural, gender is fluid, patriarchy is oppressive, no means don’t even think about it. The red-state and blue-state versions feel like parodies of one another. Reeves argues that the attack on toxic masculinity feels very much like an attack on masculinity itself.
Men need virtuous purpose
The other approach is to ask, as both Kleinfeld and Reeves do, how we can reduce the demand for illiberalism and violence by helping working-class men find a place in an increasingly feminized society. (Kleinfeld’s essay is titled, with admirable economy, “To Save Democracy, Help Men.”) This is a very distinctive kind of question. We often wonder whether the cause of our illiberal tilt is economic or cultural--a loss of financial security and hope for the future, or a wrenching change in identity, demography and values. The problem of manhood lies at the intersection of these two domains, for working-class men have lost both economic standing and social status. (And even physical status: Reeves tells us that while in 1985 the average young man could grip your hand with thirty pounds more pressure than a woman, today grip strength is nearly equal. Woman rises, man falls.)
Reeves is a think-tank guy, and his idea of an answer to a problem is a policy. He proposes “a massive investment in male-friendly vocational education and training,” a concerted effort to bring men into what are now the largely female employment sectors of education, healthcare and administration, paternal paid leave to encourage men to spend more time in child-rearing.
Those seem like worthwhile ideas. But as Kleinfeld points out, men have been leading Sweden and Germany into very dark corners though neither country has anything like the class stratification of the U.S. Identity is not simply a dependent variable of economic standing. Men went to matter–as men. If that need is not satisfied by work, it has to be satisfied elsewhere. There must be alternatives to the manosphere.
The Times’ columnist David French, who seems to specialize in the problems of men, once wrote that “American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose.” Everyone, of course, needs virtuous purpose in order to lead a full life, but American working-class men have lost so many traditional sources of selfless action that they have become especially vulnerable to the call of the selfish jerk. Where, then, do you find virtuous purpose? In volunteer work, for example, or in programs of national service. Organizations like Big Brothers can do every bit as much for the big brother as for the little one.
Volunteerism no doubt sounds like a naive prescription in a world hellbent on self-aggrandizement. But the idea of “service,” and its emotional satisfaction, pervaded American life so long as the mainline Protestant churches flourished, which is to say until a generation or two ago. I am a lucky person who has found great fulfillment in work and family and friends, and yet I have been a proselytizer on behalf of service since I began tutoring in New York’s public schools more than a decade ago. People need to feel needed; and helping those who need you is a source of great joy. Is it really impossible to restore the idea that a man is not only a strong, stoical creature who can throw a football through a tire but one who seeks opportunities to serve others?
And we need to retire “toxic masculinity.” It is, I admit, the perfect two-word description of Donald Trump, but it’s become a stigma that he and his bravos wear with pride. A real man, as the Romans could have told us, knows how to control his temper.