The Dangerous Politics of Angry Men

Don't forget the gender dimension of right-wing anti-liberalism

An angry man, screaming (Stock/David Trood/Getty Images)

Those of us who write about the rise of the anti-liberal right spend a lot of time thinking about racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry directed at racial and ethnic outgroups. Indeed, my last two posts were very much about those subjects.

The focus makes sense. When Donald Trump descended the escalator of Trump Tower in June 2015, he invoked Mexican rapists. Tucker Carlson regularly plugs “Great Replacement” theory on his primetime cable news show. Viktor Orbán denounced a “mixed race” ideal for Europe in a recent speech. Hostility to immigration is a major component of right-wing anti-liberalism nearly everywhere it is found.

But there is also a sex-and-gender dimension to current political trends that may well prove to be even more troubling and politically potent over the coming years.

The Lure of Political Combat

Trump may have launched his political career by spreading the “birtherist” conspiracy about Barack Obama’s supposed un-American origins and by promising to build a wall to keep dangerous immigrants out of the country, but at least as important was his pugilistic persona. There’s a reason why “he fights” became a shorthand explanation for Trump’s appeal to the Republican base.

What those voters wanted was a candidate who would throw punches in every direction, without apology, and without adhering to the normal political rules. He would attack Democrats plenty, including those with whom he’d happily palled around as a Manhattan socialite. But he’d also declare past Republican presidents, recent presidential nominees (including war heroes), and longstanding GOP policies to be “disasters.”

Trump was tough. Brutal. Even cruel. And he fought dirty, using anything at hand as a weapon.

This political style didn’t just appeal to white men, though it might have been limited to them at first, when Trump combined it with attacks on immigrants from south of the border. By Trump’s re-election campaign in 2020, those racist and xenophobic attacks had receded in his message, and that made a politically salient difference.

A lot has been written about the GOP’s growing support among Hispanic voters, much of it taking note of how it is wrapped up with the attraction to macho men in Latin American culture. Trump’s relentless combativeness combined with a softer-peddled message on immigration may well have made this shift possible.

Republicans obviously hope it continues. That’s undoubtedly one reason why everyone from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley to the chairman of the right-wing Claremont Institute have been pushing a message about the importance of manliness and masculinity, including obsequious statements about Trump exemplifying these virtues.

There’s Something Happening Here (and What It Is Is Pretty Clear)

Liberals and progressives may find such statements transparently ridiculous, but they are a response to something happening in the broader culture that Democrats ignore at their political peril. Jordan Peterson’s incredibly popular philosophically informed self-help project for teenage boys and young men is one example. Joe Rogan’s no-bullshit, elbow-throwing, bro-talk podcast is another. As is the far more disturbing viral social-media phenomenon of Andrew Tate, a vicious misogynist and online huckster who has millions of followers on multiple platforms soaking up various get-rich-and-get-laid-quick schemes that invariably involve denigrating (and sometimes violently assaulting) women.    

In case you’re tempted to dismiss these trends as expressions of narrow subcultures with little broad-based influence, consider the findings of a recent poll from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Tulchin Research, which Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times discussed in an important June column. Not only do most young Republicans agree with the statement that “feminism has done more harm than good,” but an astonishing 46 percent of Democratic men—and nearly a quarter of Democratic women—under 50 do as well. (The numbers for Democrat men and women over 50 was 4 and 10 percent, respectively.)

This points to extraordinarily widespread hostility to feminism among younger Americans, especially men. It would be foolish to deny this will have serious political consequences. (The U.S. has seen numerous masculinity crises throughout its history, leading to various forms of political turbulence.)

The All-Important Why

Why is it happening now? For the moment, I will only offer a handful of tentative suggestions on this complex topic. I’m bound to return to it in future posts.

The first suggestion is simply to say it’s surely significant that the combative assertion of masculinity as an ideal is taking place at a cultural moment when transgender activists and their allies in elite institutions insist on denying the reality of “the gender binary” (while also inevitably dismissing the significance of that binary’s biological basis—genetics along with testosterone and other hormones). Just as some feminists are willing to risk being labeled TERFs by resisting the trend toward adopting gender-neutral language about distinctly female biological processes (menstruation, pregnancy, lactation), so growing numbers of men are rising up to assert the distinctive reality and goodness of their maleness.

The trend’s other overlapping cultural precondition is, of course, the push by feminists and their allies to call out and punish examples of bad male behavior, often described using the shorthand “toxic masculinity.” I’m as inclined as any liberal to join in condemnations of misogyny and sexism, especially when paired with acts of sexual assault and abuse. But that doesn’t mean all or even most young men appreciate the scrutiny and attendant implication that many of their inclinations and desires are worthy of universal disapprobation.

Such judgments are also accompanied by abundant evidence that boys and men are losing ground to women—at all levels of school, in the workplace, in the family, and in broader socioeconomic terms. The result, increasingly, involves anger and resentment at what can appear to be a system rigged against men. (That this system may have until quite recently been rigged in their favor does nothing to dispel a feeling of indignation about injustice in the present.)

That’s where things get especially tricky, and dangerous, since anger is one of the few emotions men have historically been permitted to display in public. As a result, the very expression of rage at current trends ends up being treated by growing numbers of angry men as an especially manly trait worthy of valorization for its own sake.

To be proud of one’s masculinity, in other words, is to be pissed off and eager for a fight. Pushed to an extreme, this assumption can curdle into the view that a man deserves praise and applause for acting like a thug and a bully. It’s almost as if growing numbers of men have decided to appropriate toxic masculinity as a normative aspiration rather than treating it as what it really is: a partial and pathological aspect of what it means to be a man in full.  

An Uncertain Future

That, unfortunately, is where we seem to have ended up at the present moment—with rising unhappiness at recent sociocultural developments around sex and gender combining with a lack of any clear sense of how to reconstitute a fuller understanding of masculinity. We will need such an understanding if we have any hope of channeling the most destructive tendencies of men into attitudes and behavior that benefit the country along with the discontented men themselves.

I’m sure to return to this topic because it’s a huge one that’s also hugely important—though there’s no sign yet that we have the faintest idea of how to respond to it in a productive way.