Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Supporters listen as then-President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Orlando Sanford International Airport, October 12, 2020, in Sanford, Florida.
Sometimes, you have to go outside the realm of political analysis to understand politics. I was reminded of this by a recent Tom Edsall column in The New York Times in which, while unpacking a host of studies that sought to explain the growing gender gap, he cited a 2020 paper that had run in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. In that study, Eric Knowles (a psych professor at NYU) and Sarah DiMuccio (a researcher with a doctorate in social psychology) compared data on support for Trump and aggressive political behavior with data on male insecurity. Perhaps not surprisingly, they found a strong correlation.
In particular, Knowles and DiMuccio looked at the kind of data that generally eludes political scientists and political reporters (present company included). They sought out the Google Trends search data for the 12 months immediately preceding the 2016 election for erectile dysfunction, penis size, penis enlargement, hair loss, hair plugs, testosterone, and Viagra—gender-affirming care, of a sort—and labeled them as indices of Precarious Manhood. They produced a map of the United States showing where those Google searches were most common (Appalachia and the Deep South). And by running the standard statistical regression analyses, they found a strong predictive correlation between the rates of those Google searches and the votes for Donald Trump in 2016 (though, of course, those were also votes against Hillary Clinton).
Knowles and DiMuccio ran the same analyses for the Precarious Manhood measures in the year immediately preceding the 2018 congressional midterms, and found another strong correlation between those measures and the votes for Republican House candidates.
In a certain sense, what Knowles and DiMuccio have found are new manifestations of old news: that increasingly, the Republicans are viewed as the masculinized party and the Democrats as the feminized one. But I think the very phenomenon of Precarious Manhood is key to an even broader understanding of what’s gone haywire with America, once you expand its scope beyond the more purely psychological.
Maybe it’s because I’m much more a Marxian than a Freudian, but I think the fears and distempers of Precarious Manhood are fundamentally the result of changes in the economy, particularly those that have affected working-class men. In the hindsight of history, the high point for American working-class men came in the world of Franklin Roosevelt—first, when 11 million men served in World War II, and then in the decades following, when widespread unionization in manufacturing and construction, which the New Deal had enabled, meant that working-class men (whites in particular) could support their families, often with their wives not having to work outside the home.
The defense of patriarchal norms is particularly intense among working-class men, many of whom have trouble envisioning sustainable careers based on their skill sets.
For men who work with their hands, those times—and the culture that at least somewhat valorized them and put them at the center of the national narrative—are long gone. The real crisis of Precarious Manhood, I’d argue, is that the vast majority of the men who work with their hands no longer can make a family wage. In 1987, the great sociologist William Julius Wilson coined the term “marriageable male” in order to explain the declining levels of two-parent families among Black Americans. Black men denied the opportunity to have jobs that could support a family, he argued, were not being viewed as marriage material by Black women. As the share of such family-wage jobs declined across racial lines, particularly among white working-class men, over the following decades, the rate of marriages in working-class America also diminished precipitously, as Andrew Cherlin documented in his important study Labor’s Love Lost.
The fundamental crisis of Precarious Manhood looks to me to be the inability to support a family by doing what was traditionally man’s work—through largely manual labor. This is partly the result of economic changes: As a consequence of mechanization and the more newly digitized world, it takes fewer workers to build things or produce goods both large and small than it once did. But it’s also partly the result of political changes that since 1980 have offshored manufacturing, demolished unions, and shifted the proceeds of work from labor to capital, from workers to investors.
These economic changes have set in motion a host of cultural changes as well. There are more women than men in college and in many types of graduate and professional schools. And if the traditional norms of patriarchy are being assailed and in some cases overthrown—quite rightly, I should add—we still need to be cognizant that the post-patriarchal economy has yet to create a place of sustainable occupations for men whose talents are those of working with their hands. (It’s not doing all that well for working-class women, either, but that creates a different set of discontents.)
That’s why the defense of patriarchal norms is particularly intense among working-class men, many of whom have trouble envisioning sustainable careers based on their skill sets. That’s a problem that cuts across races, and across international borders, too. That’s a problem that has led to a lashing out at a non-working-class establishment that can be identified, or misidentified, as female, as feminized men, and as those who defend such historic out-groups as racial minorities, immigrants, gays, and lesbians—you know the list. That’s a problem that’s led to cults of (largely working-class) hypermasculinity, in the rise of steroidal bodybuilding and mixed martial arts. (Following his conviction, Trump sought, and received, an ego boost by hightailing it to a UFC match in Newark and basking in the crowd’s adulation.)
When you can’t envision a sustainable career based on your skill set, you may be putty for a demagogue who evokes idealized memories of a past where you fit in—however racist or sexist that past may have been, and sometimes because of how racist and sexist it actually was. You can be putty for a demagogue who blames your plight on MAGA’s usual suspects. You can be putty for Donald Trump.
Knowles and DiMuccio also compared their Precarious Manhood data with the voting for the two Republican presidential candidates before Trump—John McCain and Mitt Romney—and found no correlation whatever. It was only with Trump that the Republicans found a candidate whose own insecurity and rage at the elites who scorned him, and at the out-groups he deemed to be inherently undeserving, made him susceptible to the some of the same phobias that define Precarious Manhood, and made him its avenging champion. And by remaking the Republican Party in his image, he transformed it in this way as well. The Grand Old Party is now the Party of Precarious Manhood.
