The man is back

There is a new socio-political trend in the United States: the revival of masculinity. Commentators on the Fox News channel speak openly about it. And Missouri Senator Josh Hawley (above) dedicated his whole speech at the Conservative National Convention to masculinity. If you do not know who Hawley is, do search him out. In the future you are going to hear a great deal about him: he is Trump-lite, but younger and smarter. As things stand, Trump will most likely run in the 2024 presidential election — and even win it — but, should he decide to step aside instead, Hawley will be one of the best positioned senators to become the Republican presidential candidate.

Those reclaiming masculinity argue that men are marrying less and less, having fewer children, getting more and more depressed, dying by suicide and spending their idle time playing video games and watching pornography. This happens because society has demonised the traditional male values: assertiveness, competitiveness, courage and aggressiveness. They want to recover those values in the education of boys so that men take back responsibility for their jobs, their lives and their families. The man is back.

American conservatives have a clear political motivation to defend this trend as it allows them to mobilise male voters in the low to middle-lower classes in their favour. These are men without jobs or with job insecurity who are deeply dissatisfied with the political system. It is a way for Republicans to maintain the vote of workers that would have traditionally voted Democrat before 2016 but switched to the Right in 2016. To woo those voters in 2016, Trump blamed everything on immigrants and promised to “build the wall”. But Trump’s anti-immigrant policies did not improve things. So now the Republicans need to blame others. And what could be better than blaming something intangible that does not even require building a wall? This is the feminisation of society.

Republicans link all this to the crisis of the industrial sector and, in particular, the loss of (by their account) more than 16 million manufacturing jobs previously held by men because of trade globalisation. They argue that the crisis in masculinity is a result of the US being too dependent on cheap manufactured products from China, following the country’s entry into the WTO. Thus they present the revival of masculinity as a patriotic act against China.

Underneath it all, there is a massive change in political ideology. Traditionally, both in America and around the world, conservatives have focused on the individual, while the Left has defended the collective. But now it is just the opposite: the Democrats defend individual identity, while the Republicans take refuge in the male collective. This is happening while the Democrats are becoming the party of the wealthy and university-educated classes, while the Republicans are becoming the party of the working class and those without higher education. It is an almost 180-degree turn of the political table.

Reclaiming masculinity has, of course, important consequences for women. In this world of men who are “providers” for their families, men take care of the money while women take care of the children. Hawley’s own wife, a prestigious lawyer, boasts about cutting back her job to dedicate herself to her family. They openly complain that there are now more women than men in American universities. And in Silicon Valley some of the republican finance tycoons call openly for women to have more time than men with their children after birth so that they can establish “a bond” with them.

You may be thinking that this ideological trend belongs just to the United States. But that is what we also thought about the anti-immigration movement, the ultra-conservativism of Trump or the political focus on gender self-identity. These are all trends that started in America but spread quickly throughout the West. It is only a matter of time before we shall start seeing conservative parties reclaiming masculinity in Europe and in the United Kingdom too.

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