Opinion | Trump Offered Men Something That Democrats Never Could

On the long road to Election Day, no group of voters was more loyal to Donald Trump than young white men. One early theory was that his success with this demographic was a result of male isolation and loneliness. But that showed a fundamental misunderstanding of Mr. Trump’s appeal. He did so well with male voters because he is a walking avatar of a kind of masculinity that Democrats could never embrace, and its appeal transcends this electoral cycle.

Mr. Trump offered a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright. That this appealed in particular to white men was not a coincidence — it intersects with other types of entitlement, including the idea that white people are superior to other races and more qualified to hold positions of power, and that any success that women and minorities have has been unfairly conferred to them by D.E.I. programs, affirmative action and government set-asides. For men unhappy with their status, this view offers a group of people to blame, which feels more tangible than blaming systemic problems like rising economic inequality and the difficulty of adapting to technological and cultural changes.

The Trump campaign was channeling what psychologists call “hegemonic masculinity,” the belief that “good” men are dominant in hierarchies of power and status, that they are mentally and physically tough, that they must embody the opposite of anything feminine — and that this dominance over not just women but all less powerful groups is the natural order and what’s best for everyone.

A 2021 study by the psychologists Theresa Vescio and Nathaniel Schermerhorn found that hegemonic masculinity was a better predictor of whether people saw Mr. Trump as a good leader in 2016 and 2020 than sexism or racism alone. It was a better predictor than trust in government or even party affiliation.

Mr. Trump’s rally speeches were rambling, but they expressed this worldview consistently and constantly. I don’t believe it was strategic; Mr. Trump himself has always venerated power and status for their own sake, dominance over women and hostility toward minorities. He has always referred to himself as the toughest, the best, the strongest, the most, the winner. He was just being himself.

When he wanted to insult his enemies he identified them by qualities that the rules of hegemonic masculinity code as feminine: less intelligent (“low-I.Q.” Robert DeNiro), feminized (“Tampon Tim” Walz), weak (“sleepy Joe”). If the enemy was a woman, he described her through a lens of sexuality or motherhood, because for him that’s a woman’s primary value to men. So it’s no surprise that he painted Ms. Harris as “low-I.Q.” and “lazy” and gleefully suggested that she slept her way to the top.

You could hear it all when Tucker Carlson invited a crowd to imagine how preposterous it would be for Ms. Harris to claim victory. “She got 85 million votes,” he said sarcastically, “because she’s just so impressive as the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-I.Q., former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Mr. Trump has made this kind of open bigotry acceptable for Republicans, and it’s not going to just disappear before the next election cycle.

Professionally successful, non-childbearing women can look like a threat, both to the men who adhere to these ideals and to the hierarchy that enables the men to justify their status and power. For men who feel displaced, accusing women and minorities of benefiting from an unfair advantage, demanding that their supposedly ill-gotten gains be rolled back and their subordinate position restored, might be an appealing option. It’s one that the Trump campaign encouraged at every turn.

There’s an irony to this, in that actual systems of advantage — inherited wealth, legacy admissions to elite colleges, nepotistic professional advancement — were all designed to benefit white men. Perhaps no one embodies this unearned privilege better than Mr. Trump, but the ideological framework he operates in does not allow for acknowledging it. Instead, its beneficiaries insist that the rest of the world contort itself into a reactionary power structure.

Connect the dots — the snide insults and the brotastic podcasts and the attack on reproductive rights and the emphasis on natalism — and you get a world in which women are told to drop out of the labor force and attend to domestic matters, making themselves sexually available (but only to their husbands), producing children and supporting their husband’s career, regardless of the effect on their work, time and happiness.

Some observers faulted Ms. Harris for not doing enough to accommodate a regressive view of masculinity, suggesting that she could have picked up some votes by, say, proposing military service as a cure for male alienation, or by avoiding reasonable critiques of sexism because they might make some men feel like they’re being attacked. But prescriptions like these only reinforce hegemonic masculinity, and that is incompatible with a vision for America where the needs and interests of women and minorities are not valued less than those of white men.

It is not the responsibility of women to convince men of our humanity, abilities and potential. But the view of masculinity that Mr. Trump appeals to harms men, too, offering appealingly simple answers that ultimately leave their adherents that much more isolated.

Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

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