Amid all the joy and positivity and the big, beautiful polling surges for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the word has gone out: This election isn’t going to be a referendum on inflation, immigration or foreign policy anymore. It’s going to be a referendum on masculinity in America.
The choice is clear. On one side, there’s the enlightened maleness embodied by Harris’s vice-presidential pick and her husband, Doug Emhoff. These are the good progressive dads, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine writes, the “nice men of the left” who do guy things like coach football but also manifest liberal and feminist virtues — like being “happily deferential” and “unapologetically supportive of women’s rights” and “committed to partnership” in marriage and politics alike. Walz especially is being held up all over as a paragon of liberal dadhood: “A regular guy,” Mona Charen of The Bulwark writes, “at a time when the country needs reminding that being a regular guy is actually pretty great.”
Then there is the other model, the dark side of the Y chromosome: the toxic masculinity of Donald Trump, the anti-cat-lady conservatism of JD Vance, all of them wrapped together in a package that Zack Beauchamp of Vox describes as “neo-patriarchy.” This is a worldview, he writes, that may claim to allow for more female agency than the older patriarchy but really just wants a “reversal of the feminist revolution,” in which men finally get to be he-men again while their wives stay home and rear four to seven kids.
Most caricatures fasten on some aspect of reality, and the American right in the Trump era does indeed encompass frankly sexist ideas and influences — from Andrew Tate epigones looking for permission to be playboys to would-be patriarchs resentful that the women of America won’t cooperate.
But has liberalism perfected a model of modern masculinity while conservative culture slouches somewhere far behind? I’m skeptical, on three distinct grounds.
First, I would have thought that by now liberals would be hesitant about proclaiming the special personal virtues of the male feminist, the enlightened pro-choice dude. After Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and Harvey Weinstein, after MeToo case studies too numerous to count, surely we can say that sleaze percolates on the left and right alike, that predators can exploit liberated mores as easily as traditional ones, that the “deferential” and “committed to partnership” guy can be subject to the same temptations as the conservative male breadwinner.
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