They met over Zoom for a spirited discussion, moderated by contributing writer Joanna Weiss, about what masculinity means in white and nonwhite communities, how both parties are trying to connect with male voters, and how Democrats might hone a message about manhood while staying true to the party’s roots. Most of them agreed that, for Democrats, the answers to some of these questions are far more complicated than they are for Republicans’ less diverse voters. “If we think that the way to react to this white male aggression and politics is to have Democrats turn that aggression back on Republicans, that is not going to happen,” Ulibarri said. “That’s not the kind of masculinity, or male leadership, that our candidates and our party and our voters are going to respond to.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Two visions of masculinity
Joanna Weiss: Jackson, give us some context. It’s not new that candidates have characterized Democrats as feminine and Republicans as masculine, right? It’s the Democrats-as-nurturing-mom, Republicans-as-authoritative-dad metaphor: social safety on the left, and defense and fiscal austerity on the right.
Jackson Katz: Since 1972, since Richard Nixon’s landslide election over George McGovern — a bomber pilot in World War II who was feminized in political discourse as soft and wimpy — the Republican Party has understood that one of the ways to build electoral majorities is by racking up huge numbers among white male voters.
If we have any hope of creating majority coalitions, or supermajority coalitions, to pass progressive legislation, we have to figure out a way to peel back the overwhelming advantages that the Republicans have had among male voters, especially white male voters.
Joanna Weiss: Ted, I saw you nodding. Has the same dynamic played out in nonwhite communities?
Ted Johnson: Since about 1964, 90 percent of Black folks are voting for the Democratic candidate in presidential and congressional elections. For the 10 percent of Black folks that have voted for Republicans, that’s usually 6, 7 percent of Black women and 15 or so percent of Black men. So masculinity does factor in.
The part of conservatism that is most attractive to Black men is usually the ideas of individualism, self-sufficiency, self-determination. It’s very consonant with the Black power and Black pride movements in the ’60s and ’70s: This idea that if left to our own devices, we will be just fine if the government would just get out of the way. That hearkens back to some of the Reagan Republicanism.
Joanna Weiss: Chuck, more Latino men voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. You’ve argued that Democrats need to more directly court the Latino vote. What’s the best way to do that?
Chuck Rocha: You start with the premise that the average age of a Latino in America is around 27. They’re just a younger demographic. They’re consuming things differently. This narrative that GOP appeal to Latinos is about machismo is mostly a false narrative. It’s more about this economic pressure on Latino men to provide.
Joanna Weiss: Josh, do you want to pick that up? Do you see this kind of pressure on men factoring into political decisions?
Joshua Ulibarri: Anytime we talk about men, we really mean in many ways white men. Certainly, the vote for Democrats has been shrinking among Latino men, and the same is happening for Black men.
The books and the folks we were talking about — Jordan Peterson and Republican Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, the “dominance” language, the fists-in-the-air conversations — are very different kinds of conversations than I know we’re having in people-of-color communities. I think the number one issue for us is, as Chuck mentioned, “Can we provide?”
The way men in our community see the leadership of these two parties is quite different in that they do not believe that Democrats reward hard work the way Republicans do. Democrats tax. We regulate, we take away, or we give away what other people worked so hard to gain. And so, when we have so much pressure in our Latino community for men to provide and lead, and then we see a Democratic Party taxing and taking away, that eats away at the ability for our party to win the Latino men’s vote.
Joanna Weiss: Lis, I see you nodding about that economic argument, and I’m curious what you’re seeing.
Lis Smith: I think when we look at these appeals that Josh Hawley and other people are making to masculinity, we should see them for what they are, which is not really just an appeal to men, frankly. This is much more part of a conservative cultural outreach than a gender outreach. And it is something that is very, very limited in its appeal, and that I don’t think is going to appeal to swing voters.
In some of the races in 2022, you saw different paradigms of masculinity. A great example was the gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania. On one side you had Republican candidate Doug Mastriano dressing up as a Confederate Civil War soldier, going to D.C. on January 6th, touting what you might think of as traditional, in-your-face masculinity. But he significantly underperformed with male voters.
Then you see Josh Shapiro, who won, presenting a very different paradigm and a very different view of masculinity. In his ads, he talked about faith, he talked about family, he talked about opportunity, he talked about how when he was a county legislator, he cut taxes and kept taxes low. He talked about how as attorney general, he worked to combat crime. He always talked about being a dad and going home to his kids, and how he’d married his high school sweetheart. Those are, I think, examples of masculinity that a lot more men can identify with than these guys out there like Doug Mastriano dressing up as a Civil War soldier, or feeling the need to storm the Capitol in a triangle hat.
Joanna Weiss: There are a few Democratic candidates right now who are trying to present a traditional masculine image. In Josh Hawley’s upcoming Senate race, one of his Democratic challengers is a guy named Lucas Kunce. He’s got a very deep voice and a very square jaw. And he’s got these ads that are basically accusing Hawley of being a weenie. He’s leaning into that almost performative, caricature version of a manly man. Joan, how will that play with voters?
Joan Williams: There’s one measure on gender called hostile sexism. It’s kind of Men should be men, women should be women and it is actually more powerful than anything other than political orientation at predicting Trump voting.
What Republicans have done is taken this threatened masculinity, and taken masculine anxieties, and forged them into a weapon for the far right. And what Democrats have done in response is pretty much nothing, mostly. But the move for people who are anti-Trump — and the only group in my view that’s really understood this is the Lincoln Project — is to push back.
There are really two abiding themes in masculinity: The macho man — Trump’s got that covered — and the good man. And what Democrats need to do, and Josh Shapiro did this, Lis, to a certain extent, is enact the good man, the decent man, the “It’s a Wonderful Life” man. The only people I see articulating that are other Republicans, which makes me a little sad as a Democrat.
Joanna Weiss: You’re talking about adopting a kind of working-class white male perspective. This right-wing critique of the Democratic Party as out of touch and feminized and elitist and arugula-eating and in the ivory tower — how much of it is really just a proxy for class warfare?
Jackson Katz: One of the things that Trump does in speech after speech … he name-checks working-class male professions all the time. He’ll say things like, “We love our truckers, we love our cops, we love our firefighters, we love our military.” It’s brilliant because what they feel is a sense of cultural recognition.
Nixon figured this out back in the early ’70s. One of the ways you could appeal to white working-class men was not through giving them better wages or benefits, because that would impede on the interest of the ownership class that is really running the Republican Party, but by giving them cultural recognition. You could say to them, “They are the ones who built this country — they, meaning the white working-class male who was providing for his family. And those people — meaning multiculturalist, feminist Democrats — hate you. They detest you.”
