Fighting for the souls of White men
March 21, 2016
Barry Dym
Thanks for your March 21
article, “I Slept With the Enemy.” What
a pleasure to read. Not only does it
offer a compelling explanation for Trump’s appeal to men but it does so with
compassion. Without both, there’s not
much hope to change the way the men are seen and how they respond to the
condescending, demonizing glares headed their way.
I love your focus on the need
for rebellion, the need to “flip a bird” to the establishment. It’s the
rebellion that counts, not any particular ideology. You are right to emphasize the growing
isolation of this group of men, particularly from sources of education,
support, common cause, and direction that labor unions had once provided. The union movement had provided an
alternative narrative, in which rebellion, persistence, and courage are essential
to organizing and to strikes, where a channel for anger and aggression is
sanctioned, even applauded
What you don’t emphasize and
I would like to is that the rebellion we need is against the proper people: the
Koch Brothers, Wall Street, the Republican Party, which has nurtured a racist
culture for decades, with its “southern strategy,” its absorption of the
Dixicrats, and its Regan-inspired union busting tactics. These are the people who have captured our
narrative, brought forth by the right wing marketing machine and long
symbolized by the Willie Horton ad. That
ad, as you know, was for George HW Bush, a president that current Democrats
have decided was a good Republican.
I imagine that you went light
on the idea of emasculation because it would take away from your article’s
compassion. But in my view, the social
and economic emasculation of working class men is one of the main reasons that
the rebel narrative is so appealing. And
if we were to go further into the theme of emasculation, we would also have to
turn to the gender revolution that has been taking place for almost a half
century now. White men of all classes
have not only lost pride of place to outsiders, like Blacks and Latinos—to the “other”—they
have also lost position to insiders: their sisters, wives and mothers. And while there’s a way to at least try to
distance themselves from African and Latin Americans, there’s no place to hide
from the women in their lives, who are earning more money. Or even the same amount. And demanding that their voices be
heard.
It is as easy to make fun of
such men as it is to simply condemn the “yahoos” and their Confederate
flags. I saw many, many such men in
marital and family therapy. They didn’t
want to come. They kicked and snorted
fire about that stupid girl’s stuff. And
once they appeared in my office, it was clear that they felt anxious and
diminished on this foreign turf. They
had no real language to express their diminishment because it was an emotional
language they didn’t speak. Even worse,
speaking of diminishment was dangerous, forbidden. To say you feel like less of man, to
complain, to whine, to cry, means that you are
less of a man. So you bear the daily
losses, the indignities, the insults in private and in silence, except through
explosions and apparently “random” acts of violence, acts that you don’t really
condone, against your own wives and daughters.
Or you simply run off with another, preferably younger woman.
There have been efforts to
heal these masculine wounds but, in my view, most of the men’s movement has
been almost completely ineffective. It
has been apologetic, which feels like more diminishment to me. It has tried to inject “female” values and
styles into the male psyche. That often
feels foreign, even alienating. The
various men’s movements have done almost nothing, other than re-introduce loin
cloths and drums on weekend retreats, with the aggression that seems to be hard
wired into the male species. It has
provided none of the exuberance, the meaning, fun and rage, nor even the sense
of common cause and comradeship that, for example the union movement of the
first half of the twentieth century and
the 1960’s Civil Rights and Anti-War movements had for men.
I want to emphasize the sense
of belonging and common cause, of having a team to identify with. There is almost no more powerful and defining
experience for many boys than the athletic teams. Being a member of a team, going crazy with
joy when you win, having your pals around you when you lose. That is a place where you can express your
agony, even cry. And there is virtually
no substitute for it once they leave school.
Once you leave school, you
become a loner, a Man, as defined by working class culture—or by almost any
male culture. You learn to suck it up
when you are lonely or upset. You can’t
take it out on “the man”—you’d lose your job, if you have one; and your woman
doesn’t quite understand, even though she keeps asking. You are alone much too often. “Bowling Alone,” as Putnam would say. And, as post World War II sociologists made
plain, it was that condition—thousands, millions of men separated from the
people and institutions that had structured pre-war life—it was under that
condition that people were readily mobilized by demagogues, like Hitler and Mussolini. We stand too close to that flame right now.
So I stand with you, Sonya
Huber. I stand against the most obvious
solutions to the loss of manhood, voting for Trump, Cruz, and the others who
thumb their noses at the establishment only to offer cruel, often elitist
alternatives. We need to affirm the
hurt, the loss, the anger, and the need to rebel against its causes. We need to help to build an alternative
narrative. It is no surprise that both
Trump and Bernie Sanders have made such great strides this year. They are not accommodating. They don’t like the establishment. They give voice to rage. They don’t back down. They fight.
They are rebels. And Bernie Sanders,
at least, is a rebel with a cause.
