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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35416 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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White Dudes for Harris

It should be remembered that it was the Democrat party that broke the ice on invoking White Identity Politics directly to muster political support. The Republican party has only ever used proxy rhetoric like "they have to come legally" or "tough on crime", but looking at the recent Convention it's clear the Republican strategy is to go for the Big Tent rather than directly appeal to white voters. It's the Harris campaign that makes the direct appeal to white men, and you would not see an event like this hosted within the Republican party.

This is another indication that we're probably over the hill of Peak Woke that a white identity is acknowledged in a non-critical context:

“There is an epidemic amongst men in this country,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist who helped organize the call, told The Hill.

“That loneliness, that anxiety, that disconnection, it gets filled by something. And what Republicans have done an incredible job of, depressingly so, is creating a permission structure that makes it very easy for white men to embrace Donald Trump, to embrace MAGA culture, to embrace this sort of devolution of our politics into something much more crass,” he continued. ...

Nellis, on the other hand, argued that Democrats have been too quick in the past to give up on constituencies that seem out of reach, like rural voters and white male voters.

“We should be fighting for every inch and damn sure know that the Republicans do that. They communicate with every constituency that they can win, lose, or draw,” Nellis said.

“If we could move even a fraction of white men and get them to a place where they feel comfortable with being a part of the multicultural movement that is the Democratic Party, as imperfect as it is a lot of days, that would change our politics dramatically and so much for the better.”

That's a huge shift in messaging from just a few years ago in the midst of the Floyd riots.

“There is an epidemic amongst men in this country,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist who helped organize the call, told The Hill.

The "masculinity crisis" is probably down mostly to the traditional foundations of masculine identity, what distinguished it fundamentally from femininity going back several thousand years at least, e.g being physically powerful and being good at killing people/animals are less and less relevant than ever in industrial and post-industrial society and are only going to become more so.

Probably not actually "fixable" short of a Kaczsynskian collapse of civilization and why all proposed solutions whether they be left-wing "build a positive masculinity" stuff or right-wing "retvrn" will fail.

The "masculinity crisis" is probably down mostly to the traditional foundations of masculine identity, what distinguished it fundamentally from femininity going back several thousand years at least, e.g being physically powerful and being good at killing people/animals are less and less relevant than ever in industrial and post-industrial society and are only going to become more so.

Except

  1. It isn't. There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male. The trades are male. Some physical jobs that aren't as obviously about strength, like drivers, are also very gendered male.

  2. There's differences that show up in the modern age too. Engineering is predominantly male (though not as male as the trades), despite vast effort made to change that. But do men get credit for this? No, we get rhetorically beat up for it.

It's not men who need fixing. It's the people who insist on refusing to acknowledge anything positive about masculinity.

There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male.

But these jobs are proportionally much more scarce than 50 or 100 years ago.

There's quite a few "stereotypically masculine, requires physical strength" jobs that having hiring shortages right now. Construction labor, Garbagemen, police beat cop in cities, and Army grunt (not West Point officer) to name a few. This suggests that it's not like those jobs have completely disappeared leaving manly-men with nothing to do, it's that those jobs are now so low status that no one wants them.

"Everyone knows" that the way you make good money now is to study STEM or business and get a while-collar job, even if what you really want to do is use your muscles in the real world.

I can't help but notice that three of the four jobs you listed are public sector jobs, which may have something to do with them being low status.

"Everyone knows" that the way you make good money now is to study STEM or business and get a while-collar job, even if what you really want to do is use your muscles in the real world.

They're not wrong. If you can do the work you can make a lot more money in computer programming or finance easier than you can in the trades. It's not impossible to make big money in the trades, but sometimes it requires connections (they don't hand out those $400k/year backup crane operator jobs to just anyone), and when it doesn't it still requires business skills as well -- you have to run your own operation and have employees.

The stereotypically masculine jobs with hiring shortages now tend to either have cyclical employment (like construction) or be shit for other reasons (including being very low status and/or low pay, or all the baggage of the military)

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