The 2024 Election as a Referendum on American Masculinity

[Boethius]

I think an interesting perspective is that in the J.D. Vance versus Tim Walz portion of the 2024 election, one of the key battles is over who represents a more authentic vision of American masculinity in today's culture. Some commentary on this can be found, for example, here

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/opinion/masculinity-liberal-conservative.html

with maybe the key quote as

"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."

Another piece of media I have found intriguing comes from the Youtube channel "The Elephant Graveyard", whose channel is gaining lots of views after he provided an analysis/review of Joe Rogan's recent Netflix special "Burn the Boats". A distillation of TEG's thoughts can be found at

Do this view of 2024 as a showdown between two visions of masculinity resonate with others?

[Raze]

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/on-the-ballot-american-manhood-c7e3dabb
 

https://archive.ph/qldIO

 

The media is pushing this hard.

I actually don’t believe it, young men are the group less likely to vote anyway. 

Edited August 20 by Raze