2 weeks ago

The sad truth is that anti-feminist backlash helped propel Trump to victory | Malaika Jabali

Donald Trump has won the White House again. From the very beginning of his first administration, marked by his “Muslim ban”, until its end, marred by a violent riot at the US Capitol, the former president was fueled by the anger of his largely white, male base. These are often men who have few similarities to billionaires such as Trump, but who have felt their social and financial status threatened by some “other”, whether real or imagined. Trump and his Republican party have long tapped into that resentment.

There were the cancel culture mobs, the Marxists and the immigrants. Before that, the commies and the race agitators. Most recently, the CRT boogeymen, the “woke left” and the DEI hires – all these epithets serving as dog whistles, in historical terms and contemporary ones, for racial and ethnic groups who chip away at the financial security of white “real Americans”.

Now another obsession has come to plague a critical mass of the right: women.

Since Trump was last in office, a plethora of podcasts and media personalities – peddling more pseudo-science than political science – has emerged, framing women as both oppressors and second-class citizens. Hypersexual and frigid. Cunning and simple. Gold-digging parasites while also career-driven and disgustingly independent. In the manosphere, things don’t have to make sense. They must simply invoke certain feelings. Trump is an expert at that.

He makes men feel things. They see his bravado, his lawsuits, his crimes, his net worth and his sexual assault allegations, and it makes him the man.

Of course, as they see it, we need more Traditional Men in a time when women have become catered to, feminism has taken over and women aren’t accepting their rightful place in the home, out of the workplace (where they might compete with men for jobs and high salaries).

Never mind that in today’s economy, few households can comfortably afford a stay-at-home parent with one income. More than ever, women are working because they have to. Not because of some feminist conspiracy, but because of capitalism. But again, we’re not working with facts here, just feelings.

The anti-feminist men spouting this worldview say they have been enlightened after taking the “red pill”, a reference to The Matrix (a classic film that was not at all about joining a He-Man, Woman-Haters club). Trump, in his own words, has taken it.

Before appealing to these enraged (and increasingly lonely) men, Trump embraced a faux-populist sensibility that may have helped cement his approval, though I doubt it was necessary to earn the vote of most white men – as Republicans who never pretended to be populist (such as Mitt Romney) got a similar majority of the male vote, as they have each presidential election this century.

Of course, Trump has proven to be an enemy of working-class white men. His trillion-dollar tax cut favored the 1% (those who made at least $837,800 in 2017) and cost the US treasury a lot of money that could have been spent on social services that actually help his voters, from trainings for trade schools to affordable housing, as rental costs surge and home ownership has become historically unattainable.

The Democratic party is no friend to the working class either (with Kamala Harris rarely uttering the phrase during her short campaign, if at all). But fortunately for both parties, class struggles have been supplanted by social ones. Capitalists aren’t the problem, in the common American understanding, because in our current political imagination, we’re all middle class. We like to believe we’re just a crypto windfall, small-business incubator or tradwife away from being on the Forbes 400 list rather than in danger of falling below the poverty line.

So there has to be someone else responsible for our failures, and it’s easier to blame those in our midst. A faceless billionaire class that has eroded collective bargaining rights, moved masses of jobs overseas (or shuttered them altogether) and helped obliterate our social safety net and block universal healthcare (which practically every other industrial country has, with no controversy) is harder to hold accountable than the girl you’ve met up with for a couple of drinks, or your wife, or live-in girlfriend. Their rejection (or their job promotion, or their lack of submission, or name any random manosphere gripe) doesn’t feel good. So where do those bad feelings go?

A critical mass of men fell off the ledge and into the arms of so-called alpha males with microphones. And here comes Trump barreling back into the White House in a manosphere partly of his own making.

Trump didn’t get there just by appealing to white men. He won over more men of color than in elections past, despite the Republican party’s (and Trump’s own) history of racial discrimination, and despite a disastrous Covid response that saw Black Americans disproportionately killed in the pandemic. To be clear, most of the Black male electorate voted for Harris. But the slight shift towards the Republican party is notable.

Anecdotal interactions with some Trump-supporting Black men will probably garner a range of explanations. I’ve heard them throughout my years of reporting in Wisconsin, a state that has become a major battleground since Trump flipped it Republican for the first time in about 30 years in 2016. Some explanations I’ve heard: he gave them a “Trump check”. A woman can’t run anything. He’s about “his business”. Many simply like his persona, and that can be enough to launch a man, especially a white one, no matter how mediocre, into the presidency.

But behind that persona is a policy apparatus that endangers women. That’s probably a positive for “red-pilled” men. Project 2025 – a set of policy plans that Trump has denied being involved with but just so happens to have been written by many of the people from his first presidential administration – would allow hospitals to deny emergency, life-saving abortions to pregnant patients while also limiting access to birth control. What can be more manly than forced births!

Some of the men trying to figure out manhood have found a home on Reddit’s Red Pill forum. But a scan of the subreddit reveals that they’re mostly trying to figure out women. There are some innocuous inquiries and comments, and there are others that spout the kind of blustering, hyperbolic nonsense that would only be articulated (one would hope) behind the secure servers of an anonymous forum.

In one post I read, a user commented that he’s happy with women having fewer rights and left “barefoot and pregnant” by authoritarian, Republican policies, because he wants a cadre of “slave girls” serving him. Outside of the virtual locker room, there are men who have reportedly been red-pilled into anti-feminist mass killings and murdering their own spouses.

These are the men swimming in the electoral pool. It’s not too late for it to be drained.