Douthat: Masculinity on the ballot, but without much insight

By Ross Douthat / The New York Times

Amid all the joy and positivity and the big, beautiful polling surges for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the word has gone out: This election isn’t going to be a referendum on inflation, immigration or foreign policy anymore. It’s going to be a referendum on masculinity in America.

The choice is clear. On one side, there’s the enlightened maleness embodied by Harris’ 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 J.D. 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.

Most caricatures fasten on some aspect of reality, and the American right in the Trump era does indeed encompass frankly sexist ideas and influences; from Andrew Tate epigones looking for permission to be playboys to would-be patriarchs resentful that the women of America won’t cooperate.

But has liberalism perfected a model of modern masculinity while conservative culture slouches somewhere far behind? I’m skeptical, on three distinct grounds.

First, I would have thought that by now that liberals would be hesitant about proclaiming the special personal virtues of the male feminist, the enlightened pro-abortion rights dude. After Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and Harvey Weinstein, after #MeToo case studies too numerous to count, surely we can say that sleaze percolates on the left and right alike, that predators can exploit liberated mores as easily as traditional ones, that the “deferential” and “committed to partnership” guy can be subject to the same temptations as the conservative male breadwinner.

Especially since the nice-guy narrative around Emhoff, deputized at one point to speak against toxic masculinity, has already suffered a bit from the revelation that the second gentleman was not enough of a gentleman in his first marriage to avoid falling into an affair with a teacher at his children’s elementary school.

Second, the thing that Beauchamp calls “neo-patriarchy” and that I would call “neo-traditionalism” — a strong, religiously motivated commitment to marriage and family — does not necessarily have the anti-feminist, back-to-the-kitchen effects that are supposedly inherent to the vision.

Beauchamp cites Vance and Josh Hawley as apostles of neo-patriarchy; but both men have extremely successful lawyer wives. He links to work by sociologist Brad Wilcox and demographer Lyman Stone; but both of them have emphasized that neo-traditional households actually show relatively egalitarian patterns of burden-sharing between spouses and strong paternal involvement in child rearing.

In the sociological data and my own personal experience of neo-trad culture, what Beauchamp calls an attempted “reversal” of the feminist revolution often looks much more like an adaptation to feminism: an attempt to mix its insights with older ones, creating a culture of marriage and, yes, large families that also allows for various models of female work; from homemaking to the part-time juggle to the full Amy Coney Barrett.

Has this emergent culture figured everything out? Of course not. But if conservative forms of fatherhood were obviously toxic relative to the Walzian glories of liberal dadhood, you would presumably expect to see those effects made manifest among children. And this is the third reason to doubt the caricature of cool liberal fathers and toxic right-wing dads: If you look at the data on the teenage mental-health crisis of the past decade, the indicators are conspicuously worse for liberal kids, who are seemingly more anxious and depressed than their conservative peers.

Indeed, if I were interested in spinning up a counter-caricature, I would suggest that a “cool progressive dad” model of parenting may create special problems for teenagers, because it’s rooted in a misguided belief that kids are supposed to be more enlightened than their parents, that a good dad just listens and learns from his wise progressive teenager. In fact, most children need more discipline, adult guidance and psychological-religious grounding before they’re ready to teach their parents anything; so being a cool progressive parent is often a good way to set your kids adrift.

But of course returning a caricature for a caricature just makes the whole world blind.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.