It’s a sign of health in a publication when it dares sustain disagreement. And so it speaks well of New York magazine that it is willing to publish two points of view on what seems to be that most pressing of questions, which is, “Are Men Beasts?”
On the “yes” side, Rebecca Traister weighed in on June 29, describing herself and her friends as “Panicking. Nauseated. Heads and hearts pounding” at the coming retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy and the thought of his replacement by our own homegrown class of despotic oppressors: white men.
But does she mean men, or white men, or Republicans? The latter are the ones with the chokehold on power that makes her so anxious — the House, the Senate, the state houses, the White House, and perhaps soon the High Court as well.
The Democrats lost the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014 because former President Barack Obama passed an unpopular healthcare bill by what Republicans considered unfair, illegal, and devious measures. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to lose what many considered a sure-shot election to a truly unpopular man.
A biracial president and a woman who is an open and enthusiastic abortion supporter brought us to this misogynist nightmare that Traister finds so appalling. Truly, the world’s evolution out of the darkness is a long, halting struggle that does not always proceed at one pace.
It’s true, as Traister argues, that the Founders did not imagine a country in which nonwhites and women held power. But in the world that they lived in, few men outside the Anglosphere or the nobility held any power at all. A democratic republic was a stunning leap forward at the time.
And if the Founders were unable to see into the future, they at least made sure it would not be constrained by the past. The only rules they laid down for the holding of office concerned age (and native birth, in the case of the president) and were elastic enough to absorb and incorporate the millions of non-Anglo immigrants, the blacks emancipated when the Civil War ended, and the women who moved on from the home.
In 1928, Al Smith lost, partly because he was Catholic. But John F. Kennedy won in 1960 and the religious bar vanished. In 1996, Republicans tried to draft Colin Powell, and 12 years later, the color bar fell as well.
In 2016, the early Republican field contained one black man (now in the Cabinet), one woman, and two Hispanic senators who are the children of immigrants. Three current black sitting senators are probably thinking of running for president, as are five or six of the women now in high public office.
If we’re honest about today’s situation, then “privilege” takes on a new definition. Instead of gender or race, it pertains to access to the “knowledge economy.” A biracial, bisexual blogger who can move his gig anywhere is “privileged” next to the white, male worker whose factory shuttered and has nowhere to go for a job.
This leaves Andrew Sullivan with a few words for Traister’s lament that young, male millennials have turned against Democrats since the election in 2016. He writes: “When the Democratic party and its mainstream spokespersons use the term ‘white male’ as an insult, when they describe vast swathes of white men in America as ‘problematic,’ when they call struggling, working-class white men ‘privileged,’ when they ask in their media if it’s okay just to hate men, and white men in particular, maybe white men hear it.”
And just maybe they vote against the people saying it, too.
