Exploiting Male Rage

This anthropologist spoke before the UN about Islamic radicalization. It's not hard to see that a similar sort of radicalization is happening to white men in the US, and Europe for that matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbirlSA-dc

In both cases the target are people who are aimless, and they're promised a cause to fight for, add a bit of religion because it's an undisputable "Truth" (never mind that the Truth is whatever the leader declares to be true).

True. And yet, lately the left's explanations have also been fake, only offering an escalating story of blame and shame. No real surprise that, given the choice between the left's message that it's all their fault ("white fragility", "toxic masculinity", and such), and MAGA's story that they're the victim, they have chosen to believe MAGA.

If the left wants to stop this, if they want to stop breeding the resentment that MAGA exploited, they need a more compelling story than blaming everything on whites and males, and white males in particular.

Krugman's solutions are underwhelming. Raise pay for occupations like nursing? Yeah, we've already got a problem with affordability of medical care. And there's no appetite for raising taxes to pay for it. Deficit spending? That's eventually going to ruin us.

Unions? We've already got that for occupations like teachers; the pay is still lousy. And I don't want to need to go to the hospital when there's a nursing strike.

But at least he's admitting that there's a real problem, and that what the Democrats have been doing hasn't addressed it, either practically or politically. That's something.

That said, I think he is very wrong, and I'm puzzled as to how he starts with the premises and apparent empathy that he does while coming to those conclusions. Editing it down to the crux:

> ... the problem of white male grievance is not going away. Democrats must embrace proposals that would help makes men’s lives better. What would a real solution to men’s economic problems look like? It wouldn’t involve trying to recreate an imaginary past when men had manly jobs and women knew their place. What we can do is help men to take [jobs in] health, education, administration and literacy. Many of these occupations are female-coded and have become more so over time, partly because they’re underpaid. But they don’t have to be.... And we can help attract men into these occupations in part by increasing [salaries]...

First off, this is not about race, and Krugman knows it is not about race, because every argument he makes ignores race, and so does every piece of evidence he brings. Bringing race into it serves to reinforce a narrative that associates "American" with "white" and "immigrant" (especially illegal ones) with "not-white" and imply that right-wingers speak in code along those lines. This is an underhanded rhetorical technique, where intentional, and if Krugman is not doing it intentionally I think he really ought to know better.

Second, "women knowing their place" has nothing to do with it. Pointing out the second-order societal consequences (which Krugman acknowledges) of gender equality is not calling for it to be reverted.

Third and most importantly: yes, you absolutely can bring back "manly" jobs (by which Krugman mainly seems to mean manufacturing). As long as there are physical goods, there will be manufacturing. As long as resources are required, there will be resource extraction. Turning away from oil and drilling doesn't mean turning away from energy use (and there are any number of other useful things to mine). Solar panels need to be manufactured to be used. Electricity has to get used for something. If you want to bring in immigrants, surely you also want housing to exist for them? That housing has to be constructed. The notion that we have to abandon this market sector sounds to me a lot like the "degrowth" mindset, which is strange coming from Krugman, an economist.

Sure, technology is obviating a lot of jobs traditionally done by men. It's also creating jobs predominantly done by men. The printing press, steam engine, cotton gin, combine tractor etc. all didn't kill traditional masculinity, so why should computers and robots? The problem is that there's a culture that refuses to let anything positive or valuable become too "male-coded" (Krugman's term) lest that be lorded over everyone as evidence of male supremacy (at least, is the only motive I can understand). Which is how you get the persecution of James Damore or anyone else who defends the notion that a male-dominated workplace might not be evidence of a moral fault of the company.

Finally: speaking of gender stereotyping, you can't just make men want those jobs by making them higher paid. (I also wonder exactly how Krugman, an economist, proposes to do that, that wouldn't be counterproductive to the goal of allowing more men to do them.) In my opinion, creating that kind of market distortion would have the opposite effect in the current political climate, actually. It would come across as trying to favour women (who already have most of those jobs) over men even more.

Maybe it's not the greatest idea to associate traditional masculinity with physical toil and anti-intellectualism, either. (I wonder how masculine Krugman's self-perception is?)

If you want young men to see education as appealing, then you need to do something about the horrible stereotypes that go around about male educators, especially for the tiny minority of them in early childhood education. If you want them to see administration as appealing, then you need to do something about the perception of HR departments.

And if you want them to "provide the kind of care we traditionally associate with nurses", then you need to understand that if your idea of "traditional" goes back further than the 50s and 60s that people keep insisting the Republicans want to go back to, this is generally physically impossible (https://www.etymonline.com/word/nurse). Yes, yes, I know what Krugman means, but that's the point. Call them "doctor". Call the existing RNs doctors too. Or invent something else that accurately describes the role. But if you want cisgender men with traditional values to feel like they're doing something that men have social license to do, don't use a word for it that has since time immemorial been associated with breastfeeding.

Think about it: regardless of the gender dynamics, that's a bad evolution. A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country. In that respect, health care and social assistance are as good as hawking crypto-coins and social media influencing.

> While Trump is telling Americans that he can bring back traditional manly jobs, Charlie Kirk called for a return to traditional gender roles — getting women to marry and have children young rather than focus on career.

And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction. It's a shortsighted optimization with severe medium to long term problems, a lot like industrial pollution. Of course someone like Krugman will try to hand-wave that problem away with immigration, but the math there just doesn't work. As best, that's like moving the factory overseas to destroy some poorer person's environment instead of yours. Birthrates are declining everywhere, including in poor countries. Worldwide fertility is at replacement and dropping. The poor places will get depopulated (e.g. poor elderly left without caretakers), and eventually fail to provide the needed replacement workers.

> Like Trump’s job promises, Kirk’s prescriptions were impossible. We will never return the share of manufacturing in the economy to 1950s levels, and neither will women eschew birth control and quit their careers.

Is Krugman that dumb? Nothing like that impossible. Imagining history as a ratchet moving monotonically to more progressivism is a delusion (see: Trump and the failure of minorities to cooperate with the predictions in "The Emerging Democratic Majority"). I mean, trivially, given enough time anything possible will inevitably happen. 1950s American society happened, so is possible, so something like it can happen again.