How Democrats can win over more men
James Carville thinks the party's message is "too feminine." I disagree.
Longtime Democratic Party strategist James Carville is in the news again, this time for saying “unwoke” stuff about women. He spoke with Maureen Dowd for the New York Times about the upcoming election, and here’s the wild part:
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females [dominating the Democratic Party.] ‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’ If you listen to Democratic elites—NPR is my go-to place for that—the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?’”
Setting aside the absurdity of labeling concerns about climate change “feminine,” I’m glad he said it. Not because I agree. But because it gives me a chance to talk about a suspicion I’ve had ever since I became a therapist three years ago. I think—counter to Carville—that the Democratic Party’s message isn’t feminine enough.
I’m playing with the words a little.
What I mean by “feminine” is a nod to what we think of as “women’s work,” household labor that goes unpaid and underappreciated. Even as more women have entered the workforce, they still take on an unfair amount of childcare, cleaning, and other forms of domestic work, often working a “second shift” at home. Younger generations of men are taking on more of this labor. Men have doubled the time we spend on housework since 1965. But women still take on too much. If American women made minimum wage for all the unpaid work they perform at home, they would earn over an estimated $1.5 trillion a year.
We think of this work as “feminine” because—we are told—women are “naturally” more nurturing, taking care of kids and the home out of love rather than for money. But this isn’t true. There is no biological or historical basis for it. It’s a myth that was invented around 200-300 years ago to manage a major, world-altering shift in the workforce caused by the beginning of capitalism.
In western Europe in the early 1800s, “[Governments] largely looked on from the sidelines as industrialists [forced] newly proletarianized people, including women and children, into the factories and mines,” philosopher Nancy Fraser explains. “The result was a crisis of [care work,] which prompted a public outcry and campaigns for ‘protective legislation.’ Recasting [care work] as the province of women within the private family, [capitalism] invented the new, bourgeois imaginary of domesticity,” the idea that women were naturally cut out for housework. As Italian feminist Silvia Federici has documented, the women who resisted this shift were called “witches” and burned at the stake.
Before capitalism, everyone shared in work and home duties to different degrees in different societies. Work wasn’t always fairly distributed, but it wasn’t so gender specific. For example, most indigenous peoples in what are now the Americas raised children collectively. Federici writes:
“In the [European] feudal village ... all work contributed to the family’s sustenance. Women worked in the fields, in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an herb garden. Their domestic activities were not devalued and did not involve different social relations from those of men, as they would later, in [capitalism] when housework would cease to be viewed as real work."
The Democrat message isn’t feminine enough because it doesn’t address the major shift in the workforce happening right now.
More and more women are working outside the home, many breaking into high-paying occupations and outpacing men in educational attainment. Three-quarters of women ages 25-54 have a job today, compared with slightly more than two-thirds a decade ago. In 1950, only half did. Today, about a third of marriages are “egalitarian,” with both partners contributing roughly half of the couple’s combined earnings. That compares to little more than 10 percent in 1972. Yes, the average woman still earns 83 cents for every dollar paid to a man. But even that is shifting: In some cities, women are now out-earning their male counterparts.
This is contributing to what Fraser calls a “crisis of care.” Not because women did anything wrong, but because of rising economic inequality. It now takes most families two incomes to survive, leaving both partners juggling full-time jobs with the “adulting” of childcare and housework. Also because government has for decades been cutting public budgets for health, education, welfare, and other programs that care for people. The U.S. is the least family-friendly country in the industrialized world. “Capitalism is stretching our ‘caring’ energies to the breaking point,” Fraser says.
Meanwhile, more and more men are struggling. Since the late 1960s, hourly earnings for men have stayed mostly flat after inflation and even dropped at times. Nearly half of the progress made toward closing the gender pay gap over that time has been due to men making less money. Men are now more likely than women to live with parents. And less likely to graduate high school or finish college. And less likely to go to grad school. And much more likely to die by suicide.
Carville is right that Democrats have a man problem.
Recent polling reveals a record shift in recent years toward men preferring the Republican Party. I think journalist
’s explanation for why in his newsletter makes sense: “In modern times, the Republican Party has forced itself into the extraordinary challenge of selling policies that would serve ever fewer people to a majority. So they have learned how to speak to people.”One of the ways they are speaking to people is pushing the idea that masculinity is under attack. U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) writes in his 2023 book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, “No menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood, the collapse of masculine strength.” Men’s concerns about failing to meet the standards of so-called “traditional masculinity” are second to only party affiliation at predicting whether someone will vote for Trump.
But the answer for Democrats isn’t to stop talking about issues affecting women, like reproductive rights (and, apparently, climate change). The answer is to talk about (and actually do something about) the many challenges all of us who aren’t rich are facing.
Working people, whatever our gender expression or racial identity, are struggling in the same uphill battle. Over the last 40 years, economic inequality has grown wider and wider. Government rules and regulations are increasingly rigged to help corporations and the rich. The cost of housing continues to skyrocket. Despite union popularity at historic highs, union membership continues to decrease. Americans work more hours than workers in other developed countries—compared to Switzerland, we work seven weeks more each year! The cost of childcare is up 32 percent from 2019. No wonder birthrates in America have declined across racial and ethnic groups over the past 15 years.
So many of the men who come to me for therapy are navigating issues created or exacerbated by this inequality.
Many of them have decent-paying jobs, and they still struggle to balance work and home, being a partner and being a parent. Their relationship is fraying under the weight of parenting while working full-time. They’re constantly running from one thing to the next, struggling to be present for any of it. They’re also confused about what it means to be a man these days, as the old script of being a provider and protector is slipping away.
It's small sample size, but these are the same things I’m dealing with. And the same thing many of my guy friends are dealing with. We’re not alone. More than half of young men believe men have a harder time in America today than women.
Democrats can’t let Republicans own the conversation by blaming men’s struggles on feminism, “wokeness,” and trans people. They can’t let right-wing fantasies to “Make America Great Again” by going back to the 1950s and marrying “trad wives” be all that men see on offer.
In that sense, Carville is correct. But he’s wrong about what to do about it. The answer is to talk about and address the crisis of care that’s affecting everyone who isn’t rich. We need publicly funded childcare. We need to work less hours for the same pay. We need mandatory paid family leave. We need massive public investment in elderly care, mental health care, education, and so much more.
To be fair, some Democrats have proposed these things. Bernie Sanders recently proposed a four-day workweek bill. Elizabeth Warren has campaigned on universal childcare. But rarely do they go far enough. The federal Build Back Better legislation proposed but ultimately abandoned in 2021 had good intentions but was, in the words of Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, “chock-full of the frustrating, cruel, and self-defeating features characteristic of most Democratic welfare policy: direct and indirect exclusions of the poor, benefit cliffs, privatization, and invitations for state-level nonparticipation and sabotage.”
Bruenig continues:
“Socializing the costs of having children should be done through publicly administered, universal, easy-to-use programs. These kinds of programs are better on the merits and more likely to promote the kind of solidarity around the welfare state that is necessary to protect and expand social benefits in the future.”
Carville once famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” His latest quip sends the same message: When it comes to elections, don’t talk about things that don’t impact everyone. But the economy is more than money and jobs. It’s also what happens at home. And pretty much everyone—regardless of gender—is struggling there too.
Now, a question for the comments below: How are you doing with “adulting?”
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