Twentysomething writer Jordan Jantz recently did an amazing thing — she wrote a piece about her and her friends’ frustrations with modern dating, about “broken hearts and faltering dreams,” without blaming men, and without a negative reference to even one individual man. I read her piece three times just to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.
It’s not a coincidence that Jantz’s column has only appeared in conservative publications. Man-bashing is ubiquitous on the Left — I know, I’m on the Left, and I see the damage it causes.
Democrats worry over their problems attracting male voters and ask, “Why would men vote for Trump?” Please allow me to help.
In President Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address, he said:
“Rusted-out factories [are] scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. … One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind. … We will bring back our jobs. … We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.”
As deindustrialization tore gaping holes in what had been a prosperous American working class, both political parties largely ignored it. The key to Trump’s success is not his charisma, his immigrant bashing, his “America First” nationalism, his anti-DEI and anti-transgender crusades, his pledges to “drain the swamp,” or his braggadocio and bombast. It’s that he focused on this vital issue, and pledged to reshore and restore American industries and the good-paying jobs they once provided.
The Left is incapable of acknowledging that there are any special challenges that men face as men, and thus have failed to see the particular importance of living wage jobs to men.
Try to imagine a man who is unable to earn a decent living but is still respected and taken seriously by women and/or by other men. You can’t.
The shortage of living wage jobs greatly hurts women too, but a woman is still valued as a girlfriend or wife, a mother, a grandmother. She also has more access to government assistance.
The SAM Project found that for young men, “Expectations to provide and protect remain strong, even as the pathways to meeting those expectations feel increasingly unclear or out of reach.”
Re: Young men struggling to meet expectations, take a look at what women post on social media about what they expect from a man — if you dare.
The “date deposits” women say they now require before they’ll go out with a guy. The ubiquitous “6-6-6” — women’s demand that a man must earn a six-figure income, be 6 feet tall, and have … you can guess. The endless lists of petty “icks” that can immediately disqualify a man from receiving a woman’s affection.
The “ick” generally happens when the man is perceived as doing something unmasculine, such as using a cursive font on his phone, not wanting to get wet as he takes his laundry from his car, flinching when a needle is stuck into him to draw blood, and countless others. But being unable to earn a decent living is the ultimate “ick.”
I don’t suggest real women are anywhere near as bad as some of what we see on social media — they couldn’t possibly be. But picture yourself as a young working-class man who has been unable to secure a living wage job and must compete for these women’s affections.
In 2024, Trump’s comeback was mainly propelled by nostalgia for the strong pre-COVID Trump economy and Trump’s vigorous emphasis on jobs.
Trump leverages America’s economic and military might to strong-arm other countries into giving us better terms of trade, and hopes his tariffs, forgiving environmental policies, and low taxes will spur domestic manufacturing and encourage businesses to expand. His deportations are meant, in part, to reduce competition for jobs and drive up wages. Regardless of whether any of these will actually work, and regardless of the collateral damage they’re causing, for a man struggling to find a decent place in the modern economy, they’re perceived as good news.
The term “fragile masculinity” — anxiety among males who feel they do not meet cultural standards of masculinity — is often used to deride men, but there’s real truth to it. Men’s position in society, and even in their own families, is often precarious. Job loss and economic failure can cost a man his marriage and his children, which we often saw during the Great Recession.
The late country artist Toby Keith captured many men’s fears in his hit “Who’s That Man” about a divorced father who’s been … replaced. In the song, Keith pulls up near his former home:
“Fight the tears back with a smile/ Stop and look for a little while/ Oh, it’s plain to see/ The only thing missin’ is me/ That’s my house and that’s my car/ That’s my dog in my backyard…/ I planted that tree out by the fence/ Not long after we moved in/ There’s my kids and that’s my wife/ But who’s that man runnin’ my life?”
In the video, Keith, parked outside in his old pickup truck, sees his son run out the front door. He smiles brightly and begins to get out of the truck to run to embrace him, but quickly slumps — the boy only went outside for a moment to bring the dog in.
Some men fear, quite legitimately, that the only thing separating them from a similar fate is their job and their ability to earn a decent living.
It is in divorce court that left-wing ideology and the Democrats’ handiwork most directly affects men.
After divorce, if you lose your job or get a cut in pay, you may struggle just to stay out of jail. No, courts usually won’t reduce your child support (a “downward modification”) just because you can’t pay it — the “Top 10 Deadbeat Dad” lists district attorneys post rarely contain men with decent jobs. They instead mostly feature low-income working-class men who owe child support arrearages inflated by usurious interest rates and amount to sums they could never hope to pay off.
Your ex-wife may or may not allow you access to your children, and if she doesn’t, the courts will do little to enforce your parenting time. That’s if your children still want to see you — your ex may have bad-mouthed you in front of them, or worse, completely alienated them from you, and no, the courts rarely do anything about that either.
I worked in family law for years — I wish I could tell you all this isn’t true, but it is. The family law system is designed to combat and punish irresponsible fathers, and barely seems to notice it’s punishing masses of responsible, loving fathers too.
The left-wing media — with its caricatures of fathers as slackers and deadbeats — helps grease the skids for treating fathers this way, even though research has consistently shown that, when in intact families, fathers do as much for their families as mothers do.
Every man knows a father or a half dozen fathers who’ve gone through some variation of this in divorce. On some level, these men understand that it is mostly liberals and Democrats, spurred on by their well-organized, energetic base of feminist supporters, who have made the system so injurious and unjust to them. (To be fair, it should be noted that Republicans have also played a role in creating and perpetuating this mess.)
Why Trump? During the 1970s, the battle over court-ordered busing rocked Los Angeles. My uncle, a liberal man, was dismayed that, under the busing plan, his daughter was going to be bused to a middle school in distant South Central LA.
I’LL SAY WHAT MOST REPUBLICANS WON’T: JD VANCE COULD COST US 2028
He surprised us by voting for Ronald Reagan in 1980. His explanation? “Those liberals who want to put my daughter on a bus to a dangerous neighborhood three hours a day — we gave them Reagan!”
For a decade, some American men, cognizant to varying degrees of how the Left ignores, belittles, and undermines them, have thought, “Let’s give them Trump!”
Glenn Sacks’s columns on gender issues and politics have appeared in many of America’s largest publications.