The curdling of the American man Highlight

There has been a growing chorus of mostly men on the left since 2016 who are indignant that Democrats have to care about “purity politics” or “wokeness” or “moderation” while President Donald Trump and the Republicans are allowed to pursue their thousand-year BurgerReich. These men have also come to believe that the only way forward for Democrats is to match aggression with aggression. And, in almost all cases, aggression means masculinity. Writer Yasmin Nair pointed this out in an excellent Current Affairs piece last year, writing, “The left has a masculinity problem, in that most of its men are not the conventionally heroic type, and it tends to swoon when it sees an ex-military dude with muscles and tattoos turned ex-Blackwater operative turned oyster farmer.” Ouch lol. But I’d go even further.

The left’s burning desire for a muscleman of their own isn’t just a masculinity problem. Yes, the curdling of the American man is clearly affecting all men, regardless of whether they’re watching Joe Rogan or Hasan Piker. But the desperation to defend Platner also comes from a bizarre contradiction that has emerged on the left since Trump entered office. There is a deeply-rooted sneering, condescending inability to imagine that working people — and working class men, who always are assumed to be white in these instances — could ever vote for anyone other than a slovenly, alcoholic townie oaf. And there is a borderline pathological insistence that policies like free healthcare, antitrust regulation, student debt relief, and a rebuke of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, if shouted by a white guy in his pickup truck, could somehow, magically fix the social and racial and religious divides that have opened up into yawning chasms during the Trump era. The same leftists cheering for the DSA upset in New York last month — which was led almost entirely by women of color — are completely unable to imagine that anything like that could work in the small town America populated by noble savages they imagine in their heads. Platner, for all his unending messiness, was the easy way out. The choice that meant your favorite podcaster could be anti-Trump, but didn’t have to sound “woke,” or feminine, or whatever.