Charlie Kirk’s audience consisted to a large extent of resentful young white men who felt that modern society wasn’t delivering the status that they deserved.
Given MAGA’s brazen attempts to exploit Kirk’s murder to suppress freedom of expression, I’m sure someone will call what I just said hate speech. But it’s actually just an honest description of reality.
The thing is, there are real reasons for the upsurge in resentment by young white males. American men have in important ways been hurt by the changes in our society over the past several decades. Richard Reeves published an excellent book about the subject, “Of Boys and Men,” in 2022. And yes, he has a Substack. He discusses a wide variety of topics. What I want to focus on, enlarging his analysis, is the economic side of the problem of men in America. The most important aspect of that side is the growing number of men in their prime working years who are not in the labor force. Reproducing a chart from Tuesday’s post, here’s the percentage of men between 25 and 54 who are neither working nor actively searching for work — a group that was tiny before 1970 but substantial now:
Clearly, something has gone wrong for prime working-age American men. And the demoralization caused by the decline in economic opportunity fuels political radicalization.
What caused the large decline in workforce participation by prime-age men? What are the social consequences of that decline? Those are big questions that deserve an extended treatment, which I’ll try to provide in Sunday’s primer.
For today, I want to focus on the ways MAGA – including the late Charlie Kirk — have been exploiting men’s problems for political gain. While these problems are real, MAGA’s explanations are fake. And because MAGA’s explanations are fake, it can offer no real solutions. It only offers an ever-escalating story of victimization and outrage.
Despite the unremitting chaos, there is an underlying unifying theme in Trump’s economic policy: that he will avenge men’s loss of status and bring back “manly jobs” by going after those he considers the villains — cheating international trading partners, lying environmentalists and supporters of renewable energy, the federal “deep state”, and sneering intellectuals.
This witch-hunt won’t help American men. Yet Trump is not wrong in his belief that there are fewer “manly” jobs than there used to be. Today’s American jobs are less gender-coded than they were 30 to 40 years ago. Claudia Goldin (winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics), termed this phenomenon the “quiet revolution” – a revolution in the workplace in which large numbers of women moved into white-collar occupations that were previously dominated by men. But to this day that revolution is incomplete. Many occupations and industries remain overwhelmingly male or female. Notably, more than three-quarters of workers in health care and social assistance are women; around 70 percent of workers in manufacturing are men.
And outside relatively gender-neutral white-collar occupations, the economy as a whole has been shifting away from male-coded jobs toward female-coded jobs. The chart below shows the shares of employment in health care and social assistance (blue line) and manufacturing (dashed green line) since 1990:
Trump’s claim is that through a combination of tariffs and “drill, baby, drill” he can reverse the loss of male-coded jobs. In fact, as I’ll explain in next Sunday’s primer, Trump’s policies will do little to restore “manly” manufacturing jobs. That would be true even if those policies were competently designed – which they aren’t. Moreover, the extreme uncertainty that Trump has inflicted on the economy has resulted in the lowest hiring rate (excluding the depths of the pandemic) since 2013.
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.
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. Yet there’s no question that the MAGA-sphere brilliantly exploited the American male’s sense of economic and social loss. In 2024 a significant number of men, especially young men, believed Trump’s promises that he could bring back a masculine economy that would restore them to the status they believed they deserved. Charlie Kirk’s influence arguably delivered victory to Trump in the 2024 election.
And even now, as the economy deteriorates and the country has incurred a net loss in manufacturing jobs, young men are far more likely than young women to approve of Trump’s job performance:
Source: NBC News
I expect that, over time, Trump’s approval among young men will fade as it becomes clear that he is utterly failing to deliver on his promises.
But it’s important to acknowledge that, while Trump succeeded in politically exploiting men’s problems and sense of grievance at a crucial moment, 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 the jobs the 21st-century economy actually creates. Richard Reeves calls them HEAL occupations — 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. We can and should have many more male schoolteachers. There is no reason more men shouldn’t be providing the kind of care we traditionally associate with female nurses. And we can help attract men into these occupations in part by increasing the wages HEAL occupations pay, through a combination of increased funding, educational outreach and unionization.
We can also make it easier for men to acquire the skills needed for these jobs with policies like free community college and apprenticeship programs. And, yes, these are long-standing Democratic proposals: Hillary Clinton advocated free community college in 2016 and Biden advocated apprenticeship programs during his presidency. And we can subsidize the manufacturing sectors of the future, not those of the past — like green energy and electricity infrastructure, as Biden did during his presidency.
What about Charlie Kirk’s push to restore men’s lost status by advocating that women marry and have children at a younger age? The way to get there isn’t to repress women’s ambition. As pro-natalist countries like Sweden have shown, nations can make it easier to combine motherhood with a career by greatly expanding access to child care as well as paid maternity and paternity leave, although the effects on fertility rates may be limited.
You won’t be hearing proposals along these lines from the MAGAsphere, which is seeking to exploit men’s troubles, not solve them. MAGA opportunistically portrays the solution to men’s distress as a zero-sum game: in order to improve the status of American men, we have to “take back” from the usual suspects – women, our trading partners, the intellectual elites, environmentalists, the “deep state” and the historically disadvantaged.
And it's time for Democrats as a party to do the following: (1) acknowledge that American men are having real problems; (2) state clearly that MAGA has no solutions and is exploiting their distress for political ends; and (3) advocate for effective policies to help them, as well as promising responsible stewardship of the economy.
Last, but not least, Democratic leadership must adopt a cohesive and engaged agenda that actively calls out and addresses the problems of American men, as well as decrying MAGA’s naked incitement in the wake of Kirk’s murder. For as Trump and Charlie Kirk have devastatingly shown, and the failures of Biden’s campaign painfully reinforced, direct engagement matters. It’s time for the Democrats to step up.
I am a retired nurse educator who taught at the community college, baccalaureate and graduate levels. Community college lift people out of poverty. When I taught in the community college, 20-25% of my students were male. At the BSN level it was less than 5%. We need more men in health care. And patients need to stop assuming that male nurses and orderlies ate doctors.
The "male jobs" they are bringing back seem to be in ICE