STOP SAYING ECONOMIC ANXIETY.
After three presidential election cycles, news media and pollsters still take this flimsy excuse at face value. Why?
My reaction to this headline was a primal scream.
I cannot take this anymore. I cannot take this willful blindness that the media and pollsters utilize. I understand there is a need to accept people’s answers as truthful, lest we end up in a world where nothing can be trusted, but I am so sick to death of journalists not doing the hard work. It’s willful ignorance verging on journalistic malpractice.
It's not the economy they're anxious about. It's a world in which they don't control everything that scares them! How do I know this? Because for the last three elections now with Donald Trump at the top of the Republican ticket, it's always "white men" or "black men" or "Latino men" or "young men" that are “turning from Democrats to Trump because they have anxiety over their declining economic prospects.” Never mind that Trump’s economy crashed during COVID and a lot of men, myself included, have yet to fully recover. Never mind that it’s been proven that grocery price inflation is a deliberate corporate manipulation of the economy. Never mind that in the Forbes 400 for 2024, 333/400 billionaires are men. Never mind that union organizing and improved wages have yielded great results for a lot of working class men in the past four years. Never mind that farmers aren’t seeing their livelihoods destroyed by a stupid tariff war under Democrats.
There’s a lot of reasons, easily found, in which any man can see that Republicans and Donald Trump especially have been destroying their economic prospects. They’re not pressed on this, though. They aren’t asked by any journalist worth a damn to explain themselves. They aren’t shown evidence of how their excuse for choosing Trump is just a bunch of crap. Their words are just accepted as gospel, and splashed across headlines by the New York Times and NBC.
No.
This has everything to do with gender, and I will die on this hill. It’s about Me Too and accountability for sexual harassment and sexual violence. It’s about women being in leadership positions more often. It’s about people that Are Not Like Them emerging in the workforce, unwilling to stay in the shadows. It’s about women who don’t want to date men that belittle them, demean them, and think they aren’t good enough to compete. Women have been rising up since Trump’s 2016 victory, and have had enough of men trying to ban healthcare for them, had enough of men trying to prevent them traveling across state lines because “they might be pregnant and getting an abortion,” and had enough of men that are not even able to explain basic reproductive functions dictate whether they will live or die.
This makes men frustrated and angry, and they won’t go do the hard work, examine themselves, see where they’ve behaved badly, and change. You know how I know this? I was one of them. I fell into a place over a decade ago where I allowed the bad results of my past dictate my behavior going forward. I let toxic relationships where I’d been treated poorly make me toxic, and I became someone I’m not proud of. I slept around and then moved on to the next woman, definitely hurting some of those women in the process. I treated these women as disposable and wouldn’t “catch feelings” because I’d get “taken advantage of” again. This happened at a time where, yes, my economic prospects had badly bottomed out post-2008.
The thing is, I recognized it, worked hard to be better, learn where I went wrong, to listen to women and not avoid the truth—I was the problem. I know that not being the alpha scares a lot of men, and I know that saying "toxic masculinity" is now considered unfair somehow because it “tarnishes all men,” but too often, their gut reaction to a changing world is embracing the Donald Trumps and Andrew Tates and every misogynistic, sexually abusive shitbag they can latch on to. Russell Brand’s opportunistic conversion to Christianity happened suspiciously fast after he was outed as a serial sexual abuser. Jordan Peterson is a violent alcoholic who puts a erudite spin on his misogyny. Tate is on trial for human trafficking of underage girls. Trump has been found guilty of sexual battery in a civil case. These are not role models, and they are not going to fix the economy magically, or make the myriad issues these men face go away. They’re going to help their male billionaires remain wealthy, remain in charge of the levers of power, and use the laws and the courts they’ve spent decades taking over to repress women, repress minorities, and enable a fascist agenda.
Just like the men of Nazi Germany, they know what it is, and they like it. It’s a sense of purpose. They like controlling others. They like being the ones holding the whip or the truncheon. It goes hand in hand with their fetish for guns. Trent Reznor recognized this thirty years ago when he wrote Big Man With A Gun on the epic Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral.
I am a big man, yes I am
And I have a big gun
Got me a big old dick and I
I like to have fun
Held against your forehead
I'll make you suck it
Maybe I'll put a hole in your head
You know, just for the fuck of it
I can reduce you if I want, I can devour
I'm hard as fucking steel, and I've got the power
I'm every inch a man, and I'll show you somehow
Me and my fucking gun
Nothing can stop me now
Reznor has always been a keen observer of American culture from the day he burst on the scene thirty-five years ago. He grew up in an evangelical family and saw the confluence of patriarchy, religion, and guns. Every one of those words is what these men think and why they are so dead-set on owning the biggest and the most guns they can. It’s not an accident. It’s by design. It’s malign forces playing to the darkness inside of us, and these men take the bait because it’s just so much harder to go do the work, to examine one’s own actions and take responsibility for them.
In a time of darkness, where fascism is taking hold, where the media is failing to call things for what they are, using weasel words like “nativist” and “fascination with genetics and genes” to describe blatant racism and fascist wishes, when women are dying in parking lots and emergency rooms because ignorant men with tiny dicks can’t fathom not controlling their bodies and use the power of the law to do so, I will no longer accept any excuses.
They enjoy the power. They enjoy the cruelty. They enjoy punching down. It’s up to the rest of us to stand up and call them on their self-pitying bullshit.