America after World War II celebrated traditional masculinity. It venerated images of the strong, silent types in popular culture, characters who exuded confidence without being braggarts and who sent the message that being an honorable man meant doing your job, being good to your family, and keeping your feelings to yourself. Heroes in that postwar culture were cowboys, soldiers, cops, and other tough guys.
Republicans, in particular, admired the actors who played these role models, including Clint Eastwood, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, and, of course, Ronald Reagan, who turned art into reality after he was shot: He apologized to his wife for forgetting to duck and kidded with his surgeons about whether they were all Republicans before they dug a bullet out of him.
After the 1960s, the GOP defined itself as a guardian of this stoic manliness in opposition to the putative femininity of Democratic men. (Remember, by this point, Democrats such as Reagan had already defected to the Republicans.) Democrats were guys who, in Republican eyes, looked like John Lennon, with ponytails and glasses and wrinkled linen shirts. To them, Democratic men weren’t men; they were boys who tore up their draft cards and cried and shouted and marched and shared their inner feelings—all of that icky stuff that real men don’t do.
These liberal men were ostensibly letting down their family and their country. This prospect was especially shameful during the Cold War against the Soviets, who were known to be virile, 10-foot-tall giants. (The Commies were so tough that they drank liquid nitrogen and smoked cigarettes made from plutonium.)
Most of this was pure hooey, of course. Anyone who grew up around the working class knew plenty of tough Democratic men; likewise, plenty of country-club Republicans never lifted anything heavier than a martini glass weighted down with cocktail onions. But when the educational divide between the right and the left grew larger, Republican men adhered even more strongly to old cultural stereotypes while Democratic men, more urbanized and educated, identified less and less with images of their fathers and grandfathers in the fields and factories.
In the age of Donald Trump, however, Republicans have become much of what they once claimed to see in Democrats. The reality is that elected Democratic leaders are now (to borrow from the title of a classic John Wayne movie) the quiet men, and Republicans have become full-on hysterics, screaming about voting machines and Hunter Biden and drag queens while trying to impeach Kamala Harris for … being female while on duty, or something.
Consider each candidate’s shortlist for vice president. Trump was choosing from a shallow and disappointing barrel that included perhaps one person—Doug Burgum—who fell into the traditional Republican-male stereotype: a calm, soft-spoken businessman in his late 60s from the Great Plains. The rest—including Byron Donalds, Marco Rubio, J. D. Vance, and Tim Scott, a man who once made his virginity a campaign issue—were like a casting sheet for a political opéra bouffe.
As I have written, Trump is hands down America’s unmanliest president, despite the weird pseudo-macho culture that his fans have created around him—and despite his moment of defiance after a bullet grazed his ear. I give him all the credit in the world for those few minutes; I have no idea if I’d have that much presence of mind with a few gallons of adrenaline barreling through my veins. But true to form, he then wallowed in the assassination attempt like the narcissist he is, regaling the faithful at the Republican National Convention about how much human ears can bleed. As it turns out, one moment of brave fist-pumping could not overcome a lifetime of unmanly behavior.
And so, Trump’s choice of Vance made sense. Vance, who honorably served four years in the Marines, is now a plutocrat who ran for Senate with artless griping about how childless cat ladies are going to destroy American civilization. It was a pick that probably seemed safe, even funny, when the Biden campaign was fading, especially if Trump thought he had found someone next to whom he could appear mature and tough.
Now consider the men on Kamala Harris’s shortlist, including Governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, and Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. All of them are men of substance who have achieved political success as Democrats in states with heavy GOP representation. They have made reputations as guys who do their job and don’t whine about it. You may take issue with some of their politics—I do—but these are serious people, unlike the performative clowns who abased themselves for a man whose values they once claimed to reject.
I do not lean in particular toward any of these shortlisters, and I have no special insight or information here that would lead me to speculate about outcomes in the veepstakes. Presidential ticket-balancing is often an ugly and unpredictable business, but I assume that Harris is not going to run on a ballot that is all female or all Black or, for that matter, all West Coast or all anything else. (The late, great P. J. O’Rourke captured the unloveliness of this process when he once snarked that, in 1988, the Democratic candidate, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, “went with the high-concept ticket-balancing choice of [Texas Senator] Lloyd Bentsen, who was two hundred fifty years old and a little to the right of Albert Speer.”)
Kelly, in particular, stands in stark contrast to the pitiable men of the national GOP. An Irish American born and raised in New Jersey, he became a pilot in the Navy after attending the United States Merchant Marine Academy. He flew 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm and then became an astronaut—just like his twin brother, Scott, who commanded the International Space Station.
On January 8, 2011, his wife, then-Representative Gabby Giffords of Arizona, was shot in the head by a deranged attacker while she was meeting with her constituents outside a supermarket. Kelly proceeded to fulfill one of the most important obligations for any man or woman: He took care of his injured family member. He retired from the military and left NASA shortly after Giffords was shot, and eight years later—after supporting Giffords through the grueling early stages of her recovery—he ran for Senate.
Kelly is not an electrifying speaker (nor is Cooper), but neither is Vance. Trump thought he was buying some sort of life story about hillbilly toughness with Vance, but he may find that his submissive running mate does not compare well with someone like the imposing Kelly, his years of military service, and his history of devotion to a wife nearly killed by an assassin.
One other thing I notice about Kelly, Shapiro, and Cooper: I hardly know what their voices sound like. John Adams once said of George Washington that he had “the gift of silence.” I wish some Republican men had it. My ears have had to endure GOP officials who cannot stop talking—the streams of gibberish from Trump, the self-contradicting sophism of Lindsey Graham, the babbling of the insufferable Vivek Ramaswamy. It is a relief to hear men who talk like normal human beings instead of like a raging street preacher or the Guy Everyone Hated in Their Graduate Seminar.
More than 40 years ago, the British singer Joe Jackson wrote a song about men, their changing roles, and sexual identity. “But now and then,” he sang, “we wonder who the real men are.” I don’t know the answer; like most men, I have tried to find my own way as a man, as a husband, and as a father. I’ve tried to learn from my own father’s mistakes while emulating his better qualities. I know that, like many men, I’ve failed more often than I’ve succeeded. But I keep trying.
I also know this: The real men are not the ones who have to keep crowing about manliness and putting down women. Real men serve their nation, their community, and their family, and unlike Trump and his elected Republican coterie, they do it without whining or demanding credit.
Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic and an author of the Atlantic Daily newsletter. He is a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years, and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School.
