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REAL MEN REJECT FASCISM  
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Anand Giridharadas
October 23, 2024
The.Ink [[link removed]]

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_ However one might reject their premises, some fraction of the
American men who have succumbed to the lure of Trump’s fascism need
to feel seen and heard and recognized. Saving the country from tyranny
needs to become aspirational for men. _

Kamala Harris, by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

Two things have grown increasingly clear: Donald Trump is a fascist,
and he is winning the support of most American men. But it doesn’t
have to be like this. There is a way out.

Yesterday, a breathtaking report arrived in 
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New York Times
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John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, warned in the starkest
terms that Trump is a fascist with a real authoritarian vision and
confirmed the murmurs about Trump being jealous not to have had the
kind of generals Hitler did.

What Kelly is doing is the opposite of gaslighting, acknowledging as a
former insider what many of us have long been saying: that Trump is a
fascist, saying and doing fashy things. Winkingly encouraging
violence. Goading on and praising insurrectionists. Dehumanizing
Others. Calling for the use of the military against civilian
opponents. Promising a second term centered on vendettas and
retribution. Peddling racial supremacy. Pledging to be a dictator on
day one. Telling violent allies to stand back and stand by. Vowing
that if you vote for him, you won’t have to vote again — and that
if you don’t, it will be a bloodbath.

The distressing thing is that a majority of American men are looking
at all of this and saying, “Yeah, let’s do that.” We are
dude-bro-ing our way into democratic death.

To be clear, a majority of American men have voted Republican in most
presidential cycles for a very long time. What is happening now is not
Vice President Kamala Harris failing to win over men. What is
happening is that the Republican Party being taken over by fascists
has turned out not to be a dealbreaker for a majority of men.

The Democrats’ — and small-D democracy’s — men problem has
engendered all sorts of discussion and debate and some amount of
understandable frustration. As the writer Charlotte Clymer put it a
few days ago, “Can someone please explain to me what exactly it is
that young men want to hear from VP Harris that she’s not already
saying? And please be specific.”

The problem has also triggered unusual organizing efforts
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social media maven Liz Plank’s efforts to use social events where
men chat up women to highlight Project 2025’s dangers to all
Americans’ sexual liberty, including men’s.

What, if anything, can the Harris campaign do about this problem in
the final days? Is there, as Clymer asks, any language that can be
spoken that hasn’t? Any outreach that can be done that hasn’t? Any
policies that could be rolled out that haven’t?

In recent days, the Harris campaign has tackled the problem head-on,
announcing new policies and messages aimed at Black voters and Latino
voters in particular.

But if the material dimension of the problem has gotten adequate
attention, the affective dimension of the problem has not.

If you spend time traveling this country and talking to people and
reporting on communities, if you have the lens of a cultural observer
and not only a policy enthusiast, what becomes clear is that, when it
comes to men and their enthusiasm for fascism now, the affective
dimension may be the dominant one.

Which is to say, a lot of men have been persuaded — brainwashed may
be a better word — that the future is something that should terrify
them. That the future mocks them, thumbs their nose at them. That it
will silence them, constrict them, devalue them, censor them, starve
them, obviate them, reduce them to jokes.

Now, suspend for a moment your quibbling about whether any of these
feelings are true. In a democracy, feelings very quickly become facts.
Part of the deal of living in a self-governing society is accepting
that your neighbor’s feelings become your reality. The burden of
citizenship is accepting that what is not your fault — and may not
even be real — often becomes your problem.

A lot of what a lot of men are going through right now is simply the
inner experience of the old line, “When you’re accustomed to
privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

And one of the great sweeping mistakes of our era has been assuming
that, because certain kinds of change are morally correct, they go
down easy. Because certain destinations are good destinations socially
and ethically and arc-of-moral-universe-wise, any experience of
discomfort with the journey is a private problem to be suffered alone
and given little outside help.

So now here we are in a country that is changing a lot, has changed a
lot — indeed, has, over the past few generations, done more to
change the status and rights and dignity of women than hundreds of
prior generations did. And we have done the right things while failing
to manage social and psychological change — failing to manage the
minds and hearts of those who experience these worthy changes as
headwinds.

This seems to me central to the story of how a majority of men could
do what populations bewildered by change and anxious about the future
and their place in it have done: support fascism, support
dictatorship, support tyranny to smash it all.

Vice President Harris is a prosecutor. She has delivered many a
closing argument. She knows what closing arguments involve. In court,
they are actually a rare chance where you get to speak on the level of
affective. In the rest of a crimianl proceeding, it’s just the
facts. Just the evidence. But in the closing argument, you can make
meaning. You can tell a story. You can move people.

Because this is the only country I have, I am determined that Harris
and her running mate, Tim Walz, and the wider pro-democracy movement
she represents uses these last days to address part of a closing
argument to American men. Not only to roll out policy to them, though
policy is vital. Also to speak to them on the level of the gut.

Yes, change is scary. Yes, it sometimes feels like you don’t know
how to be these days. Don’t know what to say. Yes, it’s tempting
to shake things up when you’re scared. When you feel attacked by the
future itself.

But don’t. Because men worthy of the word don’t outsource the care
and protection of their families to dictators. Men worthy of the word
don’t depend for their self-esteem on the crushing and marginalizing
of Others. Men worthy of the word don’t need women to be locked in
the fourteenth century legally to feel whole. Men worthy of the word
don’t hand over the keys to the future to billionaires who pull the
strings.

However one might reject their premises, some fraction of the mass of
American men who have succumbed to the lure of Trump’s fascism need
to feel seen and heard and recognized in their stress and anxiety and
sense of dislocation in the future that is coming. And they need to be
invited into a contrary story of progress. Saving the country from
tyranny needs to become aspirational for men. Not a lecture.

They need to remember, and become excited to say, that real men reject
fascism.

_The.Ink is created by Anand Giridharadas. Subscribe.
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_He is the author of four books “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines
of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy
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“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
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“The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas
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Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking
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* Fascism
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* Gender Gap
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* men
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