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 The New York Times. 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, such as the writer and 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.
He is the author of four books “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy,” “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas,” and “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking.”
