My last commentary described that many people in Trump’s orbit appear prepared to vote against their interests.
Mistakes are ordinary. If it’s just mistakes, good arguments should get through. But the MAGA group seems impervious to argument. I think they have other problems.
Working as a poor people’s lawyer, I noticed that men and women treated employment problems differently, probably because our culture treats them differently. Women treated job problems very practically, to bring money home. But when men lost a job, I thought I was watching them die. The emotional hit from losing a job was enormous. And it was compounded by the interaction between changing sex roles and the unavailability of jobs. Women would do whatever was useful to care for their families. But men felt a much more specific obligation to provide the financial support for their families.
The pain some men feel is deepened by the fact that the girls are now staying in school for the training that will fit them for better, more high-paying jobs, than many men.
It used to be more common for girls to finish their education than their brothers. That began to change during the great depression of the 1930s when males couldn’t find jobs to earn money. And then of course they were needed in wartime.
People may not realize this, but college entrance exams have been repeatedly rewritten and rescored so that males and females came out evenly. Because of the different ways we treat males and females growing up, the questions they can handle easily tend to differ, which leads to periodic rewriting so that we are measuring ability, not gender.
The recent success of women in an increasing variety of occupations is a real accomplishment for fairness, equality and a top-notch work force well worth celebrating and continuing.
But the stress on the males and the political implications are no less real. Opportunities to prepare for and occupy work roles have moved geographically, physically and sexually. Hanging on to the old jobs and old roles makes it difficult to play constructive roles in a changing world. In the heartland, the shift away from fossil fuels pushes both men and women into new roles.
The Biden-Harris administration has been working to provide jobs, roles and incomes that are as good as what they lost. But the same roles and jobs they had in the past cannot be protected and should not be provided. Economic changes have a strong effect regardless of government action. Government must deal with the looming threat of global warming for all of us. And social attitudes have changed irrevocably.
Those unavoidable changes lead to a lot of anger. Government, however, cannot try to restore a bygone era but must help us adjust to the new world we live in. Many public programs used to be aimed at boys. In a bygone era, it was to “keep them out of trouble.” Now efforts are needed to fit them for the kinds of careers that are and will be available. That’s important for both males and females. We grew up thinking of males as in control and stopped worrying about them. But instead of dismantling public schools, recreating a public-private system of segregated schools, and dumbing down what they can be taught, we need to take all our kids needs seriously.
Equality is a two-way street. Overall statistics don’t mean that our culture disadvantages all women or that no men are disadvantaged. The social changes are creating pain and discomfort and they are reflected in the distortions in our politics.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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