There’s one story of the 2024 presidential contest that says that this election is all about men, and their anger. Men, in this account, have gotten a raw deal: the decline of the industrial economy in the years since the postwar boom means that many of the jobs that gave dignity, structure, and steady paychecks to their fathers are now gone, and some men, especially those without college degrees, have fallen into a cycle of desperation and despair, unable to make the kind of living for which they could respect themselves.
This economic argument about men is usually followed by a cultural one: that women aren’t as nice to men as they should be, or maybe not as nice to men as they used to be. On one end of this conversation, there are paeans to male loneliness and discussions of the male suicide rate, quasi-poetic odes to their depths of despair and acute feeling: women just don’t understand what it’s like to be sad the way that men are sad.
