Marcus Aurelius he isn’t
Tom Nichols in the Atlantic asks a question many of us have asked and asked and asked – why do working class men love Trump when he’s so “unmanly”?
Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.
And not just any little boy, but a rich little boy, a bratty spoiled demanding tantrum-prone greedy little boy?
I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage…
They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as “toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.”
…I do not present these beliefs and attitudes as uniformly virtuous in themselves. Some of these traditional masculine virtues have a dark side: Toughness and dominance become bullying and abuse; self-reliance becomes isolation; silence becomes internalized rage.
I would say that dominance is just plain bad in itself, as opposed to having a dark side. People have to be in a boss role at times, but that doesn’t have to be a matter of dominance. But that’s a quibble.
Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.
And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard.
And he’s weak, and puffy, and lazy, and cruel, and a bully, and envious, and spiteful. He’s the Captain to Henry Fonda’s Mister Roberts.
As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can’t control his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior decorating, and used to sell perfume.”
He goes through the particulars one by one, including Trump’s terror of strong women and his blustering attempts to make them stop questioning him.
His anxiety at such moments—for example, when he calls on female reporters in the White House press room—is palpable. He begins his usual flurry of defensive hand gestures, from the playing of an imaginary accordion to a hand held up with a curled pinky finger like some parody of a Queens mobster, while he stammers out verbal chaff bursts of “excuse me” and “are you ready?”
I think it’s not just anxiety, I think it’s also contempt, disgust, loathing – in short a deeply entrenched misogyny. What is some fucking bitch doing questioning him? Excuse me, excuse me.
Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team? Not in the least. In this category, he exhibits one of the most unmanly of behaviors: He’s a blamer. Nothing is ever his fault. In the midst of disaster, he praises himself while turning on even his most loyal supporters without a moment’s hesitation. Men across America who were socialized by team sports, whose lives are predicated on the principle of showing up and doing the job, continually excuse a man who continually excuses himself. This presidency is defined not by Ed Harris’s grim intonation in Apollo 13 that “failure is not an option,” but by one of the most shameful utterances of a chief executive in modern American history: “I take no responsibility at all.”
That’s a good one; I hadn’t thought of it quite that way before. The refusal ever to take responsibility, yes, but not the team sports part or the Gene Kranz part.
In the end there is no explanation. Nichols attempts one by saying people see Trump as a boy rather than a man, but that just moves the question back a step. Why do they do that, and who wants a boy in this job anyway? I’ll never understand it, myself.
I grew up – and still live – among the same people Nichols describes, and I don’t find it that difficult to understand. A lot of the men I know who prize these characteristics, and support Trump, are themselves not living up to their own standard of masculinity. There is an illusion of the stoicism and bravery of the midwestern farmer/rancher, but not that many of them actually live up to the illusion. They swagger, they brag, they dominate women, they carry guns, but a lot of it is a veneer.
As for the rest of them…my father is a truly honest, strong man who embodies a lot of the “virtues” (including domination of women). He adores Trump. But the thing is, he doesn’t see Trump the way we see him. What he sees when he looks at Trump is John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Rambo all rolled up into one, and packaged with a shrewd businessman. He doesn’t see the orange face, the combover. The whining isn’t whining to him, it’s tough talk. He sees Trump as a truth teller, speaking truth to power…the power being those who would hand our country over to godless feminist politically correct communist atheist gays.(So how did I come out of this family, you ask? I have no earthly clue.)
We don’t understand it, because we don’t see Trump with the same eyes. We see the whining, coddled, pampered orange man-baby who can’t speak a coherent sentence. They see George Patton. Why? I suspect because they want to, because his bluster and “truth” is what they want to hear. So they put on blinders and cover their eyes and ears with cotton filters. They are not living in the same world we are.
I think the easiest answer, for me, is that there is a propaganda web around the Republican Party that is ready to defend anything as long as the ideological agenda is followed. So any view of Trump that is propagated through media is the best view, and for me that view is someone who drives nuts the people these people dislike. They never accept or see the other side.
I grew up amongst these people too, albeit in the UK not the US. But the working class man who toils down the pit or on the docks or the steelworks etc, tough, salt of the earth types who don’t tolerate anything they regard as weakness (with a special focus on “womanly” behaviors) are the same there too.
I’m from the northeast of England, where once there were jobs aplenty in those industrialized industries. The men whose fathers and grandfathers and so on worked down the pit, they work down the pit and they expect their sons to do so as well. Except they didn’t because the collieries, the shipyards, the mills all closed down and suddenly there were no jobs anymore. They weren’t helped or supported by the Government (who was doing the closing) and whole villages died or reduced to a rump population. Communities destroyed and scattered to the four winds.
Those people were the solid base of the Labour party, and most would have died rather than vote Tory. Anyone who did was outcast as class traitors (this was not the case in other places where working class Tories were a thing). They were socialists and proud of it, the word doesn’t carry the negative connotations it does in the US.
These were the people that voted for Brexit.
I was horrified. Couldn’t they see that it would hurt them not help them? That a post-Brexit Britain would be no more interested in anything beyond London and the Home Counties than before? Some of them even voted Tory, a fact so astonishing I could barely believe it was true.
They’ll keep believing, even when the inevitable economic and logistic havoc is rained down upon them. They’ll blame Europe for any messes and now they have COVID19 as another excuse for why Brexit isn’t the Utopia they were promised.
They are the British equivalent of Trump voters – angry white working class people who are blaming many past injuries on immigrants and globalism going back decades. They’re given an icon – he doesn’t follow any of their rules on masculine behaviors but he articulates their misplaced rage. They’ll follow him over the cliff, telling themselves their beloved leader knows what he is doing.
I can’t speak from the experience of the previous commenters, but I do think part of it is that they admire the fact that he can behave like a bratty baby and get away with it–I do know a lot of the people who praise these ‘virtues’ find it difficult and onerous to practice them, and do it because they feel like they must, not because they believe these virtues are inherently worthy–so someone who ‘succeeds’, in their eyes, without even bothering to work for it is the object of envy.
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Maybe it’s like Joseph Smith’s secret decoding glasses. Hitler wasn’t quite the blonde, Aryan Superman type either. Go figure. Not that honest or realistic self-appraisal is in great abundance on either end of the Fox conduit. Many of the gun-toting army wannabes wouldn’t get past the physical, let alone basic training. They figure they get to call the shots because of the guns. Trump is an eqcually unqualified, unfit pretender who, unfortunately, actually calling the shots. They support each other’s delusions, though Trump only values them to the extent they blindly support him. They are going to be his bullies now, and his cannon fodder later.
I don’t see a lot of these self-styled militia guys, who would normally be rabid, anti-federal government over-reach, states’s rights type complaining about Trump’s claims regarding mail-in voting which, if I’ve got my “US federal/state division of powers facts straight, is a state prerogative.
People of good character, not necessarily ‘manly’ per se, but people who have achieved adulthood, have taken responsibility for their lives and take care of their families, men and women both. People who understand self sacrifice and delayed gratification, do what is necessary without complaint, and take joy in raising children of good moral character. Living by example. Kind to everyone, not weak, but cooperative rather than competitive, genuine care for other people’s plights and doing what they can to minimize suffering. Not domineering or a bully, but able to take the lead in most situations, and doing what is right for it’s own sake. Good to people and animals, forgiving of the flaws or nature of either. Independent and self reliant, but knowing when to ask for help. Able to handle a variety of tasks, and very capable and willing to solve one’s own problems, and willing to learn how, and apply their skills and knowledge to help others. Patient enough to read instructions and willing to take advice from people who are more experienced or wiser. Never abusing anyone or looking down on them, no matter what their shortcomings. Things like that make for virtuous people. Yes, living up to that is a lifelong project in personal development, there is so much that could be covered here, I could write a book. ;) It’s harder to *be* the ideal than to outline the general principles.
I’m not talking about some Hollywood ideal here, not that there aren’t some good concepts portayed there, just regular folks who know the right thing to do, and do it consistently. That’s the environment I was raised in, and the ones who didn’t do the right thing, or at least know what it was, either learned how or dropped from sight.
Trump has not lived in an environment where he had to learn what it is to be a responsible adult, or what it is to suffer the consequences of not being a person of good character. It goes beyond staying within the bounds of the law of the land, it has to do with being a good and decent person. He has failed miserably at this, and failed to instill it in is offspring. The most unfortunate thing about this is that he doesn’t even know how ignorant, out of touch, and unintelligent he is. Worse yet, he doesn’t care, and like so many others, he talks the talk, but he is entirely unable to walk the walk. The people who look up to this man of low character are either of low character themselves, ignorant, or have been unfortunately fooled by this self aggrandizing con artist.
I was told long ago that the measure of a man (or woman) is his (or her) ability to take responsibility. The fact that Trump denies responsibility speaks volumes about him.
Let me put it more succinctly, Trump wouldn’t make a pimple on Marcus Aurelius’ ass.
Hear hear!
[…] a comment by Claire on Marcus Aurelius he […]
I suspect at this point we’re looking more at altered brain function not changeable without there being an individual circumstance so dire that it puts the person in direct conflict with the operating world view, where retaining that world view will cost a life. I’ve seen that happen in the media a few times.