The Man They Wanted Me to Be (2019)
Jared Yates Sexton (1981)
255 pages
In the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, wide-spread soul-searching occurred around the failure to have anticipated the outcome. Though many seemed inclined to settle on a particular cause they felt had ‘swung the vote,’ in an election decided by some 80 thousand votes across five states most any of the myriad reasons put forward could have been sufficient to provide the margin of victory.
That said, there has been one explanation that has appeared particularly frequently, and that can be summarized as: frustration over stagnant wages and lost jobs, particularly in manufacturing and heavy industries, has led to a growing existential uncertainty among people in communities across the country about their position in society, their future, and the possibilities for their children. In reaction to this uncertainty, the narrative goes, working class voters have blamed globalization and immigration as the primary sources of these disruptions, and, finding little concrete support for their concerns among traditional Democrats and Republicans, were open to a populist-sounding candidate who bashed the entire system. In this line of thinking Trump hit all the right buttons, making it acceptable to disparage in the harshest possible language not only global trade agreements and alliances, but also any group identified as a scapegoat for working class dissatisfaction – such as immigrants and minorities – as counter to American interests, whatever the reality.
And that line – of the working class feeling disenfranchised and abandoned – has been accompanied by an implication, sometimes more explicitly expressed than others, that the political and social elite had failed to recognize and acknowledge what has been lost in these communities, and that given what’s been lost, it’s perhaps understandable, goes that line of thinking, that so many working class voters supported Trump.
Journalist and author Jared Yates Sexton begs to differ with this narrative and its conclusions.
In his book The Man They Wanted Me to Be, he argues that a core part of the social and cultural structure that working class Trump voters fear losing deserves, in fact, to be left behind. He argues that some of the current working class frustration has originated not directly from the losses of the jobs themselves, but from the threat such economic challenges have posed to a deeply engrained – and in his view profoundly harmful – way of life, one based on what he describes as a
white patriarchal masculinity, an especially potent and toxic system of power and control that has subjugated women and minorities for generations via methodical and organized actions powered by misogyny and racism, a unique brand of maleness that held sway over the United States of America since before its founding. (9)
Though identifying this system of white male patriarchy as leading to socially disruptive and destructive behavior, Sexton actually characterizes the men who have both benefited from its existence and perpetrated its violent consequences as themselves among its victims. From childhood they have been taught, he argues, to assume as their birthright a wide-ranging set of privileges, in particular with respect to women and minorities, as well as expectations for how they are to behave as white men. Unable now, as a result of ongoing economic disruption, to fulfill what have become for them psychologically fundamental entitlements and obligations, they are experiencing a growing frustration, which has led to aggressive reactions that are having a profound impact on the internal lives of families and communities, as well as more broadly on our culture and politics.
Thus, Sexton argues, the current political dysfunction does not originate directly out of the economic disruptions of globalization; rather those economic disruptions have exposed a long-standing and corrosive social compact, the death-throes of which now savage our social cohesiveness. In language that leaves no doubt about his sentiments, he spotlights
the current political impasse we find ourselves in where fragile white men with fragile manhoods have stalled social progress and propelled into the White House a tough-talking, thin-skinned vulgarian who embodies, more than anyone else, toxic American masculinity. (10)
And Sexton makes clear from the opening pages his own intimate familiarity with the experience and impact of this toxic masculinity, having “grow[n] up in a dirt-poor factory family in southern Indiana.” (3) As he covered that “rolling disaster” of the Trump campaign, “what [he] eventually found, at the dark heart of it all, was white men.” (3) And this realization struck a chord deep within him, recalling the challenges and experiences of his own upbringing, and the long, difficult, never-quite-over-it road he has taken to get out from under the lessons the men of his childhood forcibly pushed on him. Out of that self-recognition on the Trump campaign trail came a desire on Sexton's part to understand the origins of the system of white male patriarchy, the precise contours of what it demanded of men, and the implications for both white men themselves, and our broader society.
Sexton’s view of the current social and political dysfunction he has witnessed within his own family and while covering the Trump presidential campaign as arising out of a frustrated reaction to the unachievable expectations of the system of white male patriarchy, with white “men refusing to come to terms with their situation because to be a white man in America is to expect everything to already be on your terms” (29), resonates strongly with comments by the historian Vincent Harding from a 2011 interview he had with Krista Tippett on her program On Being, in which he said
I have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is an uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities, that it has moved into a realm of uncertainty that I did not allow itself to face before.
Up to now, uncertainty was the experience of the weak, the poor, the people of color, that that was our realm. But now, for all kinds of political, economic reasons, for all kinds of psychological reasons, that uncertainty, and unknowingness, is permeating what was the dominant, so-called, society. That breaking apart is for me more likely the source of the anxiety, the fear, the anger, the unwillingness to give in, the need to have something that they can hold on to and say, this is the way and it's got to be our way or we will all die.
For Sexton, the “refusing to come to terms with their situation” – Harding’s “our way or we will all die” – has particular poignancy because the white patriarchal structure was a “lie … always destined to fail.” (29) Misled by “the mass culture and capitalistic system of the country” the last several generations of men “were destined to come up short and rage against everyone and everything but the system that had let them down in the first place.” (29, italics mine)
Sexton’s book, then, details his path of discovery and understanding of the concept of toxic masculinity, of his own personal ongoing – and inescapable – relationship to it, and of its complicity in the social divisiveness of the past several years. He finds sympathy for the generations of white men raised on the emotionally crippling expectations of a social structure that was never beneficial to white men, and that has now become increasingly untenable in the face of dramatic social and economic changes.
But his sympathy does not extend to accepting that the system must continue. Rather, he argues that we must find a new message to transmit to boys as they grow up, one that both gives them better, more achievable goals and reduces their tendency to act out with violence, and so makes them better men. Only then can our society begin to repair itself, and so prepare to confront the complex and difficult challenges facing us in the coming decades.
Post-script: Here I include a more detailed look at the book, including several extended – and startlingly illuminating – quotes that reflect Sexton’s ability to submerge himself into the subculture he explores, and so to observe and report on it up close.
Sexton traces the roots of white male patriarchy in the US back to well before the country even formally existed, but he identifies the period after the “apocalyptic” Civil War as the moment when “our modern definition of masculinity was forged.” (22) He writes of the consequences of the economic upheaval caused by the Civil War that “The men who would comprise my family and countless others were laborers who toiled in workplaces devoid of joy and rampant with safety hazards. Before the advent of unions and labor rights movements, these were jobs where men were overworked, underpaid, and maimed regularly. It was hellish, and in order to go to work every day the laborer had to adapt both himself and his expectations to survive his harsh reality.
Faced with a job that paid just enough to keep a family afloat, and sometimes not even that, the American man adapted his idea of self-worth to depend on his identity as a laborer as opposed to his fulfillment of the American Dream. Callused hands and tired bones became indicators of self-worth and proof of an attempt, however futile, to do the necessary work to survive, if not advance.
What made this exchange possible was the laborer’s status as a white male, a privileged position that, regardless of station or worth, prioritized him above women, minorities, homosexuals, and immigrants. He may have failed to advance or conquer the world as the Gods of Industry had, but society was in his favor and at home he was still king. (22)
Through two world wars and the Great Depression this situation persisted. And then, during the years following WWII, the capitalist economy blossomed, with assembly lines pumping out a dizzying array of consumer goods and modern advertising methods developed to keep the demand high. But, Sexton notes, “with the advent of mass media and anxiety fostered by advertising, [men and women’s] insecurities and fear of failure were multiplied.” (25) The good economic times made life easier, but also further raised both expectations and the specter of not fulfilling them.
Defeat in Vietnam and the associated rise of the progressive counter-culture crashed the party, Sexton argues, beginning a long series of challenges to the system of white male patriarchy, led by fundamental socio-economic changes, such as the introduction of increasing numbers of women and minorities to the workforce. Threatened by these changes, white men aggressively opposed them in ways that “created a stagnant atmosphere in which rusted and regressive technologies and culture stayed well past their expiration dates. … [Then they] saw the mess they had made, and asked how things had gotten so bad.” (28-29) When they eventually found that no one would answer that question to their satisfaction, they ended up on the inexorable path to supporting a Trump presidency.
To illustrate more concretely the pathologies that white men have been raised to believe and embody as a result of the system of white male patriarchy, and the destructive implications for these men’s own lives, for those closest to them, and for society more broadly, Sexton turns to his own family and upbringing to illustrate how it has looked from the inside.
Though the book nominally follows a timeline from his birth, Sexton also looks farther back, to the experiences of his father and his father’s generation as they grew up during the radical economic and social transformation that occurred in American society as the growth economy of the 1950’s evaporated in the 1960’s and the Vietnam war took its toll on social cohesiveness – these changes together breaking apart the hegemony of the white male in US society.
Key to the story of his father, and his own upbringing at his father’s hand, was an expectation that any emotion must be suppressed, any weakness hidden – that, come what may, whether at home, at work or in public, a dominant and unshaken front must be maintained. Sexton points out that these expectations had been reinforced by the performance of the Greatest Generation, and their success in WWII. But, over the course of the 1960’s the economic boom of the previous decade faltered, leaving men’s pay insufficient to support their family without their wives working; at the same time, social reforms such as civil rights and women’s rights advanced the status of non-white-males both socially and economically. As a result of these changes, the expectations of the white male patriarchy became unfulfillable.
In reaction, white fathers, unwilling and, in fact, unable to give up the expectations of their upbringing, experienced a profound and debilitating frustration, and doubled down on what they knew, becoming ever more unforgiving of any signs of weakness they might see in their sons, or any sign of their wives or girlfriends becoming too independent, any displays by minorities of assuming an equal footing in the community or at work. And, as this frustration deepened, it gradually morphed into ever more aggressive language, and eventually actual violence – against sons, wives, girlfriends, and minorities.
In brutally honest language, Sexton details the struggles he had growing up and trying to fit into the mold created for him, first from his father, and then from a series of step-dad’s as his mother sought to create an economically viable home situation for him. Even once he grows up, escapes home to college, and begins to understand what has happened to him, he finds it difficult to resist the core lessons on manhood that he experienced from the men in his life. He repeatedly slides back into the dark lessons of his childhood, and it’s clear he feels their pull even today.
Out of his attempts to explore and come to grips with his upbringing come, however, important background lessons for his understanding of the phenomenon of the Trump campaign. The ugliness Sexton witnessed during the campaign rallies he attended was for him all too familiar from his own upbringing and what he saw within his own family: “While the 2016 presidential election raged and brought to surface all the frustrations and wrath that had been simmering for decades, thus ensuring Donald Trump would gain purchase, home haunted me with new meaning.” (31)
As an example, he recounts a moment from the early 2000’s, in which he goes with his dad deep into the countryside, where they meet up with other men, each bringing piles of guns and ammunition, to do target shooting. After they are done, they gather around their trucks, and conversation begins, and:
idle chitchat gave way to more pressing matters. I’d caught glimpses of this in the past when my male relatives sat in a room empty of women, in a dingy locker room, and later this setting would be re-created at every Donald Trump rally. The guns had jostled something in them. Studies I’d come across later would explain that handling guns actually increases testosterone in men and they were definitely more aggressive, and more than willing to voice their opinions. All of their words were soaked with doom. They talked about war, especially the one raging in Iraq, and soon they were liberally exchanging racial slurs, calling Arabs “camel jockeys,” “sand niggers,” and “towelheads,” many of the men wishing they could go overseas and kill some themselves as their eyes lingered over the guns. One fantasized about lining up a bunch of Iraqis, soldiers or citizens, one was just as bad as the other, and seeing how many he could kill with a single bullet.
Their anger wasn’t just reserved for Muslims, though. Soon it turned to African Americans who needed to be taught a lesson, and then Mexicans flooding over the border and stealing jobs. Somebody mentioned a group of migrant workers who’d moved into the area and the man next to me laughed and reminisced about the “old days” when the Ku Klux Klan controlled the town and the homes of immigrants would’ve been set on fire in the middle of the night.
But that wasn’t it. They moved onto conspiracies and even though they’d been so keen on slaughtering Muslims for retribution, it seemed agreed upon around the truck that 9/11 had been an inside job, that a group they called the New World Order was behind September 11, as well as getting minorities and women riled up about rights, fixing elections, and even spreading HIV/AIDS, which, one of my dad’s friends explained, had been engineered in a lab to reduce the population before the coming apocalyptic battle between good and evil. (154)
These same opinions come out into the open as part of the groundswell of support that lifted Trump to victory in 2016, notes Sexton. Describing a Trump rally that he attended in June 2016, he writes:
What I witnessed that night was one of the most blatant displays of offensive, fascistic behavior I’d seen since my days in the locker room. It was like all of the troubling, frightening things that’d been saved for private spaces, kept behind locked doors, had suddenly exploded into the public arena. Society had kept these people at bay for years, or at least mostly contained by the threat of consequence, but Trump’s candidacy had sprung the lock and given them safety in the daylight. My reporting was among the first to sound the alarm as to just what had begun taking shape. Up until that point the criticism of Trump was that he was offensive, sure, unacceptable, certainly, but no one in their right mind thought he’d actually get elected. That rally, and the ones that followed, proved these thoughts to be depressingly misguided, and the certainty had only allowed his base of deplorables to take root. (123)
Though Hillary Clinton may have made a political blunder in her use of the word “deplorables” in a speech to describe Trump supporters, Sexton owns the term, and makes it clear that for the attendees he saw at Trump rallies – who reminded him of his family and the community he grew up in – it was the right word. Not surprisingly, his reporting made him an uncomfortable visitor to family gatherings; more broadly, he reports that “white supremacists threatened to murder me in my home [and] people … tried to break into my house.” (31)
In the final section of the book Sexton focuses in more detail on the political calculations that have contributed to supporting the continuation of this lie, to maintaining the righteousness of the system of white male patriarchy, despite the resulting crisis of masculinity and its violent consequences. He begins by noting, crucially, that
besides his most obvious lies … Trump’s message has resonated with large swathes of the country because there is, at its heart, a kernel of truth. The America he’s speaking to, that of my family and others like them, is indeed suffering. (216)
This suffering – the result of the patriarchal structure that white men are brought up to internalize and the social and economic changes of the past half century that have made the expectations that come with it untenable – has been exploited and manipulated, he argues, by the Republican Party and its supporters in the media. He views these groups as actively working to distract white males from shaking off these damaging expectations and instead pursue a path of “cooperation between the demographics pitted against each other.” Instead, they are “trained by conservative media to feel attacked.” (217)
In a series of paragraphs that express both the deep sympathy and the profound anger Sexton feels about what he has learned, he cleaves to the heart of his story. Beginning with those raised on the tenets of white male patriarchy, and trapped in their upbringing, he makes clear that
They’re justified in feeling that something has changed. The world really is transforming around them, and with those changes their advantages are rapidly evaporating. Industry is giving way to a new economy that favors creativity and communication while rewarding empathy and education, which men are taught to oppose. The future is geared for so-called feminine values, and the education and the democratization of mass culture does mean that minorities who have been held back in the past are now realizing more social and economic potential. (217)
For those, however, who have sought to hold onto their power and wealth by manipulating men into continuing to cling to the social structures of the past his critique is withering and merciless. He pulls no punches in stating that
Republicans lied to men by telling them their factories were coming back. They lied to them by telling them the mines they worked in were going to be reopened. They told them to resist even the most commonsense gun control as their children were murdered in their classrooms. They told them to hate higher learning when all the studies and all the books told the same story: the times were changing and you’d better change with them.
Even more tragically, change has always been in their best interest. The occupations they cling to so desperately—the factory jobs, the mining jobs, the manual labor jobs—were awful in the first place. Men who toil in these careers are underpaid and miserable. They suffer horrific injuries, die prematurely, and are exploited by companies that hardly ever reward their labor or loyalty. But men have long fallen for the great myth of American capitalism. They strive to make it and when they fail they find solace, no matter how dismal, in their pursuit and their work. (218)
The result has been that white men have doubled down on defending what they were raised to believe was their birthright. And the consequence has been the the ugliness of the past years, as
we watched men attack women as opportunists, as being too unattractive to be violated, as motivated by political and economic ends, because each conflict was another battle in the escalating war in the crisis of masculinity. No ground can be given to the forces of progress here because with each case of men being held accountable for their actions the whole house of cards could come tumbling down.” (218)Sexton argues that men actually have much to gain from the cultural changes underway, but he at the same time makes clear, based on his own experiences and struggles, that the unwinding of the grip that the indoctrination of his upbringing in how a man should behave, what a man should believe, as part of the white male patriarchal system is not a simple feat.
He describes in detail how for every step he himself has taken forward in his personal battle on this front, he has then too often slid backwards – finding himself trying to prove his manhood through descents into drinking, and picking meaningless fights – experiences that have led him to the edge of suicide, when he finds that he can neither live up to the unrealistic expectations nor free himself of them.
With this book Sexton looks into his own heart, and that of the men of his family and his community, to explore the system of white male patriarchy that he feels has been so destructive for both white men and our broader society.
Other reviews / information:
Sexton notes (quoted more fully above) that men
suffer horrific injuries, die prematurely, and are exploited by companies that hardly ever reward their labor or loyalty. But men have long fallen for the great myth of American capitalism.This recalls the analysis of the philosopher Martin Hägglund, in his book This Life, in which he argues that such exploitation is inherent, and in fact unavoidable, in capitalism, because capitalism values not the time of the individual to pursue what they desire out of life, but rather values the labor time of individuals, and so attempts to maximize that labor time while minimizing the associated cost of it. (My review of Hägglund's book here.)
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
