Vice President Kamala Harris’ dramatic entry into the presidential race in July — including selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate — put a new twist on the already gendered nature of the election. A woman was now at the top of the ticket.
Instead of Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s misogynist manhood solely driving the media narrative, there was now a new storyline: Not only was a Black, South Asian woman the nominee; there also was a counternarrative — the egalitarian expression of manhood embodied by Walz and Doug Emhoff.
From the GOP convention theme song, “It’s a Man’s World,” to Hulk Hogan’s ridiculous tribute to old-school manhood, the Trump campaign gambled that their brand of “tough” masculinity would be a winning strategy against President Biden’s perceived “weak” portrayal of manhood. But Trump was caught up short when — just three days after his convention ended — he was facing a woman.
Into this fraught political moment comes a thought-provoking film exploring presidential masculinity. The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power & the American Presidency is rich with content and context for voters to make sense of the gender politics playing out in the election. Created by educator-author Jackson Katz, The Man Card was originally released in 2020. The updated and expanded 2024 version crackles with urgency now that Kamala Harris is Trump’s opponent.
The Man Card demonstrates how presidents and the presidency have historically been linked in the American imagination with traditional ideas about men. The film exposes how the right uses one-dimensional ideas about manhood to portray Democrats as too weak to attract working-class white men. In less politically volatile times, a full-on review of the film would make sense. But writing about The Man Card weeks before the election invites viewers to assess the film through an activist, not an educational, lens. Viewers might ask themselves: What can I do to get the film into a local union hall, before groups of younger, working-class men, broadcast on community access television, streamed in battleground states?
The Young Men Research Initiative, which Katz cofounded earlier this year, is urging the media to cover the male side of the gender gap and the Democrats to reach out to young men, especially those who typically get their news from the online, misogynist manosphere rather than traditional media.
The film uses vivid archival and contemporary footage to illustrate the ways presidential masculinity is portrayed, ranging from a cowboy hat-wearing Ronald Reagan cutting brush on his Santa Barbara ranch to George W. Bush decked out in a fighter pilot’s uniform landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln to (wrongly) declare, “Mission accomplished,” in Iraq.
For the second time in eight years, a man whose political identity is rooted in both misogyny and reductive ideas about manhood is running against a woman. Instead of a white woman, now his opponent is Black and South Asian. Plus, she’s a prosecutor; he’s a felon. The Man Card asks white male voters, especially in battleground states, how they will judge the Harris-Walz ticket. Will they throw their support behind the MAGA movement that promises to restore men’s former glory? Or will they reject long-established voting patterns and help usher in a new era, redefining the highest office in the country, and with it our national identity?
Voters have a stark choice. Trump and Vance promote a rigid masculinity infused with both misogyny and Christian nationalism. They have used bigotry and fear of the other — including bald-faced lies about Haitian immigrants — to gin up their base. Meanwhile, Harris and Walz represent an evolving expression of leadership — championing women as leaders at the highest level — more suited to the 21st century.
Until now, the loudest voices in the struggle over which version of gender and power will prevail have been those promoting traditional masculinity as the key to solving society’s problems. Among them are some on the far right who, alarmingly, believe violence is both acceptable and necessary. Meanwhile, other voices are beginning to be recognized: those of antisexist men who have worked to transform conventional masculinity over the same half-century covered in The Man Card. They’ve been redefining manhood, fatherhood, and brotherhood. Now, it’s time to add white male presidents.
To better understand the deeply gendered social, cultural, and political forces that Kamala Harris is up against, here’s an idea: Set aside an hour and a quarter and watch The Man Card. Then, take to heart Michelle Obama’s challenge and “do something.” Maybe, begin by sharing what you learned with men you know — especially young men.
Rob Okun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is editor emeritus of Voice Male magazine, chronicling the antisexist men’s movement for more than 30 years and is editor of the anthology, Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement.
“All the months are crude experiments, out of which the perfect September is made.” — Virginia Woolf
We began September in Memphis with our annual holiday. No, not Labor Day. Sure, we celebrate that, but so does the rest of the country. I’m talking about the fact that here in the Bluff City we have in recent years begun celebrating “901 Day” on September 1st, a riff on our 901 area code. It’s grown to include a great many celebrations around town, from Beale Street to breweries to parks and music venues. One presumes a good time was had by all this year, even if there was a bit of intermittent rain to dodge.
September also marks the end of summer here in the 901. Even though we’re still a few weeks away from the true end of the heat, the signs of autumn are there if you look. On my morning walk in the Old Forest of Overton Park on Monday, leaves were beginning to fill the wooded trails, wet and soft underfoot — the gold palms of the tulip poplars, the brown-fingered oak fall — their presence no doubt triggered by the recent dry spell, but unmistakable harbingers of the change to come, nonetheless.
Summer’s end always brings mixed feelings. And the seasons change faster now, or so it seems as I blossom into codger-hood. But everything is faster for everybody these days. According to folks who study such things, we’re wiring ourselves that way. I listened to a podcast last week about the decline of the human attention span. The average person checks the internet more than 100 times a day — scanning emails, various websites, news sources, and social media feeds. I’ve never counted, but I suspect I’m in that neighborhood, at least.
I’m trying to be conscious about my internet addiction, but it’s so difficult, especially when the source of our distraction — our phone — is always close at hand. Looking around the optometrist’s office the other day, I noted there were 19 people, 18 of whom were looking at their phone. The other guy was probably blind.
The problem is that we’ve learned that there is always a reward of sorts waiting for us when we swipe open our dinging little pocket pals: “likes” on our social media posts, a fresh email from a friend, a nudge from our favorite news app, a game to finish, and, of course, the sweet, cocaine-like buzz of confirmation bias and righteous indignation.
We progressives savor the latest absurdities from MAGA-land like gooey chocolate-chip cookies, fresh from the oven: Did you read that Donald Trump changed his stance on abortion four times in 48 hours? Did you see that he reposted vile, misogynistic, sexual tweets about Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton?! Did you read that he had the nerve to announce that his administration will be the “greatest ever” for women?! OMG!
And then there’s Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. What a piece of anti-feminine work this guy is. Seldom does a day pass when he is not saying something more Neanderthal-ish about women than he did the day before. The creepy would-be veep has made it clear, over and over again, that he thinks women are put here on Earth only to have children until they can’t anymore. And when they reach menopause, their role is to help raise their grandchildren. It’s their biological destiny, don’t you know? Childless career women are frustrated and angry because “they passed the biological period when it was possible to have children.” They are “miserable people who have no real value system,” and “struggle to find meaning in their lives.” Also, they have cats. Also, childless people shouldn’t be allowed to be teachers.
And on it goes, day after day. Thirty days hath September, and 31 hath October, and five hath November until the Day of Reckoning. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” wrote English playwright William Congreve in 1697. There’s a reason that saying has stayed in the English language lexicon for 327 years, and methinks Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and the rest of their clueless GOP enablers are about to find out why.
Editor’s note: Our political columnist Jackson Baker and former Flyer writer Chris Davis traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, last week for the Republican National Convention on Monday, July 15th, to Thursday, July 18th. For this story, Baker and Davis reflect on their experiences, giving light to the ever-changing political landscape.
No sooner had we begun to digest the facts and fallout from the Republicans’ just-concluded convention in Milwaukee than the prolonged drama in Democratic ranks regarding the status of the ailing and beleaguered President Joe Biden abruptly resolved itself with Biden’s withdrawal from the election on Sunday.
However much that action had been anticipated, it still cast a shade on the events in Milwaukee, and attention, for better and for worse, will continue to gather and focus on the coming Democratic convention in Chicago in August. The immediate consensus among participants and observers alike was that there will be no open convention in Chicago — rather, a closing of ranks and a conferring of the nomination on Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris.
The Sunday following the RNC, Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy. (Photo: Tennesseewitney | Dreamstime.com)
It is even possible that the Democrats could nominate a second woman — someone like the much-respected governor of battle-state Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer — to fill out their ticket as Harris’ running mate.
Whatever the case, various expectations have been turned on their head, and the over-the-top machismo of the Republicans’ convention, culminating with the final-night showcase appearances of Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock, may look, in retrospect, like a misfire.
All the more reason to look back on the Milwaukee convention, which had been studiously stage-managed to present the aura of inevitable triumph.
Donald Trump sported an oversized bandage on his right ear, a reminder of his surviving an assassination attempt just the week before. (Photo: Chris Davis)
Against the memory of a doddering and fragile Joe Biden in the June 27th televised debate with former President Donald Trump, the Republicans could present the image of Trump as a hero-martyr, who, on the weekend before their convention, had risen after being felled by a would-be assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, to proclaim, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
The donning of a conspicuously oversized bandage on Trump’s nicked right ear during the candidate’s public appearances in Milwaukee emphasized the degree to which the Republicans, understandably, expected to reap large symbolic dividends from the event.
On the opening night of their convention, last Tuesday, as on evenings to come, the Republicans, perhaps forgivably, would exploit Trump’s near-miraculous survival as a quasi-resurrection that reinforced what was already, here and there in his followers’ ranks, a near-messianic sense of the candidate.
And, though there was boilerplate aplenty served from the dais — regarding inflation, Biden’s presumed insufficiency, and other alleged shortcomings on the Democrats’ part — there were also overtures to voters presumed to be in the Democrats’ sphere of influence.
There was, for example, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who delivered a paean to the working class and denounced, in vivid detail, “greedy employers” and the evils of unbridled capitalism. It may have escaped most people’s attention that O’Brien did not explicitly endorse Trump; he merely expressed gratitude for being invited by Trump to address the convention. In a sense, he was more troll than Trumpian, but his participation in the GOP’s opening-night ritual was, ipso facto, an opening-out and an appeal to working-class voters.
The question rose uneasily to the minds of Democrats: Was it possible that a forthcoming realignment might occur as a benefit to Republicans, not themselves, the time-honored “party of the people”? And this concern could only have been deepened after remarks from the dais by one Amber Rose, a “model and TV celebrity,” as she was billed, and an ex-squeeze of Kanye West, no less, who professed herself a former “leftist” who could simultaneously praise Donald J. Trump and proclaim that Trump and his supporters “don’t care about Black or white or gay or straight. It’s all love.”
There were intermittent calls for national “unity” from the Republican stage, although, as these would be elaborated by Trump himself, notably in his later acceptance address on Thursday night, there were actually calls for the Democrats to surrender active resistance and to back away even from their forlorn hopes of salvation through acts of jurisprudence against Trump, most of those already all but scuttled by the Supreme Court.
Nor was there any mercy shown to President Joe Biden, who was subjected to patronizing remarks and Weekend at Bernie’s comparisons, alternating with chants of “Joe must go!” and claims that “He can’t even walk up steps and put on his own coat.”
J.D. Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate on day one. (Photo: United States Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Not that there weren’t signs of disunity among the Republicans themselves. The new party line on foreign affairs — articulated by both Trump and his hand-picked vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance — was to jettison the nation’s present commitment to shore up Ukrainian resistance against Vladimir Putin’s invading Russian armies. But some of the speechmaking — notably from an old warhorse, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and from Trump’s own erstwhile Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — was still insisting on regarding Putin as an arch-villain and the Ukrainians as victims.
Trump was credited simultaneously with being the only hope of restraining Putin and the architect of peaceful coexistence with him!
Such contradictions may now be highlighted as the Republicans refocus to train their fire on Joe Biden’s putative successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is something of an unknown quantity to them — as she is, indeed, to most Americans.
She may become the target of Republican reproaches owing to her lackluster early efforts as Biden’s vicar for border issues, but her prominence as a spokesperson for women’s reproductive freedom will more than offset that perceived weakness and reactivate the militant reaction against the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
Milwaukee was chosen as the site of this year’s Republican convention for the same reason that Democrats had wanted to convene there in 2020 before Covid-19 had nullified their gathering then. The city, a de facto distant suburb of Chicago, is a haven for the struggling middle class and is a key to the votes of Wisconsin, a rust-belt state that both parties consider a must-win in November.
Like Memphis, it is a bit ahead of itself, a place for logistical anomalies — like the hotel which housed the Tennessee delegation, containing a splendid water park but no gift shop. Forget your toothpaste and you’re looking at an Uber ride to make up the difference. But meanwhile you can dream.
For the space of a week, Republicans indulged in a dream of political supremacy over a disabled opposition. We — and they — are about to see whether that was fantasy or reality, as the Democrats, under new management, prepare to meet in Chicago next month.
— Jackson Baker
……………
On day three of the RNC Chuck Fleischmann, Tennessee’s 3rd District representative, caught a tingle. “There is a certain sense of vibrancy in this convention that I haven’t seen since I was a young man in 1980 for Ronald Reagan,” he said to applause from the Tennessee delegation, who gathered for a breakfast meeting at The Ingleside Hotel and Water Park, a good half-hour bus ride from the main event at Downtown Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum. That’s one way of describing the weird feeling in Milwaukee, where a general avoidance of Downtown by locals made the high-energy convention seem like it was happening in a ghost town patrolled by squads of imported bicycle cops with little to do but ride around in big loopy circles.
TV ratings were disappointing. The convention’s opening night was strong enough that pundits were talking about the possibilities of a new political realignment. In spite of featuring the party’s most diverse lineup ever, viewership was down 25 percent compared to a high-water mark in 2016. Even with 25 million people tuning in for Trump’s speech on the final night, the overall numbers fell just short of 2020’s Covid-impaired convention. Protests in Milwaukee were modest and almost nonexistent after the convention’s first day. A smattering of charismatic street preachers remained, leaping and shouting their fiery messages about God and Trump, while a few dedicated liberal activists walked lonely beats with their handmade signs resting on slumped shoulders. Overall, the energy was pretty low for this sort of event, but inside the Fiserv Forum, a hard-working five-piece cover band called Sixwire kept things humming along with hits by Steely Dan, Loverboy, The Rascals, and REO Speedwagon while delegates on the floor and guests throughout the forum danced and prayed and waved their cowboy hats from side to side for the cameras and all America to see.
RNC guests could buy all sorts of merch. (Photo: Chris Davis)
“We are the party of opportunity,” Fleischmann continued, back at the Ingleside, where there was no band and production values were less glamorous. “Race doesn’t matter. Gender doesn’t matter,” he said, naming two things that seemed to matter very much inside the Fiserv Forum, where delegates and guests can buy “Black Americans for Trump” stickers, and “Latino Americans for Trump” stickers, and “Women for Trump” stickers; and where, judging by reoccurring themes and enthusiastic crowd response, few things are worse than DEI, and nothing is more important than a willingness (the Republicans would say “ability”) to define what a man or woman is in the most simplistic terms.
Race has certainly mattered in Milwaukee, the swing-state city where the RNC chose to stage its big event. The city’s joint designations as the most segregated city in America and also one of the poorest, can both be linked to a legacy of redlining, and other race-based restrictions. But here I go missing the point.
It’s difficult to talk about what happened at the RNC, especially on the night of former President Donald Trump’s incredibly long and occasionally weird acceptance address, without falling into the fatal snare of fact checking. Trump, who boldly led the world into the post-truth era we currently occupy, made so many untrue statements he overwhelmed cable news resources who struggled to keep up an admirable exercise in futility. In a post-truth environment, facts will always matter less than feels, and right now the Right’s right to terrify immigrants with threats of mass deportation, and rattle the vulnerable, electorally insignificant trans community by insisting they don’t exist, makes our current GOP feel good enough about themselves to ignore that, even according to the very libertarian Cato Institute, Trump’s tax cuts skewed toward the rich and did none of the great things they were supposed to do.
No single idea presented onstage received more consistent applause than God, and outside of Trump, no single person received a bigger ovation than former Trump staffer and Project 2025 contributor, Peter Navarro, fresh from prison where he’d been cooling his heels following a contempt of Congress charge for refusing to provide documents and testimony relating to the January 6th insurrection. Tucker Carlson, the ex-darling of Fox News, might have gotten even more applause than Navarro had he not successfully petitioned the crowd to stop.
“God is among us,” Carlson concluded, following a gushing endorsement of the man he once claimed to hate “passionately.”
There are many layers to the RNC onion beyond what’s broadcast to the world. The friendly state delegation breakfast meetings are more intimate, and are often a place for more frank and practical conversations about what’s ahead. Mark Green, the embattled representative from Tennessee’s 7th District, wanted to make sure delegates understood what they were watching when the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron deference doctrine. He describes the decision as a victory over bureaucracy.
For 40 years, Chevron deference gave government agencies broad latitude to interpret ambiguous legal statutes and its dissolution puts a raft of public safeguards and environmental protections at risk. Green rejoiced in the decision to kill Chevron deference, and announced his plans to start rolling back regulations as quickly as possible
“The day of the hearing I dropped the ‘Save Us From the Chevron Deference Act’ [or the Sunset Chevron Act],” Green boasted. “It will repeal, in a rolling 30-day fashion, every single regulation passed under the Chevron doctrine.”
Inside the Fiserv Forum, wrestling icon Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off and forcefully announced the arrival of “Trumpamania!” Back at the Ingleside Hotel, things were rarely so over the top, although 2nd District Representative Tim Burchett did say he believed America came one centimeter away “from full-blown Civil War,” when a lone gunman’s bullet grazed former President Trump’s ear in Pennsylvania. Inside the Fiserv Forum, Trump’s unfortunate and very nearly tragic brush with American gun violence is described as a holy miracle: proof of God’s divine purpose for the once and future leader of the free world. Back at the Ingleside Hotel, Chad Connelly, founder of the Faith Wins organization, showed the Tennessee delegation another way God works in politics.
“What if we go to churches in key precincts, get everybody to vote, and teach them to vote biblical values?” Connelly asked, recalling the questions he asked himself while figuring out how to “maximize” the Christian vote.
“I wasn’t going to push Republicans. I wasn’t going to push a candidate. I was going to push Christian values,” Connelly told Tennessee Republicans. By recruiting pastors to register voters and teach them to vote “biblical values,” Connelly says he helped to flip nine U.S. Senate seats in 2014.
“I believe a man named Jesus hung on a tree for me and for you,” Connelly said before announcing that he’s currently recruiting poll watchers to monitor elections in swing states like Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan. It’s not a hard job, he says. You only need to watch for voters over 100, and houses “occupied by more than six people.”
Representative Chuck Fleischmann was right about one thing: The 2024 RNC was a vibe. Almost mellow and with an eye for wholesale political realignment, it platformed unions, and women, and all kinds of Americans we’re not used to seeing at the RNC. With Christian Nationalism coming hard off professional wrestling’s top rope, it was also a camp masterpiece: a populist extravaganza with all the classic rock and J.D. Vance’s Mamaw’s 19 loaded handguns. Sure, the Nielsen ratings were low, but with President Biden exiting the race only weeks before the DNC, a “certain sense of vibrancy” may be all it takes to win the White House. — Chris Davis
Baker-Davis team: (top) 2004, RNC, New York; (bottom) 2024, RNC, The Ingleside Hotel and Water Park (Photo: Picjointer)
MILWAUKEE — There was something very strange about Monday’s opening night of the 2024 Republication National Convention.
Several strange things, in fact. Oh, there was the usual bashing of Joe Biden, the condemnation of what in reality is now a diminishing inflation, and the traditional GOP homage to private enterprise.
But who could ’a thunk that the most vigorous moment of the evening would be a Teamster official extolling unions and the working class and denouncing, in vivid detail, “greedy employers” and the evils of unbridled capitalism. Shocking as this lengthy speech was, it was clearly not aimed at the arena crowd, which gave it ever more tepid applause, but to a presumably largish TV audience containing Democratic and independent voters as well as faithful Republicans.
That speech had come not long after remarks from one Amber Rose, a “model and TV celebrity” and a self-proclaimed former “leftist” who could simultaneously praise Donald J. Trump and proclaim that Trump and his supporters “don’t care about Black or white or gay and straight. It’s all love.”
Another surprise was the culminating appearance of the hero/martyr himself, Donald J. Trump, ear heavily bandaged from a rifleman’s attempt on his life last week, sung onto the stage by Lee Greenwood.
Photo: Chris Davis
Equally interesting was the creation of an ad hoc presidential box containing Trump, his new vice-presidential choice J.D. Vance, Speaker of the House Michael Johnson, Black Florida congressman Byron Donalds (one of several GOP African-American officeholders put on display Monday night), and — wonder of wonders — the exiled Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
It seemed to symbolize a new merging would-be GOP hierarchy.
All of the climactic events were an unexpected attempt at blending MAGA attitudes and Republicanism at large with a new approach to traditional Democratic voting blocs.
Can such a realignment hold behind a figurehead whose successful bout with potential death may have redeemed the image of a mad hatter given to reckless self-indulgence, who had clearly tried to sabotage the previous presidential election and endorsed violence, both verbal and physical, in the process?
The week and the convention were still young, and the Democrats have yet to have their own convention. We shall see what we shall see.
Consistent with this overarching effort at self-recreation was the Tennessee delegation’s Monday-morning breakfast, which featured its own efforts toward achieving an image of “unity,” though the mechanics of the process, at least as spoken to by Senator Bill Hagerty, the main breakfast speaker, were essentially limited to the idea of making nice to Nikki Haley.
A quote from the prominent Millington Republican Terry Roland, not a UT-Knoxville enthusiast, on being handed one of the conspicuously orange-hued MAGA hats passed out to all delegates: “I’d rather kiss a donkey on the ass than put this orange thing on my head.”
State Chairman Scott Golden of Jackson, on the other hand, as well as Senator Hagerty, in separate remarks to the state delegation, made a point of glorifying the color orange. It was, in fact, Orange Day for the delegation.
• Meanwhile, next week: a preview of the forthcoming local election and more, much more about the GOP’s dramatic week of refurbished public appeals.
