The Material Basis of Changing Gender Relations
It’s not about woke ideology.
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It’s clear that among the chief drivers of Trumpism and populist movements more generally are the changes in gender relations that have taken place over the past 50 years. One of the important reasons that Trump won last November’s election was that many young men, including African-Americans and Hispanics, broke for him. The Democratic Party under Kamala Harris focused its appeal on women and issues like abortion, which simply did not resonate with many male voters. Trump celebrates a certain form of traditional masculinity, taking Republican bigwigs to UFC fights and boasting about his sexual prowess. He recently issued an executive order that sought to revive coal mining, saying, “They want to mine. One thing I learned about the coal miners, that’s what they want to do. You could give them a penthouse on 5th Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy.”
His administration also pressed for the release of the Tate brothers from house arrest in Romania, a pair of misogynistic thugs who were charged with sexual assault and were celebrated by many in MAGA world on their return to the United States.
There are many things wrong with Trump’s actions, from reversing climate policy to violations of the rule of law. But there is an underlying social reality behind his appeal to young men.
Beginning in the late 1960s, women began to move into the paid labor force in massive numbers, not just in the United States but all over the world. While pay disparities remain, women began competing with men as breadwinners in families, and traditional patriarchal families began to break down. Women are today being educated in higher numbers than men in many countries around the world, and as Richard Reeves notes in Of Boys and Men, they do better than male counterparts in labor markets. A pathology of male unemployment leading to crime and drug use spread from poor African-Americans in the 1970s to the white working class by the early 2000s, in some cases leading to “deaths of despair” from substance abuse. Resentment against the system that produced these results has animated an important part of Trump’s base.
Many in MAGA blame these developments on a “woke” ideology that privileges women and promotes their welfare over that of men. It is true that feminism represents a coherent set of ideas, ideas which justified policies like the post-Harvey Weinstein clampdown on sexual assault and efforts to appoint women to leadership roles in and out of government.
But changing ideas about the role of women was not the fundamental source of social change in gender relations. Rather, these ideas were a reflection of underlying shifts occurring in the economy, shifts that were in turn driven by technological developments. Ideas, to use Marxist terminology, were merely “superstructure.”
I wrote about this in my least-read book, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, which was published in 1999. The underlying argument was simple: rising female labor force participation was the result of the ongoing shift from an industrial to a post-industrial or information economy. This evolution was first noted in the 1960s, in books like Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. The nature of work was changing: jobs requiring upper body strength and physical endurance were being replaced by service sector positions that required mental acuity. In this new economy, the typical job did not entail lifting heavy objects off the factory floor, but sitting behind a computer screen all day manipulating symbols. And the fact of the matter was that women, particularly at younger ages and lower education levels, were better suited for this kind of work than young men. They were more reliable, more teachable, and less likely to take foolish risks.
What I called the “Great Disruption” had other technological drivers. The birth control pill was introduced in the early 1960s, and allowed (at least theoretically, if not always in practice) the separation of sex from reproduction. Older institutions like the “shotgun marriage” (versions of which are present in every traditional society) existed because young men needed to be forced to provide for the girlfriends they impregnated. The growing ability of women to support themselves economically without male help, when combined with the sexual revolution, let young men off the hook, so to speak. Divorce rates increased, men abandoned wives, girlfriends, and children, and nuclear families ceased being the norm.
Trump’s trade policy, and the furor it has set off since “Liberation Day” on April 2, is based on a wrong understanding of social change. He blames free trade and globalization for the decline of American manufacturing, and would like to return the United States to the position it held in the 1950s where it was the world’s leading manufacturer. This presumably would have knock-on social effects, returning men to their rightful place as the chief breadwinners in families.
This narrative is based on a nostalgic fantasy. The entry of China into the WTO did lead to a loss of American manufacturing jobs, but all advanced countries, including those running large trade surpluses like Japan and Germany, have also seen a drop in manufacturing employment. The reason is the same in all places, which is technological advances that have reduced the need for physical labor. The vast majority of manufacturing jobs that exist today, the ones being outsourced to places like Vietnam and Bangladesh, are low-skill jobs that are largely done by women. Getting sneaker manufacturing back to the United States is a joke: as the rapper Jay-Z said, “I want to wear sneakers, not make them.” There have been hilarious memes on the internet of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and J. D. Vance sitting at sewing machines in sweatshops or, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested, “screwing in millions of little screws” to make iPhones.
The kind of manufacturing jobs that will return if industries are re-shored are more likely to be essentially service sector positions—production engineers who operate and maintain complex equipment, or programmers of the robots that will do the actual heavy lifting. What will not come back even with the highest tariff walls are millions of jobs requiring hard physical labor that men used to perform.
The Great Disruption had other big social effects that we are now having to contend with. Educated women want to work. When they live in still-patriarchal societies like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan where they are channeled into traditional female roles, they revolt either by reducing the number of children they have, or by delaying marriage or avoiding marriage altogether. This is what has led to the disastrously low birth rates in much of developed East Asia, and many parts of southern Europe.
The United States will not return to the labor market of the 1950s under any circumstance, nor should it want to. In the heyday of American manufacturing, men literally wore out their bodies by age 65 as a result of unrelenting physical labor. The coal miners that Trump wants to protect may love their work, but they toil in one of the most unhealthy and dangerous professions in the world (described by Michael Lewis in his new bookWho Is Government?). If you want to blame anyone for the massive changes that have occurred in the relationship of men and women, don’t blame woke ideology. You can blame instead the ubiquitous smart machines that today define our lives.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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Even in the 1950s most blue-collar jobs didn't require the upper body strength or physical endurance that excluded women. Women's exclusion from most of these jobs was plain discrimination. During WWII, when women were needed to do jobs in manufacturing they were recruited; when the war ended, positions were needed for returning GIs, and women were needed to take on the job of professional consumers to transition to a peacetime economy, they were sent home--in spite of the fact that, according to a survey by the Women's Bureau at the time the overwhelming majority said that they would prefer to keep their jobs if they could. Woman can do most blue-collar work and, as the natural experiment of WWII indicates, many would prefer it to the pink-collar drudge work into which most women are now locked.
As for the question of why more women are going to college and outperforming men, and the endless whining about boys falling behind, the reason for this is obvious. Women are working without a net. Without at least a four-year college degree and decent academic performance women will be locked into agonizingly boring, low-wage pink-collar drudge work. Men still have decent blue collar options so there is no need for them to bother.
Basically, many who are anti-woke or really hate wokeism are often more radicalised, bigoted and authoritarian than left-wing collectivists