Background reading:

• “Feminist Future, or Return of the Strongman? The Young Men’s Vote and the Fate of the Nation” — Jackson Katz
• “Right-Wing Criticism of Tim Walz’s Military Record Is Really an Attack on His Manhood” — Jackson Katz

Transcript:

00:00:03.4 Michele Goodwin:

Welcome to Fifteen Minutes of Feminism, part of our On The Issues With Michele Goodwin at Ms. Magazine platform. As you know, we report, rebel, and we tell it just like it is, and on all of our shows, we center your concerns about rebuilding our nation and advancing the promise of equality, and as you know, when we are doing Fifteen Minutes of Feminism, we dive right in, and in this episode, I’m with a guest that we’ve had on before. We really appreciate him. 

He is Dr. Jackson Katz, a regular Ms. Magazine and Ms. Studios contributor, and creator of the 2020 documentary The Man Card: White Male Identity Politics from Nixon to Trump, which was recently released in a newly-revised and updated version. We talk about that in this episode, and what we really dive into are the ways in which the various forms of masculinity are coming up for discussion right now in the countdown to the election.

00:00:05.5 Michele Goodwin:

The work that you’ve done has been so critically important for our understanding about how men and boys are navigating our society. So, I’m so grateful that you are joining me in this conversation. So, you’ve been writing a lot about how masculinity has been influencing the lead-up to the 2024 election, and of course, so much has dramatically changed in the lead-up time. More dramatically with, now, the Vice President, Kamala Harris, replacing Joe Biden as the Democrats’ nominee. So, let me start off with this. How do you think that change has influenced how those on the right go about leveraging masculinity in their rhetoric about campaign strategy?

00:00:56.3 Dr. Jackson Katz:

Well, first, Michele, thank you very much for having me back on. This is a great honor and opportunity for me, so thank you for that. Wow, this is kind of unbelievable, what’s been happening in this election, and you know, the argument that I’ve been making, that I’ve been writing about, making films about for a long time, is that the Republicans have understood that a central part of their appeal is not just to white people, but to white men and men who are threatened by and frustrated by and resentful of feminist gains.

So, it’s not just, you know, sort of backlash against civil rights and racial justice that animates the rise of the right over the past half century, but it’s also backlash against feminism and the LGBTQ revolution, and the Republicans have understood this, both implicitly and explicitly, for a half century, and the Democrats are only now beginning to figure it out.

And for example, when Kamala Harris announced that Tim Walz was her vice-presidential pick, I was elated. Many people were, because I thought, okay, finally somebody gets it. Somebody at the highest levels of the Democratic Party gets that you have to explicitly appeal to men, and especially white men through narrative, through symbolism, through reaching out. It’s not about policy, because my argument is also that it’s never really been about policy. It’s been about identity.

And so, I think this election, so many things are happening around identity, but specifically around, in the case that I’m focusing on, white men’s identity, and Trump, in the ‘24 Republican National Convention…and the Trump Administration…not the administration, but the Republican National Convention was just so over-the-top focused on a celebration of a certain kind of cartoonish hypermasculinity. They literally played It’s a Man’s World as Donald…by James Brown as Donald Trump walks out into the arena with his little patch on his ear from the assassination attempt.

They made no, you know, bones about it. It was like, you’re voting for a man, the savior of the country, who’s tough enough to claim back or reclaim America, that’s been lost to the forces of liberalism, feminism, you know, wokeism, whatever you want to call it, and what they consider degeneracy, and I mean, Hulk Hogan coming onto the stage, you know, and ripping his shirt off, and I mean, yes, that was, like, literally over-the-top cartoonish, but that was only an exaggeration of what was really happening.

And then, when Kamala Harris became the nominee, after the Democrats successfully sort of moved beyond Joe Biden, then, because she’s a woman, this brings sort of gender into center stage again, but the interesting thing is that, normally, a woman’s presence in a political campaign at this level would call attention to gender in a way that had been invisible prior, but because Trump is such an over-the-top sort of hyper-masculinist actor, gender had already been highlighted. Kamala Harris’ entry made it even more complicated.

00:04:36.4 Michele Goodwin: 

So, I’m wondering how you perceive the two debates? There was the first between Joe Biden and Trump. Shortly thereafter, Joe Biden stepped down, after calls for him to do so, and there was much conflict over that, but there was a debate, and then there was a follow-up debate after Kamala Harris received the nomination from the Democratic Party, so two debates. How do we understand that through this lens of masculinity?

00:06:56.7 Dr. Jackson Katz:

Sure. Well, let’s be clear. Debates, in the modern era, have almost never been about policy. They are theatrical performances, and I’ve written they’re, essentially, masculinity contests, where it doesn’t matter who knows more than the other person, who has more of a grasp of policy. In fact, that could actually backfire for the Democrats if the emphasis is on how much they know about the various issues, how articulate they are, because that has not been the decisive factor in how people measure success or failure in debates.

It’s all about performance, and again, the performance is a one-on-one…outside of the Hillary Clinton / Donald Trump debates in 2016 and then the Kamala Harris / Trump debate here in 2024, every debate has been between men, mostly between white men, and it’s, therefore, judged as a contest between men in a kind of…with boxing metaphor as the reigning metaphor used by the commentariat to, you know, talk about the success or failure of the various candidates.

Did he land a knock-out punch? Was he about to parry, you know, the…with counterpunch against the jab that this candidate successfully, you know, launched? I mean, it’s embarrassing. To me, I’m embarrassed by this, but this is how it works. I mean, for example, during the Ronald Reagan presidency, Reagan would study lines. He would actually write lines and study them, and you know, he’s an actor who was very good at delivering lines.

He knew that what mattered, not was grasp of policy. He knew, for example, when he was debating Jimmy Carter in 1980, when he was debating Walter Mondale in 1984, both of those men were much smarter than Reagan, knew much more about policy than he did, but he studied…you know, he understood that it was about lines. Like, for example, there you go again, or I’m not going to make age…you know, I’m not going to make my opponent’s age an issue, his youth and inexperience, an issue.

He knew that people would then grasp onto those lines and say, oh, Ronald Reagan won the debate. Nothing to do with policy, and yet, the Democrats think, okay, I get to show up and be smart and be able to point to all these programs that I have, you know, and these policy issues. It’s not about that. Anyhow…and by the way, Biden, when I watched Biden…I mean, I’m not alone in this. I know that a lot of people did the same thing. It was like, from the first moment, it was like a disaster, and it was not because of what he said. Like, if you read the transcript, you’re not getting the point.

The point is not about that Biden was articulating positions that made more sense than Trump. It was how he came across, and by the way, when it comes to male voters, if you listen to the male…the discourse in podcast America, in the manosphere, in right-wing talk radio, on Fox News, since Biden became president, and then increasingly, over the last couple of years, there’s just open mockery of Joe Biden’s masculinity, open mockery of his command…not just his command of sentence structure, but his, like, sort of power…

00:10:08.5 Michele Goodwin:

Which, on that point about sentence structure, it also seems to me, the mocking of a disability, as well, which we’ve seen with this, that real men, bold men aren’t vulnerable. They don’t have disabilities, or none that one could see. You know, I saw that…I know you’re going to make this other brilliant point, because all the points you make are brilliant, but I think we also saw that at the DNC convention when Waltz’s son stands up and said, I love you dad, and then, suddenly, it seems as if there was real animosity against this and against his child. It was stunning, the level of vitriol. In fact, it was really quite chilling and horrific, what was targeted at this young boy standing up with tears in his eyes, mouthing that he loved his father.

00:11:04.9 Dr. Jackson Katz:

Yes, and I would say the reason for it, the big, overarching reason for it, is that Tim Walz is an extraordinarily powerful threat to the Republicans framing themselves as the party of men and the party of strong men and real men, and anything that they can do to take him down, to make it seem that he’s not the man that he is being presented as, is a way…they’re going to take that.

So, for example, almost from the moment that he was announced as Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential running mate, right-wing media attacked his credentials in the military, which is a repeat of the Swift Boat attacks against…right-wing Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry in 2004, because they knew…smart Republican strategists, among them Roger Ailes in the 2004 election, knew that John Kerry’s status as a combat veteran of Vietnam was one of the most powerful sort of identity pieces that he had, to try to pull back some of the white male voters to the Democratic Party, because they could say I identify with this guy.

He’s a combat veteran. He has the support of the Firefighter’s Union. Even though John Kerry was from an upper-class background, he did have some markers of sort of masculine…and in a hegemonic sense, masculine status and achievement, and they knew that, and so, they went after him, and by the way, Chris LaCivita, the person…one of the people who was the instigators of the Swift Boat ad campaign in 2004 against John Kerry, is also a senior advisor to the Trump campaign.

So, they knew, for example, that Tim Walz’s military record, as a highly-accomplished, non-commissioned officer in the Army National Guard was something that would give a permission structure to white men, especially who are identified with military with sort of hyper…sort of kind of masculine, traditional masculine pursuits. He’s a gun owner. He’s a hunter. They knew that all that would be damaging, because it would give white men a permission structure to vote for the Democrats. So, they attacked him at his greatest strength.

So, I think this thing with his son, it was more like what angle can we use to undermine Tim Walz’s claims to fatherhood, to patriotism, to military valor? All of those things are things that they understand to be constitutive parts of why they roll the table with white male voters every election cycle at the presidential level, and they know that they have to get overwhelming majorities of the white male vote, especially the high-school-educated white male vote, to win the election, and so, anything that’s going to undermine their radical majorities among that demographic is a threat that they have to then counteract.

00:14:11.3 Michele Goodwin:

in fact, in thinking about the DNC, what you’ve said on Waltz in a piece, Tim Walz, a DNC speech was a masculinity-themed, populist pep talk, and you say that, in particular, his identity as a conventional, Midwestern white man who hunts, fishes, and was a highly successful football coach might just be the perfect complement to that of his running mate Kamala Harris, who clearly has formidable political skills of her own, right, and so, with that, you were noting that he was an ideal selection as a vice presidential running mate.

00:14:54.0 Dr. Jackson Katz:

Yes, and again, you know, we have a big country, right? Fifty states, and we have an Electoral College, which means that Kamala Harris has to win the votes, majorities, in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, which have really large percentages of white voters and white male blue-collar voters, who vote overwhelmingly, in the last half century, on the presidential level, for the Republicans.

And so, there has to be a way to cut into that radical majority that the Republicans have been gaining with those white male voters, and so, the Tim Walz pick was, I think, explicitly focused on that piece of it and beyond. I mean, Tim Walz has a number of political skills, and I appreciate that very much, but I think a big part of it is what I’m talking about, and what I think the Democrats haven’t figured out, until now, is that you have to play…you have to understand and appreciate what’s happening with white male identity.

You can’t just push it off and say, you know, we’re focused on other things. We’re focused on people of color. We’re focused on getting women out. We’re focused on expanding sort of the palette of the American pluralistic experience. That’s all great stuff, but white men still make up a third of the electorate, and if you lose them, for example, the way that Biden did in 2020…he lost, among white high-school-educated men, something like 71 to 28 or something like that.

I mean, Trump just ran the table with white male voters, especially high-school-educated white male voters, in 2020. It’s really hard to counteract that, especially in the battleground states, if you don’t cut into that majority, and I think the Tim Walz pick and some of this narrative about patriotism, about strength, about, you know, about traditional masculine sort of ideas…

00:16:44.4 Michele Goodwin:

But doesn’t it also just look like he has her back? I mean, so, something that I think is also really important to put on the table, men who can support women and who can do so in such a way where it doesn’t seem that, somehow, they are threatened, one gets that sense from Tim Walz, and I’m sure your research probably shows something in that. What does it take? What are the certain skillsets that a man has when he can stand by, support, and be proud of standing by a woman? It seems that Tim Walz embraces, or seems to embrace, some of that. It comes across, at least, as people are saying.

00:17:26.9 Dr. Jackson Katz:

Absolutely, and again, it’s a critical piece of what has to happen, because, honestly, in right-wing media…in the right-wing media ecosphere, which I pay very close attention to and have been for, you know decades, they mock men who support women’s rights. They mock men like me. I mean, most of my work is men’s…you know, engaging and mobilizing men around men’s violence against women and supporting basic, you know, gender equity issues and feminist issues. People like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, they mock men like me, as if we’re, somehow, weak or soft or have these ulterior motives, and listen, I mean, if you think about the men who…and young men who are supporting Trump, they’re not listening…I’m sorry to, you know, Ms. podcasts. They’re not reading books about gender equity and intersectional…

00:18:20.3 Michele Goodwin:

You know that they’re not listening to my podcast, Jackson.

00:18:23.7 Jackson Katz:

Not yet, not yet, not yet, Michelle.

00:18:25.2 Michele Goodwin:

Not yet. Not yet.

00:18:26.9 Dr. Jackson Katz:

That’s the next project, but they’re not taking women and gender studies classes on college campuses. They’re not engaging at the level that many of us engage on these issues. They’re listening to Ben Shapiro. They’re listening to social media clips. They listen to Tucker Carlson interviewing some neo-Nazi. I mean, they do things like that, and the ones who are more politically engaged are engaged in podcasts and social media discourse, but they’re not exposed to sophisticated feminist ideas, and much less ideas about how men can retain their strength and their integrity and at the same time, support feminism and support feminist efforts and policy positions. In fact, what they hear is the opposite. They hear that men who are supportive of feminist projects are emasculated cucks, wimps, soy boys, and virtue signalers who can’t get laid, basically, I mean, unless they curry favor with women by…

00:19:26.0 Michele Goodwin: 

So much of it does actually go back to sex. We’ve got to get…I got to get you back on this show again and without the kind of gap of time that we’ve had. So, we’re coming near the close, and we always ask about what’s the silver lining, and so, keep that in mind as I ask you one question before that, So, I’m wondering, do you think that the mobilization of groups, like White Dudes for Harris, signifies a kind of shift in the public perception of what it means to be…have a left-wing…is there such a thing as left-wing masculinities? And how much does this stand to actually impact election outcomes?

00:20:05.9 Dr. Jackson Katz:

Well, to me, the biggest issue in this election is gender, okay? I don’t think it can be overstated. I think this election is going to hinge on whether more women come out…I’m making a dramatic statement for effect, but you know, so, I know there’s nuance to this. Whether more women come out to support Kamala Harris than men come out to support Donald Trump, and I think, yes, we can parse that a little bit, but I think, overwhelmingly, this is about gender, and the gender gap is enormous.

By the way, the gender gap among young people 18 to 29 is enormous. It’s, like, the biggest gender gap across the board, is the gender gap among young voters, and I’m involved in an initiative called the Young Men Research Initiative. We’re trying to call attention to how the Democrats and progressives and feminists need to pay much closer attention to narratives that reach young men, because young women are moving to the left. Young men are moving to the right, and in part, they’re moving to the right because they don’t feel welcomed.

They don’t feel embraced, and they don’t feel like they’re part of sort of the progressive and feminist, you know, multi-racial coalition going into the future. I think they are part of that coalition, but we need to narrate that more effectively. So, I would think, in a hopeful way, I think, if we can…and over the next couple of months, you know, until the election, if we can figure out ways to talk publicly, not just you and me, obviously, but anybody, you know, who has the ear of young voters as well as more generally, can say, yes, there is a place for white men in the Democratic coalition.

Yes, there’s a place for white men who support women’s rights. We welcome you. Tim Walz is a perfect example of that. He’s literally the embodiment of that. That it’s not a measure of your weakness. This is so absurd. It’s a measure of your strength if you’re a man that you support gender justice and don’t see it as a threat to your very identity. That’s actually a form of weakness rather than strength, and so, I think framing it positively, like I always do, is we need more young men…we need more men who have the strength, the self-confidence, the moral courage to speak up and support justice and fairness and gender equity and women candidates, and it doesn’t diminish our manhood.

This is so absurd on so many levels, but we can’t just bat it away and say that it’s absurd. We have to actually, as we always say, meet them where they are. We have to talk to men. We have to talk to young men. One last thing about this. I made a film that just came out, I mean, literally today. We’re releasing it today. You know, happy day, but it’s called…

00:22:37.6 Michele Goodwin:

Congratulations.

00:22:39.4 Dr. Jackson Katz:

Thank you. It’s called The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power & the American Presidency, and it’s all about how, over the last 50 years of presidential campaigns, gender has been a central subtext, and now it’s risen to being in the foreground, but it’s always been present, and by making it visible, I think, by talking about it, even like you and I are doing right now, it undermines the power of the right to frame these issues in a way that alienates men, especially white men, and brings them back into sort of the progressive coalition.

00:23:15.7 Michele Goodwin:

Jackson Katz, it is always such an incredible pleasure being with you. We ask our guests, each episode, what they see as a silver lining, and so, I’m wondering, in these times, how do you see a bright future ahead?

00:23:39.8 Dr. Jackson Katz:

I really think that, like the Harris campaign has been able to articulate, there is a newfound sensibility among people on the progressive side of the house, that recapturing this notion of American experience and the American project as a small d democratic project, a racially-diverse society and you know, on a large scale, which has an enormous footprint in the world…because, you know, I travel all over the world, and obviously, what happens in the United States is incredibly important to people around the world.

But we have this opportunity, going forward, in this incredibly diverse society that we live in, to model that we can actually live together, with each other, across all these differences, and I think the peace, you know, that I take some comfort in, obviously, it’s the leadership of women and people of color and LGBTQ. Obviously, that’s been an incredibly positive step…you know, giant step forward over the last couple of generations.

But I do believe, whether it’s White Dudes for Haris or other men who are going forward, we do have a constituency of men who haven’t had a very unified voice. They’ve been individually supportive of women or people in their intimate relationships, or they’ve, you know, donated to campaigns and everything else, but they haven’t had a public and visible voice to articulate some of these things. I think that if we build it, they will come.

In other words, I do believe that there’s an awful lot of men out there, including white men, who have felt really uncomfortable…not just uncomfortable, they’ve been outraged by the Trump years and by Trumpism and by MAGA, but they haven’t really had a way to articulate that, outside of supporting others, and I think, if we can give them a platform and a voice in some organized fashion, I’m hopeful that that will be the tipping point for the progressive coalition, that could then enact…have a supermajority that could then enact social legislation, that could benefit everybody, including, by the way, those very same white men who have seen right-wing social policy as, somehow, their ally, when it, in fact, is not their ally.

So, I’m hopeful that, if we do this right, we can build this expanded coalition and actually get some things done in this country, and by the way, Kamala Harris, like for me and for many white men, have been elated for the last several weeks since her ascension to the nomination, and I think that that’s a hopeful sign, as well. It’s not just people of color. It’s not just women who are thrilled by this moment in our history. It’s all of us, and I think there’s reason for hope in that.

00:26:21.0 Michele Goodwin:
Dr. Jackson Katz, who is a regular Ms. contributor and also has a new film out about The Man Card, you all have to find it at your university. He’s hosted. Bring him there to talk about it. It is always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for spending time with me on our On The Issues Podcast and Fifteen Minutes of Feminism, which is never counted in traditional terms. We count our minutes in feminist terms. Thank you so much, Jackson.

00:26:51.3 Jackson Katz:

Thank you so much, Michele.