Yes, lots of conservative males feel unmanned because women can now get jobs and contraceptives and so are not (a) desperate to find a man to support them while (b) terrified of getting pregnant. The best answer would be teaching young males that while their grandfathers and male their fathers could be real dicks without it ruining their lives, that is no longer true. But that is really not an answer Tucker Carlson's audience wants to hear: Josh Barro: "I think a big problem with the 'economic and social change undermined marriage and family for the working class' frame is that a main way it did this is by making women less dependent on men...
Jane Coaston: Tucker Carlson Has Sparked The Most Interesting Debate In Conservative Politics: "Carlson... greed that his monologue was reminiscent of Warren, referencing her 2003 book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Growing Broke....
...Carlson wanted to be clear: He’s just asking questions.... In this telling, white working-class Americans who once relied on a manufacturing economy that doesn’t look the way it did in 1955 are the unwilling pawns of elites. It’s not their fault that, in Carlson’s view, marriage is inaccessible to them.... Someone, or something, did this to them.... Carlson is advancing a form of victim-politics populism that takes a series of tectonic cultural changes—civil rights, women’s rights, a technological revolution as significant as the industrial revolution, the mass-scale loss of religious faith, the sexual revolution, etc.—and turns the negative or challenging aspects of those changes into an angry tale of what they are doing to you. And that was my biggest question about Carlson’s monologue, and the flurry of responses to it, and support for it: When other groups (say, black Americans) have pointed to systemic inequities within the economic system that have resulted in poverty and family dysfunction, the response from many on the right has been, shall we say, less than enthusiastic. Yet white working-class poverty receives, from Carlson and others, far more sympathy....
Carlson said that growing up in Washington, DC, and spending time in rural Maine, he didn’t realize until recently that the same poverty and decay he observed in the Washington of the 1980s was also taking place in rural (and majority-white) Maine. “I was thinking, ‘Wait a second... maybe when the jobs go away the culture changes,’” he told me, “And the reason I didn’t think of it before was because I was so blinded by this libertarian economic propaganda that I couldn’t get past my own assumptions about economics.”... Carlson told me that beyond changing our tax code, he has no major policies in mind. “I‘m not even making the case for an economic system in particular,” he told me. “All I’m saying is don’t act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God or a function or raw nature”...
#noted
