Much commentary on Trump's victory has veered between two explanations: either there is a bigger proportion of the electorate with 'deplorable' attitudes to women and minorities than was thought; or economic dislocation has produced an angry white working and middle class eager to punish political elites.
These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Paul Mason's contention that the contraceptive pill has undermined 40,000 years of male-dominated human development in a few decades, helping explain the misogyny that infected the presidential campaign, is probably true.
But just as the pill has recast sexual, reproductive and gender relationships, the devastation of manufacturing industries has undermined male dominance in the economic sphere and in the realm of social reproduction — at least for many working class and middle class men.
Many men, it appears, blame their loss of status and power not on an economic system that has no use for them anymore, but on women — this helps to explain the tolerance of Trump's sexism and celebration of sexual assault, as well as the troubling growth of family violence in the US and many other countries.
The potent combination of insecurity, latent violence, race and perceived emasculation was captured in the words of a Trump supporter interviewed by The Guardian at the President's inauguration: 'This is the mood of the world ... People want their lives back. I'm a white male who owns firearms. At least for the next four years I get to keep my guns and my balls.'
What this points to is the need to be cautious about making arbitrary distinctions between class and identity politics. We should remember that 'working class' is an identity in itself, and that 'working class male' is a sub-set of it. Economic forces are the primary shaper of class identity, but not the only one.
The essence of working class male identity has been formed over innumerable generations, conditioned by intertwining relationships between manual work; family structure; relations between the sexes; religious and cultural norms, and so on. While the essence of this identity is determined by the worker's relationship to the means of production, there comes a point when the identity takes on an independent existence, becoming a force in its own reproduction.
Thus the very identity of 'working class man' becomes self-reinforcing, with the constituent elements of that identity (toughness, self-sufficiency, physical strength) becoming not just the manifestation of an individual's relationship to the means of production, but the means and object of their own reproduction. It is no longer hard manual labour that creates a tough, self-sufficient man, but the identity 'working class man' that recreates itself.
"Rather than work creating a particular form of male identity, male identity now requires a particular relationship to work — without work, men feel no longer able to 'provide' for their families, feel worthless and emasculated."
Indeed, the destruction of secure skilled and unskilled male jobs over the last 30 years helps to explain the backlash against mainstream political elites that was exemplified in Trump's victory. But the viciousness of the sexism that marred the election campaign, and the willingness to ignore (or welcome) Trump's misogyny, are a symptom of the undermining of a deep sense of masculinity that, for at least some men, is their primary — perhaps only — identity.
This helps to explain what has long baffled parts of the Left — the phenomenon of working class tories. A materialist understanding of the dynamics of class formation renders this inexplicable. Why do some workers vote against their objective class interests? One explanation, of course, is the effectiveness of the dominant ideology of capitalism to produce false consciousness. No doubt this is important.
But it is also likely that some elements of working class identity are not at all progressive. Think for instance of intra-family solidarity, with clearly identified gender roles within the nuclear family. These may have had a structural functionality in earlier periods, when heavy labour made males the primary wage-earners, and welfare states were undeveloped, leaving families as the locus of social reproduction and individual support. Such elements are now running up against pressures for gender equality.
Given the concrete nature of family relationships, compared to the relative abstraction of class as an economic category, there is little surprise that the identity of 'working class man', given meaning, at least partly, in its relationship of contradistinction to the category 'woman', trumps the identity of 'worker'.
Indeed, the power of masculinity as a source of identity may now be so substantial that it reverses the normal understanding of class identity formation. Rather than work creating a particular form of male identity, male identity now requires a particular relationship to work — without work, men feel no longer able to 'provide' for their families, feel worthless and emasculated.
The problem is, as Paul Mason (Post Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future) says, 'work — the defining activity of capitalism — is losing its centrality both to exploitation and resistance', leaving masculinity as the central site of contestation. In this sense the key struggle for gender politics today may not be around female identity, or non-binary identities, but the problem of masculinity. For a problem it truly is.
Colin Long is Victorian Secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union.