WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE

My day job is to be funny. It’s also my night job. I am not tasked, as are most academics, with the role of concocting theories.

But a theory has occurred to me, one that seems to explain the era we’ve been living through, and I haven’t heard its like from anyvbody else. So, here goes.

What needs explaining, it seems, is the attraction Donald Trump has to men, young men in particular. I think its roots go back a few decades.

In the 1970s, two relatively new groups entered the work force: black people and, in much larger numbers, women.

Suddenly, young men were competing for jobs with a comprable number of “others”, and, more importantly, “others” whom employers had successfully been paying lower wages than to their white male employees.

That entrance into the job market, and iinto the wider economy, has continued to swell. Today, the majority of students in major universities are women. And that entrance of the long-time lower-paid groups has arguably emboldened employers to put more downward pressure on wages.

So young men face more competition for good jobs than their fathers or grandfathers did, and at lower wages than they might have expected.

It’s not politically or socially acceptable to blame women and, to a lesser extent, black people, for this major change.

Most young men have mothers, sisters, or companions who’d discourage their male counterparts from taking out their resentments and frustrations on them.

Then comes along a politician who finds a safer object upon which to blame those frustrations and resentments: the undocumented immigrant population. Of course, illegal immigrants are a tiny fraction of the cohort that caused the changes in the work force. But they lack the political communication power to continually drive home that point.

And there’s something else afoot. Alone among American politicians, Trump has succeeded in creating an image of super-masculinity. At a time when “toxic masculinity” is a viable subject for public discussion, Trump projects that image, learned not from his experience as a businessman—certainly not from experiencing four bankruptcies in a business, gambling, where profits are guaranteed—but from his later experience with the world of pro wrestling.

In the early 2000s, Trump made a habit of showing up at, and participating in, WWE events, marinating in an environment of fictional but increasingly popular entertainments of imagined testosterone. No better example of this cross-pollination exists than Hulk Hogan’s “speech” at the recent Republican convention. As the conspiracy theorists like to say, that was no accident.

So, just as Mark Burnett created a persona for Trump as a wildly successful businessman, Trump created a persona for himself as an aggressively super-masculine leader. And, for men angry at the “they”—women and minorities—who had seemingly robbed them of their expected opportunities—the super-masculine leader offered immigrants as a safe target for their frustrations.

Which would go far to explain another puzzlement: how a low and at best medium income populace could identify with a supposedly super-rich elitist: His frustrations, borne of his father’s disdain for him and nourished by events like a 2016 Catholic Charities dinner where Manhattan’s real elite booed at his presence, were a weird super-echo of theirs.

That’s the reality behind the bizarre construct of “They’re coming for you, I’m just standing in the way.”

This theory has the added advantage of explaining why Trump voters have joined Christian nationalists in support of severe anti-abortion laws. After all, women can’t compete in the workplace if they’re stuck at home having babies.

Of course, Trump has women in his coalition as well as men. It would be interesting if someone came up with data—not polls but actual data—on how many of those women are “stay-at-home moms”.

Does the arrival of a woman of color in the Presidential race portend an easing or a prolonging of these developments? Place your bets.

But not at a Trump casino.