How Voters Feel About Josh Hawley’s ‘Attack on Men’
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri surprised even some allies when he recently devoted his entire speech at a high-profile national conference of conservatives to an extended analysis of why so many men appear stuck in a cycle of “idleness and pornography and video games,” as he put it.
Hawley’s warnings against what he called liberals’ “attack on men” could open a new front in the culture wars that Republicans have used to consolidate their support among the voters most alienated by social and demographic change. Polls consistently show that a significant majority of Republican men, and even as many as half of Republican women, believe that amid the reassessment of gender relations sparked by the #MeToo movement, men are being unfairly punished and discriminated against.
[Read: Josh Hawley’s mission to remake the GOP]
Republican politicians haven’t targeted those anxieties nearly as explicitly as they have the unease in their base about the nation’s growing racial diversity—a concern that has infused the party’s focus in the Donald Trump era on issues including undocumented immigration and the teaching of race in public schools. But Hawley’s speech showed how resistance to shifting gender roles can be braided into a broader conservative message of defending “traditional” American values against accelerating change.
Apprehension about new dynamics in both race and gender “are correlated,” Erin Cassese, a University of Delaware political
