I’ve brought this up before. Our Democratic State Committee has outreach subcommittees for women, veterans, LGBTQ, labor and more but no outreach for men. We struggle to win elections in “blue” Massachusetts as a result.
In the New York Times, David Brooks wrote a great piece today summarizing the problems that boys and men in the modern world are dealing with:
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3 out of 4 deaths from suicide or drug overdoses are male
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For every 100 women that died from Covid, 184 men died from Covid
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1 out of 3 men with no education beyond their high school diploma is out of work
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In 2014, more men lived with their parents than with a wife / partner
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When the pandemic hit, the decline in male enrollment in college was 7x greater than the decline in female enrollment
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15% of men have no close friends
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Women initiate divorce 2x as often as men.
What I see here is that men and boys are struggling mentally. They seem to have lost ambition and don’t have as much interest in improving their lives and outcomes.
These are problems that deserve to be addressed by the Massachusetts Democratic Party. The problem is, right now we can’t talk about any of that without an assumption that anyone who starts this topic is an ardent anti-feminist, racist, misogynist who is “mansplaining” thereby invalidating their opinions. I think these problems deserve a better and more constructive conversation than that.
From the piece you cited (emphasis mine):
The suggestion that we adjust our school programs to reflect observed and well-documented physiological differences between young boys and young girls is a good one. This looks like another of the many examples where our public education policies are set by parental or societal convenience rather than observed reality. Another example is in school starting times. We now know that adolescents suffer from too-early starting times for high school. Most towns continue the practice because it is inconvenient for parents and school-bus schedules to start later.
The final emphasized excerpt strikes me as most important. We hurt boys, men, and all of us when we perpetuate the lie that a man without higher education can sustain a middle-class lifestyle for a family on his income alone. Even if that canard were true in the distant past (it was demonstrably never true for men of color, and it completely excludes households led by women), it is absolutely not true today.
Our focus on work, labor, and wages as a foundation for self-esteem is itself dangerously obsolete. Our wealthy and ultra-wealthy long ago learned how to exploit that focus to plunder the lives of those who embrace it.
We Democrats should be taxing excessive wealth (where “excessive” is measured by a metric like the GINI coefficient) and distributing that excessive wealth among the rest of us.
If every American received their fair share of the enormous wealth that today’s American economy generates, most of the economic suffering would be removed.
This change will increase, rather than decrease, the importance of building self-esteem in each person regardless of the career or vocation choices that person makes.
“We hurt boys, men, and all of us when we perpetuate the lie that a man without higher education can sustain a middle-class lifestyle for a family on his income alone”
That is not a lie. That is economic policy as decided by those in power to make policy. Economics is not like gravity, the speed of light, or the flow of a river. Economics is what those in power deem it to be. I suppose Democratic leaders might just honestly admit that, “Yes, there was a time when we supported middle class wages for essential jobs that do not require a college diploma, but we do so no longer and now support an economic policy were retail workers, transportation workers, health aides, and all the other many essential roles that we depend on to enjoy our comfortable lifestyle do not deserve to live a comfortable and secure life.”
There is a reason that the relationship between supply and demand is called a “law”.
No government has ever offered a policy that works better than supply and demand for setting wages and salaries. The attempts to impose wage and price controls by Richard Nixon on August 15, 1971 were a miserable failure that exacerbated the suffering Mr. Nixon was allegedly attempting to address.
These are your words alone. No Democrat has ever said any such thing.
The “law” of supply and demand? Gimme a break. We both know that supply and demand can be manipulated by government policy. Copyright and patent protection for one are government policies that control supply and demand. License to work as a doctor, or dentist, or lawyer are government controls of supply and demand. Now, if one is employed in the software industry, medical field, or law, all high paid areas, one is benefitting from government policy that affects supply and demand.
When trade policy forces autoworkers in Ohio to compete with autoworkers in Mexico, again, we see government policy rigging the “laws” of supply and demand.
No Tom, no one said these auto workers do not deserve a comfortable and secure life, but someone did say “a man without higher education can sustain a middle-class lifestyle for a family on his income alone” is a lie. No Tom, it is not a lie, it is the result of government policy.
You’re misusing vocabulary. All the examples you cite are of government using market mechanisms — based on the law of supply and demand — to influence outcomes.
I appreciate you agreeing that nobody uses language like “deserve”.
I also appreciate you correctly quote me, and I stand by that quote. It is a statement of fact.
I invite you to offer some specific changes to government policy that you think would make it possible for a man (or woman) without higher education to provide a middle-class lifestyle for a family on just his (or her) income.
I’ve already offered my suggestion: The government could provide a universal base income (UBI) to every American so that every American has access to the basic necessities of life. This UBI could and should be funded by the combination of an erosive wealth tax on the very wealthy and a return of the gift and estate tax rates to their levels of the mid 20th century (a top bracket of 80-90%).
The key difference between my proposal and the Democratic Party lies of today is that my approach decouples the necessities of life from any wage or salary for every American.
The lie is promising that ANY government policy will result in wages and salaries that can support a middle-class family on the earnings of one breadwinner who does not have higher education. Such a policy does not exist because it is a fairy tale — the Democrats might as well promise to change the value of the acceleration due to gravity or change the speed of light in a vacuum.
All the examples you cite are of government using market mechanisms — based on the law of supply and demand — to influence outcomes.
Yes. Government is manipulating supply and demand in such a way to drive wealth to some sectors of citizenry and way from others. much in the way that governments build cams to divert the natural flow of water to benefit certain areas over others that would not naturally receive it.
The government makes the choice to do this. It’s not a “law” that Bill Gates cannot have any competitions duplicating his software. In a free market “supply and demand” economy, Mr. Gates would probably still be working for a living.
Your suggestions treat the symptoms and do not address the cause.
Working class Americans do not want a handout. They want wages that are in line with the wealth that they help to create. Allowing certain sectors special government protections to claim an unequitable share of the wealth and then taxing them on that unearned wealth in order to give it back to the working class that created it is beyond the absurd in complexity and bureaucratic arcane policy that disguises the inequalities and appears to make the wealthy class as benevolent humanitarians.
“We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice”
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Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932
And this still does not address the question as to why there is no outreach for men in the Massachusetts Democratic Party, given the plight of so many men in the commonwealth who are suffering.
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