Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

And on the personal side there was one more thing—the federal government wasn’t on the side of men being manly. Liberals were certainly on the wrong side of that one. It wasn’t easy being a man. It was an era of numerous subtle challenges to masculinity, it seemed. These days a woman didn’t need a man for financial support, for procreation, even for the status of being married. And now with talk of transgender people, what, really, was a man? It was unsettling, wrong. At the core, to be a man you had to be willing to lose your life in battle, willing to use your strength to protect the weak. Who today was remembering all that? Marriage was truly between a man and a woman, Mike felt. Clarity about one’s identity was a good thing, and the military had offered that clarity, he felt, even as it offered gifted men of modest backgrounds a pathway to honor. Meanwhile, the nearly all-male areas of life—the police, the fire department, parts of the U.S. military, and the oil rigs—needed defending against this cultural erosion of manhood. The federal government, the EPA, stood up for the biological environment, but it was allowing—and it seemed at times it was causing—a cultural erosion. What seemed to my Tea Party friends to be dangerously polluted, unclean, and harmful was American culture. And against that pollution, the Tea Party stood firm.