How the Republicans Became the Party of Precarious Manhood

The fundamental crisis of Precarious Manhood looks to me to be the inability to support a family by doing what was traditionally man’s work—through largely manual labor. This is partly the result of economic changes: As a consequence of mechanization and the more newly digitized world, it takes fewer workers to build things or produce goods both large and small than it once did. But it’s also partly the result of political changes that since 1980 have offshored manufacturing, demolished unions, and shifted the proceeds of work from labor to capital, from workers to investors.