Republican Politicians Do Not Understand Masculinity

I am an engineer by training. This means, among all of my other many, many faults, I am neither impressed by power nor in awe of it. Power, in engineering terms, is usually easy. Yes, at the high end you run into physical limitations, but throwing more power at a problem is often the sign of lazy engineering. Efficiency — getting performance out of less power — impresses me. Which is why I am so disgusted by the Republican definition of masculinity.

The GOP, especially in Texas, is trying to make the Democratic candidate look unmanly. People like Ted Cruz accuse him of being transgender, and Ken Paxton attacks in a similar fashion, hitting him on his vegetarianism (which he isn’t) and repeating the transgender attacks. But Ted Cruz allowed Donald Trump to insult his wife and then became a spokesperson and supporter of Trump. Ken Paxton gave a plea deal to a man who raped a child for years that kept him in jail for a good, solid, entire day and did not even require that person to register as a sex criminal. Hardly manly behavior.

Men, if you grew up properly, are supposed to protect people, to stand up for people who cannot stand up for themselves. Now, done incorrectly, this can be problematic. It can curdle into doing what the man in question thinks best, not what the people who are suffering think best. Or it leads to oppressing others in the name of protecting someone else. But there is no definition of masculinity, or basic decency, that means not defending people, like your wife or the victims of child abuse, from people who would hurt them for no reason. And yet, the GOP flocks to these people, Trump included. Why? Because they aren’t interested in masculinity or decency. They are interested in domination.

Paxton and Cruz’s attacks are meant to diminish their opponent; to assert that they are, all evidence to the contrary, tougher and thus better than him. Trump’s entire politics runs like this. He demands that his cabinet meetings turn into fawning compliment parties for him, enforcing a level of pathetic servility that even North Korea finds inherently repulsive. It started from the beginning of his first term — forcing his first press secretary to go in front of the world and lie about the size of his inauguration crowd. It is why his second term has been filled with losers who attempt to project toughness outward but grovel at Trump’s feet. Heck, Marco Rubio just compared the stupid UFC fight on the White House lawn to putting people on the moon. The ridiculousness is the point. They grovel at their leader’s feet in order to gain power over others. Unfortunately for them, this inability to see the world in anything other than domination rituals leads inevitably to people uniting against them.

Trump has lost the war with Iran. Trump is going to have to give up sanctions and billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets in order to get the Strait of Hormuz open, and will get no assurances or verification on Iran’s nuclear program. He is paying to get back to a situation worse than the one he inherited from Obama, even worse than the one he inherited from Biden. But because Trump can only think in terms of zero-sum violence, he was incapable of understanding that he had started a war he likely could not benefit from. His ICE raids are similar — an ICE ramp-up that was done normally, without the masked men, without the violence, without the focus on racial profiling, without the sad focus on specific individuals, would likely have not engendered much opposition beyond folks who already do not approve of ICE. But, again, they had to rub people’s faces in the power they thought they had. As a result, Americans organized and thwarted much of their plans, both in the streets and in the courts, and ICE is almost certainly a dead organization walking.

They keep making this mistake, over and over. DOGE was a big middle finger to the idea that there are connective tissues among people. No need to help poor people, or to collectively engage in medicine and science. They damaged those areas and killed those people overseas because they could — because it was more important to them to show that they were in charge and that they would decide what was deserving and what was not. Now, America is a pariah in much of the world, and China is making easy inroads. Even the murder of fishermen in drug trafficking areas shows the bully mindset, and shows how harmful that mindset is: by killing innocents, they have made it impossible for anyone to help the US stop drug trafficking. Being a big, tough man was more important than actually solving the problem.

Republican politicians are not manly in any sense. They are thugs and bullies, the same kind that struts around when unchallenged and cowers when confronted. They refuse to do anything that real men, real people, do. Instead, they play-act and pretend, acting out their warped fantasies. The fact that the national political press still sees the GOP as the “father” party speaks more to their warped sensibilities than reality. And Democrats should not be afraid to point out when the GOP acts like toddlers and not men. It’s an easy argument, and an important one. The GOP has ceased to be a conservative party and has devolved into a party of bullies. Bullies need to be stopped, not coddled, not ignored. And certainly not indulged.

I build systems for a living, and the best systems, like the best democracies, are finely tuned compromises. Throwing power at them is often counterproductive, a source of bugs and decay and wear. The GOP has forgotten this. We need to restore our system to equilibrium.