Much commentary on Trump's victory has veered between two explanations: either there is a bigger proportion of the electorate with 'deplorable' attitudes to women and minorities than was thought; or economic dislocation has produced an angry white working and middle class eager to punish political elites.
These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Paul Mason's contention that the contraceptive pill has undermined 40,000 years of male-dominated human development in a few decades, helping explain the misogyny that infected the presidential campaign, is probably true.
But just as the pill has recast sexual, reproductive and gender relationships, the devastation of manufacturing industries has undermined male dominance in the economic sphere and in the realm of social reproduction — at least for many working class and middle class men.
Many men, it appears, blame their loss of status and power not on an economic system that has no use for them anymore, but on women — this helps to explain the tolerance of Trump's sexism and celebration of sexual assault, as well as the troubling growth of family violence in the US and many other countries.
The potent combination of insecurity, latent violence, race and perceived emasculation was captured in the words of a Trump supporter interviewed by The Guardian at the President's inauguration: 'This is the mood of the world ... People want their lives back. I'm a white male who owns firearms. At least for the next four years I get to keep my guns and my balls.'
What this points to is the need to be cautious about making arbitrary distinctions between class and identity politics. We should remember that 'working class' is an identity in itself, and that 'working class male' is a sub-set of it. Economic forces are the primary shaper of class identity, but not the only one.
The essence of working class male identity has been formed over innumerable generations, conditioned by intertwining relationships between manual work; family structure; relations between the sexes; religious and cultural norms, and so on. While the essence of this identity is determined by the worker's relationship to the means of production, there comes a point when the identity takes on an independent existence, becoming a force in its own reproduction.
Thus the very identity of 'working class man' becomes self-reinforcing, with the constituent elements of that identity (toughness, self-sufficiency, physical strength) becoming not just the manifestation of an individual's relationship to the means of production, but the means