The Masculinity Debate Isn’t About Vibes. It’s About Work.

I read The Atlantic’s piece on the return of the “Democratic manly man” twice before I let myself get annoyed. The first read was curiosity. The second was recognition — recognition that once again, a national conversation about American masculinity was happening almost entirely without the men who’ve been quietly practicing it my whole life.

The setup, for anyone who missed it: reporter Russell Berman profiled Democratic House candidate Brian Poindexter, who wants voters to know he started in a machine shop, hauled furniture, became a union ironworker, drives a Ram Big Horn, and built his own shed. The pitch is that Democrats lost working-class men because they got squeamish about masculinity, and now the party is trying to relearn a language it forgot. The Federalist fired back within a day, arguing — correctly, in my view — that manhood isn’t a costume you put on for a campaign season. “To be an American man is not simply a matter of aesthetics,” they wrote, and they’re right that a truck and a shed don’t make a man any more than a suit and a briefing book unmake one.

Here’s what neither piece got to: this whole argument is playing out as if masculinity is a swing-voter demographic to be won back, not a set of daily obligations millions of men are already living out. I spent years in the military learning what it actually costs to carry responsibility for other people’s lives. I’ve spent the years since learning that the version of masculinity that matters most isn’t the one that shows up in a campaign ad — it’s the one that shows up at 6 a.m. to get kids to school, that shows up to a night shift nobody wants, that shows up to therapy even though showing up feels like the hardest thing you’ll do that week.

That version of masculinity is disproportionately Black and brown, disproportionately working in Milwaukee’s trades, warehouses, and shop floors, and almost entirely absent from both the Atlantic piece and the backlash to it. Poindexter’s biography — ironworker, pickup truck, backyard shed — is a fine one. It’s also a very specific, very white, very rural-inflected version of “manly,” being deployed as if it’s the only available template. Nobody in that exchange is talking to the Black father in Sherman Park working two jobs to keep his son in a good school district, or the veteran two blocks from me still figuring out how to translate combat discipline into civilian patience. Their masculinity doesn’t need reviving. It never left.

I’ll say the thing both sides tend to dance around: men, of every background, are struggling to find a version of manhood that isn’t defined against something — not defined against weakness, not defined against women, not defined against “wokeness,” not defined against a stereotype from a decade ago. The healthiest men I know define their masculinity by what they build, not what they’re rebelling against. That’s true whether you’re an ironworker in a Ram truck or a Black dad coaching Pop Warner on a Saturday morning after a double shift.

What frustrates me about the political version of this conversation is how transactional it is. Democrats appear to be relearning masculine signaling because they think it costs them elections. Republicans and conservative commentators are quick to say the signaling is hollow — again, correctly — but rarely follow that critique with anything constructive for the men actually looking for direction. Both sides treat masculinity as a communications problem to be solved rather than a formation problem — a question of how boys become responsible men, sustained over decades, not election cycles.

If I’m being honest about what actually rebuilds a man’s sense of purpose, it’s not a truck in a campaign ad. It’s mentorship. It’s a trade or a craft he’s good at and can point to. It’s a faith community or a fraternal one that holds him accountable to something bigger than his own comfort. It’s other men who will tell him the truth. None of that fits neatly into a midterm strategy memo, and that’s exactly why this conversation keeps missing the men who need it most.

Milwaukee has real infrastructure for this already — apprenticeship pipelines through the building trades, veteran mentorship networks, church-based men’s groups — that do more for a 19-year-old’s sense of manhood in six months than a national magazine trend piece will do in ten years. If either party wants to actually reach men instead of just talking about them, that’s where the work is. Not in finding the right truck. In funding, scaling, and showing up for the programs already doing the forming.

The truck’s fine. The shed’s fine. But manhood was never about the props. It’s about who’s still standing there when nobody’s watching and nothing’s being filmed.