New Film Looks at How Trump & the Right have Played the Man Card
New film explores how the right has been targeting white men at the very core of their identities for more than five decades.
For years, right-wing politicians and pundits have criticized the left for playing “the race card” and “the woman card.” Our new film The Man Card turns the tables by shining a light on the right’s own longstanding use of white-male identity politics in American presidential elections.
Ranging from Richard Nixon’s tough-talking, law-and-order campaign in 1968 to Donald Trump’s hyper-macho revival of the same fear-based appeals in 2020, The Man Card shows how conservatives have lured white working-class men away from the Democratic Party by branding the Republican Party as the party of real men, attacking Democratic leaders as soft, and promising to restore declining white male power and authority in the face of demographic changes and ongoing struggles for racial, gender, and sexual equality.
The Man Card pays special attention to how right-wing politicians, political operatives, and media commentators have used white-male identity politics to channel the legitimate, class-based grievances of tens of millions of white men into unbridled resentment of women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and so-called “liberal elites.” It also explores how these deeply gendered dynamics have undercut the presidential prospects of women and undermined the nation’s ability to adapt to a changing world.
A co-production of the Media Education Foundation and Eat the Moon Films, The Man Card was directed by Peter Hutchison and Lucas Sabean, and is based on the award-winning book Man Enough: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton & the Politics of Presidential Masculinity, by Jackson Katz.
