Our New Film “The Man Card: White Male Identity Politics from Nixon to Trump” is in the News
Our New Film on Trump & the Right’s Use of White Male Identity Politics is in the News
With just days to go before Tuesday’s election, stories about Donald Trump’s hyper-macho posturing and unyielding support from white men have suddenly started appearing all over the place in national media.
A number of these pieces – from the Washington Post and the New York Times to Ms. Magazine and Forbes have included references to our just-released film The Man Card: White Male Identity Politics from Nixon to Trump, as well as commentary from author and political analyst Jackson Katz, who created and co-wrote the film.
“As the election approaches, journalists and opinion-leaders are finally taking a deeper look at how Trump’s cartoonish displays of tough-guy masculinity are at the heart of his political appeal with a lot of white men, separate and apart from his well-documented race-baiting,” Katz said today. “I think the value of our film is that it doesn’t treat Trump, or Trumpism, as the origin or source of these kinds of brazen attempts to mobilize manhood in presidential politics, but as the culmination of a 50-plus-year conservative strategy designed to man-up the Republican Party and target white men at the very core of their identities as men.”
Directed and produced by acclaimed filmmakers Peter Hutchison and Lucas Sabean, The Man Card takes a deep dive into the tactics the right has been using since the late ‘60s to win over blue collar and working class white men who were once rock-solid Democrats but now routinely vote for Republican presidential candidates as though their very identities depended on it. Ranging from Richard Nixon’s tough-talking, law-and-order campaign in 1968 to Trump’s puffed-up revival of these same fear-based, tough-guy appeals in 2020, The Man Card shows how the right has enacted a deliberate strategy to frame Democrats and liberals as soft, brand the Republican Party as the party of “real men,” and position conservatives as defenders of white male power and authority in the face of demographic change and struggles for racial, gender, and sexual equality.
In addition to the print pieces listed below, be sure to check out this interview about the film with co-directors Hutchison and Sabean on the leading progressive program The Majority Report with Sam Seder. (Their appearance starts at 1:45:12).
