Watch The Man Card Now
Donald Trump’s staggering popularity with white men, especially white working-class men, didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the culmination of a 50-year strategy by the right to target white men at the very core of their identities.
We’re thrilled to announce the release of a timely new film that takes dead aim at the right’s longstanding mastery of white male identity politics.
The Man Card, created by award-winning author Jackson Katz and co-directed by Peter Hutchison, the acclaimed filmmaker behind the surprise-hit documentary Requiem for the American Dream, is now available.
The Man Card explores how outmoded ideas about American manhood have combined with the politics of white male backlash to shape presidential elections over the past five decades. 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 film 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 exploited 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 Jackson Katz’s book Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton & the Politics of Presidential Masculinity (Interlink Books, 2016).
