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Your discussion of alpha and beta dogs made me search for recent articles on politicians. Internet provided a quick link to a book by Stephen J. Ducat “The Wimp Factor: Gender gaps, holy wars, & the politics of anxious masculinity” and a number of reviews. Although Freud is not my thing, it’s quite interesting. It unravels stupid.
According to Ducat, and I agree, that the placement of this line of thought concerning the “gendering” of issues by ultraconservatives has, after a twenty-five year program of inductive propaganda through the use of “increasingly popular right-wing radio talk show hosts”, successfully linked “progressive” or “liberal” thinking and attached them to a “feminine” link to nurturance and compassion (the ‘government’ as the ultimate ‘mommy,’ with poor dependents sucking on its teat). But a grievous error has been committed because conservatives fail to mention to their radio listeners that corporate welfare and huge tax breaks for the rich do not seem to fall under the same “dependency.” The common thread amongst conservatives seems to stress that the sucking of money upward into the higher echelons of society is OK because it makes the rich smarter and more powerful, while at separate times strongly suggesting that money trickling down to the poor it is bad for them because it makes them stupid and dependent. (This deliberate omission of these facts does have a name: In social psychology, this mental line of thought is called ‘myth enhancing,’ or ‘hierarchy enhancing’ — but that subject is for another time and place).
The “good” fundamentalist makes a conscious decision to adopt the myth; belief in it is life-enhancing. Once accepted, however, he does not bother himself with constantly distinguishing his myth from fact. He does not question its reality on every religious occasion. Instead ..
He takes his God for actual, talks to him, obeys him, makes offerings to him. If the naturalist questions him about this, he will not discuss it; for he has made his decision, and elected his belief, and he does not care what its grounds were and what he meant by it. In effect the Fundamentalist does not any longer distinguish myth and fact. But why should he, if the myth is worth believing in? He did distinguish when there was need of distinguishing: but he made the distinction then in order that he would not have to make it every day. In the life of belief there must be a certain economy. It is well to believe a good many things without having to conduct a continuous epistemological discussion about them; to believe without being self-conscious about it.
The feminist revolution in this country in the 1970s
We have the emergence in 1980s for the first time of the gender gap in political attitudes – men and women taking different political positions, voting for different candidates. Or, put another way, it’s when you begin to see the gendering of political issues where environmentalism is somehow female, or that being anti-regulatory is somehow male. The gender gap is the gendering of these political issues as masculine or feminine, which leads to men taking certain positions and women taking other positions.
After 9/11, rhetoric about how the “real men” are back
You had all kinds of over-the-top, gushing encomia to this sort of post-9/11 revivified manhood. There was this special issue of the American Enterprise titled, “Real Men, They’re Back.” There was this article titled, “Return of Manly Leaders and the Americans Who Love Them.” There was even this contest where they had a chart of how Republicans and Democrats measured up and their conclusion was that to be a man you had to be a Republican.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."