A common discussion these days, at least among my crowd, focuses on how someone so unfit for the Presidency can hold the nation’s highest office. Clearly, we have become a global embarrasment, aware that residents of our peer nations are shaking their collective heads while asking each other … what’s wrong with those Americans?

Responses to this question abound, some quite convincing: identity politics, chauvinism, caucasion paranoia, the uncertainty related to rapid social change, the slow decline of working class and rural America, and even the price of eggs. Oh, and one should not forget that Americans, in general, are a criminally backward lot.

Recently, I was musing about one aspect of this conundrum … a quirk within the demographic dimension of the issue. In the recent election, younger males flocked to Trump in unexpected numbers, white males in particular. That fact struck me as slightly counter-intuitive. Aren’t the young supposed to be liberal? They were in my day, or so it seemed. What’s going on here?

Let’s look at a few numbers. In general, white youth without college experience chose Trump by 14 percentage points. But young white males with less education supported Trump by an overwhelming margin … 63% to 35%. For males, being young, white, and less educated was a strong predictor of support for the least competent candidate in living memory. Why support someone, and a party, that has never had your interests at heart. Good question, Tom.

We pretty much know that working class males feel threatened. Ever since Ronald Reagan, the laboring class has struggled. After decades where increasing productivity was matched by pay increases, that link was broken in the 1980s. Since then, the monetary rewards of our increasing GDP have gone to the owners of capital, not the nation’s workers. Some $50 trillion dollars has been siphoned from the lower segments of the income distribution for the benefit of those at the very top. While Republicans historically lamented the systemic redistribution of income, they rather like it when their wealthy benefactors profit from the trend.

While seeing their earnings capacity stall and then decline, younger white workers faced a new threat. Not only did their jobs disappear in an emerging global economy that was rigged against them, but they sensed there was another looming concern … being replaced by the other side in the gender wars.

When I was young, most women were not in the labor market, not after marriage at least. Men anticipated and accepted their role as provider, or breadwinner. That stereotype was challenged over time as it became apparent that females were supplanting males in many ways not previously imagined. Recently,  non-farm female workers outnumbered their male counterparts males by 200,000. While a tiny plurality given the size of the labor market, that is a stunning achievement. Females were taking control of the labor market.

But the signs of female progress have long been there.  Women began outnumbering males in college enrollment by the late 1970s. What followed could be expected. Females began to outnumber males as college graduates in 1982. The education related gender-shift trend has continued since then. By 2006, females surpassed males in earning doctoral degrees.

The signs of emerging female dominance in education (and in many professions) were everywhere, if you managed to look. When my wife first worked as Deputy Director of the Wisconsin Court system, the judiciary was a male bastion. Today, females dominate that state’s highest court with six of the seven Wisconsin Supreme Court justices being from the gentler sex. There is an election for a Wisconsin Justice on April 7 (today). Not surprisingly,  both candidates, once again, are females. This is not shocking at all given that women have outnumbered men in law schools for the past decade, now taking up over 56 percent of all law school seats.

Some years ago, I had to take our dog to the University of Wisconsin Veterinary School since he needed high level care for a heart condition (His heart specialist was, no surprise, a woman). While waiting, I found a hall where pictures of the yearly graduating classes were posted. The trend was clear. In the early years (late 1970s I believe), the classes were about 80 percent male. In the most recent years, they were 80 percent female. In the medical clinic where my primary physician is located, they have a wall with pictures of all the Clinic’s doctors. When I first began going there some four decades ago, virtually all the docs were male. Today, 18 of the 21 docs are female. Oh, and I have to see my dentist today for a loose tooth … a female of course.

This leads to another fact potentially disturbing to insecure males. By 2028, females are expected to control 75 percent of all discretionary spending. What little money young males have probably are going for drugs and booze to forget about their sorry plight. Oblivion is preferred to a bleak reality.

Think about this for a moment. You are a young, white, working class male with, at best, a high school education. Manufacturing jobs are rare. Where they exist, they don’t pay nearly enough to support a family. If you live in rural America, it seems as if your town, and your prospects, are dying. Jobs are vanishing. Farms are being swept up into huge conglomerates. The sense of opportunity, the so-called American dream, has been lost in your eyes. Worse, that dream had you as head of the family, a role that increasingly seems out of reach.

What are you to do if you are a young, struggling kid. Some clearly give up. The Opiod and Meth crises testify to that. Others look for traditional scapegoats like immigrants and minorities. Many look for a strong leader who will ease their fears and provide pat answers to their concerns. They surely will respond to an opportunist who tells them whom to blame for their troubles. Besides the traditional scapegoats (people who look, speak, and believe differently), this now includes a new group to be castigated and rejected … uppity, aggressive women who have been helped by ‘woke’ Democrats and by affirmative action. It turns out that those white, working class voters who agree that society as a whole has become “too soft and feminine” were some 5 times more likely to support Donald Trump. Apparently, he was just the man who could save them. Irrational fear of females might just be a real thing.

Trump doesn’t have to deliver on his promises. He merely has to cater to the subconscious fears and prejudices of his base supporters. He must have chortled when his opponent in the last election turned out to be a Black woman. How convenient for his authoritarian, male dominated persona and message.

The fact that the vast majority of Americans vote against their self interest cannot be explained by logic. It can only be understood in terms of unreasoned fear. We have whites fearing loss of their privileged racial status to non-whites. We have native born Americans fearing competition from immigrants. Now we even have males worried that women are taking over the world. And just around the corner, there lies a dystopian future where AI machines will render humans irrelevant. Panic and despair abound.

Fear and desperation are the basic catalysts leading to tyranny and authoritarianism. Worse, they  are just about the hardest challenges for democracy to overcome. As I always say … I’m glad I’m old.