Manliness, Cat Ladies, Fertility Panic and the 2024 Election

Presidential elections are too vast and complicated to be about any one thing, but they’re sometimes more about one thing than they are about other things. The 2016 election was more about immigration, about who counted as an American. The 2020 election was more about Donald Trump, about what kind of country America was and would become.

And the 2024 election is more about gender. Normally, when people say an election is about gender and family, they’re saying it’s about women, men in politics, men in power. But that is not what I’m saying is happening in the 2024 election. It’s visions of masculinity that are unstable and contested in this race.

In Donald Trump and in Tim Walz, you have two very different, but very explicit, archetypes, visions of what it means to be a man. Trump’s pitch is built on what I would call an almost cartoonish overperformance of masculinity, which is aimed at alienated young men. Having Hulk Hogan and the head of the U.F.C. on your night at the convention really puts a sharp point on that. But in Tim Walz, Democrats have found their own version of a male archetype: a football coach, a soldier, a guy who will fix your car, but also an ally, a man comfortable being in the role of supporting women, a man unthreatened by social change, a man even excited by it.

And then there’s family. Dobbs, of course, put abortion at the center of the election. But the other side of that fight this year — it’s not the pro-choice movement versus the pro-life movement. It’s something newer and stranger — a panic about falling fertility that doesn’t just want to ban abortion — though it does want to do that. It wants to shame anyone who doesn’t have kids. It wants to undermine their legitimacy as full participants in political and I would even say cultural and civilizational life. What does it mean to be pro-family? Is it to support people in finding the life path they want to walk, whether that’s becoming a parent or not? That’s more or less what Kamala Harris believes. Or is it to use policy and culture to push people to have children? To reward them for having more children? To demean and even punish them for choosing to not have children? That’s more or less what JD Vance and the people who have influenced him believe.

To understand this election, you need to swim in some ideological currents that most people don’t understand. But there are people who spend a lot of time in those waters. Christine Emba is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.” Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox who focuses on politics in the U.S. and abroad. He just published a book called “The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.” And they are the perfect guides on this.

This is an edited transcript of part of our conversation. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show.”