Once we gain clarity on how New Populism moves—or whose anger propels it around the world—we are compelled to reconsider the leading answer to why it came about. This was the question of “probable cause” that opened Part III: What led to New Populism? What is its motivating history?

The reigning answer puts class forward: Neoliberal economics, cultural ostracism, and the changing demographics of opportunity brought us here, and the socioeconomic displacement of the (white) working class is what needs attention. Part III has shown this answer to be misleading, in need of serious qualification. As long as class inequality is in the clutch of manly grievance, we are in no position to address it well. What first needs attention is that catchy feeling of endangered manhood, the sense that men of a certain sort are the oppressed class. For this, we need to answer with gender first.

This chapter demonstrates what gender-first analysis can look like. It narrates ‘how we got here’ differently, through a ‘crisis’ of masculinity that essentially stole class to serve its own interests. As that hints, I do not abandon the tale told by class-forward accounts, but I do include what they omit—the storied past of manly grievance that is integral to the current picture.

Class-forward histories of New Populism must be read with a big asterisk, and gender-first analysis supplies it. Aggrieved masculinity has a history of its own or, I should say, many histories. The claim that some deserving manhood is imperiled has been asserted over and again, across place and time, to great effect.

Predictably, these claims of crisis invoke class in ways that endorse its manliness. Class gets tethered to a certain kind of masculinity, to which people then default at the very mention of class. Like this, class is hijacked in the service of manly entitlement. Put simply, aggrieved masculinity has a long and varied history of usurping class.

In this light, New Populism is not so new after all, and class-forward accounts are content to repeat this pattern. To interrupt it, we must keep the crucial elements of that history together—gender without losing class, both without losing race and other vital factors. We need intersectional accounts of how class and masculinity get tied up together.

Remember (from Chapter 14) that gender-first analysis holds these elements together through regional specificity.