Steve Rose's framing of Scott Galloway as a kind of enlightened guide to “the crisis of men” is a useful illustration of how contemporary media systems manage dissent.
In the piece published by The Guardian, we are told that he is a brave truth-teller addressing a neglected issue, but the “truths” on offer never stray far from the dominant ideological framework.
They individualize what are in fact structural problems, reduce the consequences of neoliberal social destruction to matters of psychology, and repackage a collapsing social order as a crisis of male identity.
This is a familiar pattern: when economic policies immiserate large parts of the population, elites encourage us to discuss culture, moral fiber, and “manhood” instead of power, capital, and the dismantling of public life.
The statistics Galloway cites are real enough — declining male participation in education, loneliness, unemployment — but they are presented in a vacuum.
There is no mention of the decades-long assault on labor, the offshoring of manufacturing, the destruction of union power, or the systematic transfer of wealth upwards.
Instead, we are invited to believe that young men are “struggling” because they lack dating skills or masculine virtues.
This is ideology in its purest form: divert attention from the economic system that produces precarity and blame individuals — or entire demographics — for not adjusting themselves to market demands.
The notion that Trump’s political success is rooted in young men’s emotional fragility is similarly backward.
Trump did not ascend because “the left ignored men.”
He rose because he gave voice — however crudely — to grievances produced by neoliberalism: stagnant wages, economic insecurity, collapsing communities. Bernie Sanders has long given a voice to those same problems, naming the true culprits in the process, but Democratic Party leadership has been unwilling to follow his lead, because they are captured by donor interests.
Trump can get away with blaming scapegoats while nominally handwaving against elites because his elite donors know his rhetoric is just an act. Trump is firmly in the pocket of entrenched corporate power, because his interests and theirs are aligned materially, and the actual economic policies Trump has passed since his first term prove it.
Trump's appeal was amplified by a propaganda apparatus that excels at converting economic despair into cultural resentment. To attribute this to a “masculinity crisis” is to perform precisely the diversion that keeps the underlying power structures intact.
Galloway’s prescriptions — “protect, provide, procreate” — read less like social analysis and more like marketing slogans.
They have the convenient effect of reinforcing traditional hierarchies while presenting themselves as benign advice.
Meanwhile, the genuine sources of male despair — alienation, economic precarity, the commodification of every human relationship — go unexamined. It is easy to provide bromides about paying for dinner; it is harder to confront the system that made economic survival contingent on debt, hustle, and permanent insecurity.
We might also note what is absent: any analysis of race, class, or sexuality; any engagement with LGBTQ men; any recognition that women and marginalized groups have been navigating similar or worse conditions. The narrative is comfortably universal while erasing most of the world.
This is why media platforms embrace figures like Galloway and, earlier, Jordan Peterson.
They speak to real suffering but redirect it into ideologically safe channels — personal discipline, traditional roles, nostalgia for hierarchies — instead of class solidarity or political action.
They articulate the symptoms while obscuring the causes. They encourage men to adapt themselves to a system that is destroying them, rather than challenging that system.
One can, of course, discuss the challenges facing men. But if we are serious, we must place those challenges within the context of forty years of policies designed to atomize society, destroy social bonds, and subordinate every human interaction to the market.
Without that, we are not diagnosing a crisis — we are participating in a managed narrative that keeps power where it is.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people and movements creating a more free, regenerative and democratic society.
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