Here's my view. (Disclaimer: I lean conservative, quite anti Trump, and think liberals have some valid points. Use that to decide whether to bother reading.)
Liberals/Democrats, classically, were the party of the little guy, the working class. The working class has been being destroyed ever since NAFTA. Thinks are getting worse and worse for them. The Democrats should have been running on how the economy effects the little guy. They should have been the ones screaming about the price of eggs.
Instead, the impression everyone got was that, if you're working class but you don't think gay marriage is a good idea, or you don't think trans people belong in womens' bathrooms and on womens' sports teams, or you don't like abortion, then you're a moral leper, and the Democratic party is committed to the total eradication of your viewpoint and culture.
Unsurprisingly (given human nature), a bunch of people on the receiving end of that decided to flip the Democrats the bird, and instead voted for the guy who at least pretended to care about their concerns.
So, yeah. There may be "reactionary masculine pushback", but I think it's more pushback from the socially conservative section of the working class. Those people are supposed to be the Democrats' core constituency, but the Democrats quit listening to them.
Myself I'm fine with gay marriage. If you can pass, use whatever bathroom you want, just don't show me anything I don't want to see. (e.g. if you want to be a man, man up!) I think it is up to sports leagues to decide who plays: I don't want the state to mandate it either way. (A man I know was one of the charter players on the Sirens, a women's hockey team, because they didn't have enough players to make a quorum and he wasn't particularly big or dangerous.)
OK, that's all fine[1], until we come to abortion.
If you're working class, and you passed high school biology, you know that the fetus doesn't really fit in "this is my body". (It has different DNA, for one thing.) And if you look at that slogan, being endlessly repeated, and decide that one side is trying very hard to avoid the actual issue (and you lean socially conservative anyway), then you still have a bit of a problem with the Democratic Party. How big a problem is probably an individual gut-feel question.
[1] That's all fine, unless the state requires leagues to admit trans when the league doesn't want to. I haven't been keeping real close tabs on this, but did at least some states do that with at least some leagues?
I largely agree with your overall points. What follows is my pet theory for how this angst is being manifested at this time.
I’m very liberal. The Democratic party is dead to me. I think this demise of the Democratic party started under Clinton when he embraced neo-liberalism and decided against worker and environmental protections in the free trade agreements. It’s rational for people to not want illegal immigration. Liberals look for heretics while conservatives look for converts. But at this time in U.S. history I think the genesis of the backlash comes from disenchanted men and this disenchantment largely stems from women being empowered sexually and otherwise. The American political system has major structural imbalances so it was inevitable that a backlash of some form took hold. The system needs rebalancing. Such is my unsubstantiated, non expert view.
There is a case study in that second book about Stanley, a brand that represented masculinity and how it's trajectory reflected the decline of men, in recent years Stanley has become a symbol of female-gendered consumerism.
Liberals/Democrats, classically, were the party of the little guy, the working class. The working class has been being destroyed ever since NAFTA. Thinks are getting worse and worse for them. The Democrats should have been running on how the economy effects the little guy. They should have been the ones screaming about the price of eggs.
Instead, the impression everyone got was that, if you're working class but you don't think gay marriage is a good idea, or you don't think trans people belong in womens' bathrooms and on womens' sports teams, or you don't like abortion, then you're a moral leper, and the Democratic party is committed to the total eradication of your viewpoint and culture.
Unsurprisingly (given human nature), a bunch of people on the receiving end of that decided to flip the Democrats the bird, and instead voted for the guy who at least pretended to care about their concerns.
So, yeah. There may be "reactionary masculine pushback", but I think it's more pushback from the socially conservative section of the working class. Those people are supposed to be the Democrats' core constituency, but the Democrats quit listening to them.