There’s already a lot of common decency in America.
We just need a lot more of it.
And there is nothing particularly masculine, feminine, binary, non-binary, capitalist, Marxist, “woke”, or “anti-woke” about practicing common decency.
Common decency means telling the truth, basing our voting choices and our public policy decisions on facts. Common decency means polite and respectful public discourse, refraining from insults, rants, raves, and demonization. Common decency means putting up with bad speech in order to have the opportunity to respond with good speech. Common decency means freedom, which means choice. Reproductive choice, choice of books to read in the library, choice for anyone of clothes to wear, choice for anyone to wear lipstick or not, choice of religion or of no religion at all. Common decency means doing what it actually takes to assure that the most vulnerable among us are cared for – which requires public, taxpayer funded social and health safety nets supplemented by private charities.
Senator Josh Hawley just published a book entitled “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs”. We can snicker about the plethora of ironies that accompany his authorship of such a book. But it is enough to refute the title itself. America doesn’t need “masculine virtues”. It needs common decency. And if all of us, male, female, and non-binary, practiced more of it, the real problems that men face in society today would evaporate. If we had strong labor unions in this country, everyone, including men, would have a greater sense of dignity and economic security from which they would be able to make better life-choices. The same could be said if we had enough beds in drug and alcohol rehab centers, if we had affordable prescription drugs, if we had a banking and finance system that supported low-income people instead of preying on them, and if we had a housing policy that made home ownership much more accessible to working-class people.
Hawley, born to the elite as a banker’s son and Stanford and Yale graduate, blames the elite class for the sad status of men in America today. The “woke” elite class, that is. But it is the “anti-woke” conservative elites like himself who need to do the soul-searching. Hawley is blowing smoke to hide his own culpability for the crises that men – and everyone else – face in America today.
That culpability is presented in clear detail by the sociologist Matthew Desmond in his new book, “Poverty, By America”. I’m most impressed by his insistence that ending poverty in America would be no more nor less than the exercise of common decency: there’s nothing partisan or politically dogmatic about it. He argues cogently that we could take today’s level of public spending for health, housing, and social safety nets, including expenditures in the form of tax breaks, and re-deploy it to end poverty in America once and for all. We would not need to raise tax rates on anyone. Our problem isn’t money or taxes. It’s not a debate between “woke” and “anti-woke”, capitalism versus socialism. It’s about current public policies that benefit the well-off – whether they’re “woke” or not – and hurt those with low incomes. The real challenge is deciding whether or not we are committed to act out of common decency to solve problems that, in the end, hurt us all. It’s the “trickle-up” theory. Rich and middle-class people benefit from current policies that leave the poor behind. But in the end, rich and middle-class people would be even better off if the poor were better off. Men, women, and non-binaries alike. The problems men face today, decried by Josh Hawley, would be alleviated by following Matthew Desmond’s common-sense prescriptions.
If you were tempted to buy Hawley’s book, if only out of perverse curiosity, I suggest you make the equivalent investment in Desmond’s book instead. Just as America needs to shift its investments from ones that exacerbate poverty to ones that will end it.