Vitamin R: Vexler Is Right, There Is a Crisis of Men
- john raymond
- Sep 13
- 3 min read
Vxler is right, there is a crisis here. But the crisis of men is not fundamentally about identity or cultural scripts; it is about dispossession.
Generations of Western men have faced a deliberate system of extraction in which elites engineer declining opportunity, capture institutions, and normalize precarity. The sense that “the system devalues men” is correct, but the conspiracy is not gendered—it is economic.
The ruling in Citizens United made this explicit: corporations, and by extension wealth itself, were elevated above citizens. This is the true source of nihilism and instability, and it corrodes both masculinity and democracy.
1. Economic Precarity as the Driver
Each generation since the 1970s has inherited less real opportunity: wages stagnate, costs rise, mobility declines. Young men are told they have agency and responsibility, yet encounter shrinking horizons. The “male crisis” emerges when that contradiction is internalized as shame or redirected as rage.
Here the feeling of conspiracy is not delusional—it is the structural reality of neoliberal capitalism. Wealth accumulation at the top has been prioritized over systemic stability, and men, who historically derived social worth from providing and advancing, experience this as existential theft.
2. Citizens United and Structural Betrayal
The Citizens United decision in 2010 codified the betrayal: corporations and super PACs could spend without limit, drowning the republican form of government in oligarchic money. The ruling signaled to ordinary men (and women) that their voices mattered less than the balance sheets of conglomerates.
This judicial coup redefined citizenship itself—privilege for wealth, impotence for individuals. The democratic scaffolding that men depended on to believe in a fair system was revealed as theater.
3. Why Men Feel Targeted
Men are not wrong to feel that the system devalues them. But the mechanism is not cultural erasure—it is structural extraction. Masculinity, tied for centuries to labor, provision, and status, cannot survive when each year delivers “slightly worse” conditions for workers.
The effect is compounded: men feel redundant both economically and socially. Instead of stability, they are offered distraction—gym culture, self-help hustles, right-wing grievance politics. These are palliatives, not solutions.
4. The False Frame of “Male Identity Crisis”
Public discourse often treats this as a cultural problem—men unwilling to adapt to egalitarian modernity. That is only surface.
The deeper truth is that elites have sabotaged the republican form itself. By concentrating wealth and dismantling social mobility, they destabilized both genders, but men—conditioned to equate worth with economic role—register the loss most acutely as a crisis of identity.
5. Implications for Democracy
A system that undermines men structurally produces nihilism, not patriotism. Violence then becomes not just an act of transcendence, but a distorted response to systemic betrayal.
If democracy is perceived as hollow—captured by corporations, unresponsive to workers—authoritarian figures like President Trump can offer counterfeit meaning: rage, dominance, scapegoats.
Thus, the “male crisis” is not separate from the democratic crisis. They are one and the same. Both stem from a republic subordinated to oligarchy.
The Crisis Is Real
The male crisis is real, but its explanation is simple: elites have extracted so much that each year working men (and women) fall further behind. Citizens United was not just a court case; it was the declaration that money, not people, rules America.
Until that betrayal is reversed, no cultural redefinition of masculinity will suffice. The task is to restore structural opportunity—not to rehabilitate “alpha” illusions or scapegoat the disenfranchised.
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