Uplifting the Man Farthest Down
Men are a handful. They contribute disproportionately to almost every social problem in America. To some degree, this is nothing new: For as long as Americans have debated social policy, they've prioritized problems associated with men. The temperance movement, for instance, was a century-long effort to bring men under control. Closer to our day, problems like chronic joblessness, mass incarceration, substance abuse, suicide, and homelessness are hitting levels not witnessed in generations, thanks in large part to America's male population.
Many social programs can help troubled men. They fall into two general categories: those that redistribute resources, and those that specialize in rehabilitation. Entitlement programs make up the bulk of the former. The latter — which provide training, treatment, and education to clients while helping them develop positive habits and build character — include addiction-treatment centers, workforce-development programs, problem-solving court programs, prisoner-reentry programs, and homeless shelters. Their goal is to rebuild broken lives.
Rehabilitation entails more downside risk than redistribution. Running a food pantry won't break your heart like working in intensely personal, one-on-one circumstances with someone, watching him reenter society on the wings of your highest hopes, and learning later on that he's relapsed. But the upside of rehabilitation work is greater, too.
All people, at some point in their life, can benefit from an encounter with someone who urges them to set their sights a little higher — an exercise economist Tyler Cowen calls the "high-return activity of raising others' aspirations." Elevating a man's expectations of himself is a different task than ensuring he's maximizing his entitlement-program enrollment.
It also differs from "meeting people where they are," a standard refrain among 21st-century social-service personnel that especially harms young men. As Jared Klickstein, a former drug addict and author of the recent book Crooked Smile, explained in a 2022 RealClearInvestigations report on San Francisco's drug crisis: "It's like, well let's just get everyone on Suboxone or methadone or whatever. Let them quit at their own rate....We're talking about kids that are 20 to 25 years old. Like [they're] just going to throw in the towel and get on methadone for the rest of [their lives]?"
To assist these troubled men, we can begin by taking stock of our efforts to change the lives of those Booker T. Washington once called the men "farthest down." This task requires an honest reckoning with the non-profit — the institution typically seeking to help American men turn their lives around.
THE SOCIAL-SERVICE INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Non-profit programs for the poor and the unwell proliferated following the 1960s, a decade whose locally focused legacy we often overlook. Yes, the Great Society and related initiatives centralized government a great deal, but there was decentralization, too. The mentally disabled were deinstitutionalized, top-down approaches to urban planning gave way to community consciousness and consultation, privately managed subsidized programs supplanted public-housing projects, and charter schools and vouchers were incorporated into the K-12 public-education system. As such examples suggest, decentralization during the latter half of the 20th century was a mixed bag. But even when it failed, it didn't lead to recentralization: The community-based non-profit remains paradigmatic throughout the social services.
At their best, non-profit social programs that rescue men from poverty, drugs, and crime instill bourgeois values in their clients and demonstrate to the broader community how one might live according to such values. Ideally, they exert a multiplier effect, as seen in the 2019 documentary The Pursuit.
The film, starring Harvard's Arthur Brooks, depicts what a manly approach to fighting poverty looks like. It features a graduation ceremony of The Doe Fund, a publicly funded New York-based program for troubled men. (In the interest of full disclosure, The Doe Fund gave me an award in 2022.) The fund works to build a brotherhood focused on employment, sobriety, and fatherhood — values celebrated not only by the graduates themselves, but by everyone attending the ceremony, from the graduates' children and the mothers of their children to their nephews and so on. In doing so, the fund helps to reknit civil society in communities where it's most frayed.
Over the years, some social programs for men have proven wasteful and corrupt. Much of the system that conservatives deride as the "social-service industrial complex" effectively functions as a permanent Works Progress Administration. Program performance receives little independent evaluation; poor performance is rarely invoked as cause to shut down or restructure failing programs.
Still, with respect to rehabilitation-style programs, policymakers should focus on reform, not elimination. The social-service industrial complex, which is as old as Medicaid and Medicare, is not going away. We also need to train social-service personnel in rehabilitation strategies that speak to troubled men. That training must take place on the job.
THE GENDER IMBALANCE
Troubled men disproportionately account for some major social problems. Men make up 80% of suicides, nearly 70% of the street-dwelling homeless population, and 70% of fatal drug-overdose victims. Over 90% of incarcerated Americans are men, and of those under community supervision (on probation or parole) whose sex is known to federal statisticians, around nine in 10 are male. About three-quarters of car-accident fatalities are male, as well as four-fifths of homicide victims. The rate of addiction is about a third higher among men than women. Although women suffer a higher rate of serious mental illness, seriously ill men are less likely to receive treatment than their female counterparts.
As for those in the helping professions, the gender imbalance tilts the opposite way. Seventy percent of workers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies as members of "community and social service occupations" are women, including 84% of social workers. In his 2018 study Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western found that ex-offenders rely mainly on the "older women" in their lives for money, housing, and other basic supports during their first year out of prison. When we speak of "family supports" for, say, adults with a serious mental illness, we are mostly referring to mothers: The National Alliance on Mental Illness was founded by mothers, and mothers remain the backbone of that organization — especially at the grassroots level.
Plainly, women give more. But women also receive more, both from civil society and from the government. The welfare state's resources have always flowed disproportionately to women with children. Among adults between the ages of 18 and 64 with no high-school diploma, women receive rental assistance at a rate nine-tenths higher than men, Medicaid at a rate two-fifths higher, food stamps at a rate nine-tenths higher, and Supplemental Security Income at a rate two-fifths higher. The rate of homelessness among women is also lower: Families appear to put up with recalcitrant female relatives longer than they will recalcitrant male ones.
Many services for the poor are themselves segregated by gender. Homeless shelters take pains to separate single adult men from women (themselves also single or with children) by segregating residential areas and sometimes programming and meal times. Some family shelters not only refuse to serve two-parent families, they actively discourage clients from having anything to do with men during their current stretch of acute vulnerability. A man showing up at the shelter draws immediate scrutiny as a sign of backsliding.
These programs' anti-male bias is flagrant, if understandable. Yet aside from the question of whether these programs should change, we should be highlighting the need for more effective social programs targeted at men.
A countervailing force to the heavily female profile of social-service personnel is exerted by male "peer specialists" with experience in the troubles men tend to face. Peer specialists are paid staff — and often former clients — of the programs for which they work.
Peer specialists have a long history of helping to treat drug and alcohol addiction. The 12th Step of Alcoholics Anonymous reads: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs." Peer-specialist services are now standard practice in programs that focus on prisoner reentry, homelessness, and behavioral health.
Peer specialists can do much good on the front lines of the battle against poverty, such as dispensing tough love from a highly credible source. However, they also risk what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "defining deviancy down" — the tendency of society to respond to destructive behaviors by reducing standards for what is allowed. OnPoint NYC, a program that operates supervised drug-consumption sites in New York, employs people who are still addicted to drugs as peer specialists. Overreliance on peer specialists also bolsters the assumption that only subjective life experience can create the moral standing necessary to teach someone else how to shape up.
Many people in recovery should aim higher than becoming a professional former drug addict or homeless person. These men need contact with social-service professionals who are not peers, but rather people firmly situated in the ordinary social order of family, church, school, and the workplace.
ON HUMILIATION AND PRIDE
Identity politics has become the standard tactic through which groups advance their interests in contemporary American society. For men, this model is counterproductive. Pleading for an end to some sort of "war on men" risks backing into the same culture of victimhood from which troubled men are trying to escape. Victim mentality offers no fix for humiliation — perhaps the defining pathology of the man farthest down in America today.
The female cast of social-service personnel renders this therapeutic attitude dominant in programs serving disadvantaged Americans. Troubled men are taught that only the unenlightened fail to seek professional therapeutic assistance in the face of adversity, and that their opposition to such assistance is rooted in "stigma." These teachings don't hit home with most men. One cannot build a sense of pride in how much one relies on others, least of all paid professionals. To rely in moral affairs on experts whose expertise you cannot yourself validate is neither an enlightened nor a practical idea.
Pride, the opposite of humiliation, stems from a sense of contribution — the feeling that someone else is relying on you, and that you are able and willing to meet his needs. Teaching every man in a community to believe he is weak, and that he needs to lean on others who may in fact be weaker than he is, creates an unsustainable Ponzi scheme of emotional dependence. Every functioning community needs strong, self-reliant individuals — people on whom others can rely when faced with crises such as eviction, unemployment, or the death of a friend or family member; people who don't succumb to the urge to lie, cheat, or steal, even when they might be able to get away with these things. In lives filled with adversity, young people especially benefit from confidence that at least some adults in their lives won't break.
Another reason for weakening therapeutic culture in programs that serve men stems from the mental-health field's workforce shortages, which are profound and, in some specialties, poised to worsen in coming years. American adults with severe mental illness — 5 million of whom receive no treatment for their condition — undoubtedly require medical interventions. For chronically jobless and even many drug-addicted men, social and moral interventions are more appropriate. Ceasing to apply a medical framework to problems that have more to do with habits, character formation, and finding better friends would free up more system capacity for treating those with truly debilitating illnesses, like schizophrenia.
Programs indifferent to pride will have trouble reaching men. We see pride's force in the appeal of street gangs and ideologies like the Nation of Islam. Some men take pride in their ability to endure the rigors of street life: The hardened drug addict's self-conception as an outlaw is a theme of many classic treatments of that culture, including Edward Preble and John Casey, Jr.'s "Taking Care of Business: The Heroin User's Life on the Street," John Kaplan's The Hardest Drug, and Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonberg's Righteous Dopefiend. Anyone who exchanges street life for straight life will increase his life expectancy, health outcomes, earnings potential, and, in the long run, may well find a new sense of non-outlaw pride. But in the near term, for a man trying to follow the right path, pride can be hard to generate. He faces limited and unattractive options, which makes it hard to design effective programs for single adult men.
Seasons three and four of The Wire illustrate this dynamic as they follow the travails of Dennis "Cutty" Wise, an ex-offender trying to reenter society. He endures withering scorn from high-rolling drug dealers while he works a low-paying manual-labor job. Cutty feels a constant temptation to return to street life, which he overcomes by launching a boxing program for teenage youths — another example of a manly social program.
Calls for upholding high standards in social programs are often criticized as utopian. But there's a pressing practical justification for them. Rob Henderson, author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, relates why more should be expected from those with less: "People think that if a young guy comes from a disorderly or deprived environment, he should be held to low standards. This is misguided. He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment."
A skeptic might point out that higher standards means double standards. America is in the process of legalizing marijuana. If smoking marijuana recreationally is fine for privileged college students, why not for lower-class Americans?
There are a few answers to that question. One is that many lower-class Americans are in a fragile place and can't risk succumbing to substance abuse. Assuming the legalization juggernaut presses on, someone will have to deliver that message.
Cognizant of targeted social programs' shortcomings, some theorists have called for broad-based reforms. William Julius Wilson's social democracy and the industrial-policy agenda favored by new-right thinkers like Oren Cass try to achieve wholesale what social programs for men try to achieve at the retail level.
Evaluated according to how much they will help the man farthest down, broad-based solutions have two shortcomings. First, their benefits are likely to be captured by more functional cases — women and men who aren't beset by drugs and shiftlessness. This leaves us back where we started, with community-based social programs attempting to help those who fall through the cracks.
Second, broad-based changes can also fail to trigger what University of Virginia law professor Megan Stevenson calls a "cascade": the hoped-for result of treatment that manifests in "a cycle of change that accumulates over time and affects many areas of one's life." The declines in the teen-pregnancy and violent-crime rates, though highly desirable in themselves, had surprisingly modest downstream effects on school performance, employment, and family structure: Low-income neighborhoods struggle with intergenerational poverty as much as ever.
PROGRAMS FOR THE MAN FARTHEST DOWN
In the coming years, we will have to rely more heavily on social programs targeted at disadvantaged men. It's virtually unheard of to encounter a homeless-services provider these days who is scaling back operations, though this has happened at times in American history.
To be effective, these programs should serve an exclusively male clientele and, as much as possible, be led and staffed by men. Their two chief values should be steady employment in jobs outside the social-service sector, and old-fashioned sobriety.
Embracing steady employment means menial labor, which is something many social-service professionals, if they hail from an upper-middle-class, college-educated background, are unenthusiastic about. This leads them to emphasize job training over work experience.
Yet formal job-training programs suffer from the same defect as any institutional response to social challenges: They are artificial. Hard skills — those that can be gained through training, such as licensure and educational credentials — may be necessary for upward mobility, but soft skills — making eye contact; putting up with a short-tempered boss; showing up every day on time, even when it rains — are foundational. Unlike job training, virtually all on-the-books employment, and even much off-the-books employment, helps people develop the soft skills necessary to find and keep a job.
In their promotional materials and at their graduation ceremonies, rehabilitation programs should highlight former clients who have achieved gainful employment beyond peer work, such as those who now work in a butcher shop or on an overnight shift at a UPS warehouse. Above all, we must avoid denigrating menial labor as a dead-end job — progressive journalists don't need help further defaming programs that boost low-skill employment.
As for sobriety, programs aimed at treating addiction should focus on building camaraderie among participants. In drug-policy circles, there's growing interest in the idea of recovery as a spectrum. But if the goal is building a brotherhood of mutual support, common traits among participants are essential. Four men who are fully sober (if for varying lengths of time) will bond more easily than four men who are individually fully sober, on methadone only, still using but mostly at a supervised drug-consumption site, and recently switched from fentanyl to cannabis. In this sense, old-fashioned abstinence has an oft-overlooked practical appeal.
In terms of funding, a hybrid system is best. Private funding is attractive because it offers maximum operational flexibility. Many faith-based programs accept public funds, but those that are most rigorous about spiritual formation — such as the boot-camp-style program Men of Nehemiah in Dallas — keep taxpayer support to an absolute minimum. Public funding is attractive because it leads to larger scale, better data, better evaluation systems that compare similar programs, and, even more crucially, formal taxpayer confirmation that we as a society want to promote work and sobriety. As those on the left like to say, government budgets are moral documents. We don't want to develop a system that's sharply divided between privately funded programs that have strong values and publicly funded programs that don't.
Even with funding in place, the problem of scale in social programs can be hard to overcome. It's a problem not unlike the one James Madison grappled with in Federalist No. 51 — that angels are always in short supply. But pressing the issue of scalability and what works is one way to push for more program evaluation, which is also in short supply. Randomized-controlled-trial approaches are valuable, but not necessary: It's rigorous enough to subject programs to independent evaluations and allow for apples-to-apples comparisons between programs doing the same work with the same kinds of populations.
Sometimes politicians provide the most independent and effective evaluations here. New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and former Los Angeles city controller Ron Galperin are recent examples of elected officials who used their offices' powers to meaningfully audit social programs. Their evaluations were not based on randomized controlled trials, but they informed and advanced public debate nonetheless.
A CULTURE OF WORK
American men are in trouble. Yet our despair need not be thoroughgoing, for at least one reason: There is no culture of respectable unemployment among Americans. This stands in contrast to Alexis de Tocqueville's observations of Native Americans in the mid-19th century, the tramp culture that developed later that century, and the Gypsy culture from which the likes of great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt emerged, as described by historian James Lincoln Collier:
They made their living by doing odd jobs, street peddling, and stealing. It was generally considered undignified for a man to do any real work: Reinhardt throughout his life referred to ordinary workaday people as "peasants." It was the function of men to gamble, drink wine, play music, and to dress in as much splendor as their estates permitted them.
Having a good conscience about one's idleness is foreign to today's Americans. The 7 million or so prime-age "men without work," to use Nicholas Eberstadt's phrase, are not singing songs about how great it is to be a bum or to consume heroin. The outlaw pride of addict subculture has a diminished quality in contemporary society. "The addict alone in his hoodie seems an emblem of the Opioid Era," wrote journalist Sam Quinones in The Least of Us. That hiddenness augurs a sense of shame. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, there's still hope for troubled men in 21st-century America.
