The diminishment of males—every age, race, and ethnicity—is now another thing for American society to worry about. Of Boys and Men, a new book by Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, looks at how boys and men are struggling in the United States. He argues that males are much more likely than females to feel socially excluded, and if they don’t remarry after divorce, they are much less likely to thrive. We’ve known for a while that girls in the United States are outperforming boys in most academic disciplines, earning 57% of bachelor degrees in 2020. Reeves covers the whole of America’s “male malaise” problem, which he says that nothing short of structural and societal change will be able to rectify.

It’s good to have constructive, nonpartisan thinking on this issue and not just the Tucker Carlson/Josh Hawley/Jordan Peterson “crisis of masculinity” blame game against the American left. And we especially need these ideas when the life expectancy of American men has dropped to its lowest in nearly three decades. That is indeed tragic. But then so is the fact that men’s problems continue to cause much needless suffering for women and children. In “Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education” (2o13), economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman argue that “the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys’ psychosocial development and educational achievement.” Thus we have a vicious cycle: fathers don’t participate (either pay or play) in the raising of their sons, sons within cash-strapped female-headed households have emotional and social adaptation problems, and the conservative right blames mothers and the mothering left for these “male fragility” problems that begin with economic and societal conditions.

As America slouches toward November 8 and the next ring of hell for our democracy, the appetite for new ways to save government by the people is pretty low. But people still have ideas—people like David Jolly, Christine Todd Whitman, and Andrew Yang, who at the end of July announced their new Forward Party.

There is certainly logic in a moderate party emerging to make the Republicans go the way of the Whigs, like a recalibration of your oven or car idler when something skews the reading high or low. A once “normal” party shifts to radicalism and violence, and a moderate party pops up to sideline the extremists.

The shooter who took ten lives at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket on May 14 cited “the great replacement theory” as his rationale for randomly gunning down Black people. This paranoid fantasy shared by millions of Americans says that Democrats have hatched a diabolical plot to replace white Americans with people of color (imported or domestic).

Where did this concept come from? A recent New York Times analysis of more than 400 episodes of Tucker Carlson’s nightly ranting on Fox News showed that the onetime news host at CNN, PBS, and MSNBC was openly promoting this racist propaganda. On one show, he directly warned a category of viewers he respectfully called “legacy Americans” that they were in danger of being replaced by voters from “the Third World.” Given that Carlson has also alleged that those protesting the murder of George Floyd were not objecting to police brutality but looking to inflict “ideological domination” on the country, his racist antagonism is not surprising. But the amplification of a lie into a “theory” is both absurd and very dangerous.

For the super-rich, 2021 has been casting lots of shade—from the Sackler family’s weaseling out of any accountability for opioid deaths to the Pandora Papers’ exposure of billionaires’ offshore and domestic tax havens. We had reminders of how America’s richest families keep that “super” before the “rich”—like with tax loopholes allowing them to pass vast sums of wealth down to their heirs by avoiding capital gains taxes. We also learned from the New York Times that in the homes of the wealthy, many basic kitchen appliances are now being hidden within bespoke cabinets, and only the initiated know where. (For instance, a regular person could not find the fridge chez Cher.)

And yet after Democrats failed to get the votes for a corporate income tax hike to pay for President Biden’s infrastructure and social spending bill, they are also unlikely to pass a proposed billionaires’ tax that would make the super-rich pay annual capital gains taxes on the value appreciation of their humungous assets. That’s a shame since there are more billionaires than ever in the United States: 719 in 2021, an increase of almost 17% over 2020.