Anger is Not Strength

On this week’s episode of At Our Table, Senator Cory Booker and I got into a conversation about men. Not just about politics, but about loneliness. About responsibility. About what it means to carry weight in a country that feels off balance.

At one point he said, “I think we are in a brotherhood crisis right now. The boys are not all right.”

That didn’t feel like a slogan. It felt like a fact.

Young men are drifting. Some are angry. Some feel ignored. Some feel like the rules changed and no one told them.

And our politics has decided to meet that moment by fanning the flames and emphasizing a narrow definition of strength.

For decades, Republicans have claimed the language of toughness and labeled Democrats the party of care. It’s a simple story, but it sticks. Tough versus soft. Daddy versus mommy. Strong versus sensitive.

In that story, anger looks like power.

This is not new. The action movie tough talk of the 1980s led to the victim rhetoric of talk radio in the 1990s. That developed into an entire online world reinforcing that message today: podcasts, influencers, comment sections. They tell young men their frustration proves something has been taken from them. Respect. Status. Opportunity. Authority.

Some of that frustration is real.

If you’re a young man trying to build a life right now, you’re walking into an economy where wages haven’t kept up with costs. Housing feels out of reach. Health care can wipe out your savings. The minimum wage hasn’t moved in years. Childcare costs in some states are higher than college tuition. Medical debt is still one of the top reasons families go bankrupt. Male labor force participation among men without college degrees has declined over the past two decades. Suicide rates among men remain stubbornly high.

In a culture that still tells men their worth is tied to whether they can provide, that kind of pressure hits hard.

That’s not weakness but simply math.

You hear older generations say they overcame worse. You look around, and it feels like everyone is moving past you even though everyone you know is stuck in the same spot as you.

But what happens next matters.

One political message says: you’re angry because someone took something from you. Let’s beat them.

Another says: you’re angry because a broken system failed you. Let’s fix it.

That difference is bigger than it sounds. The first message is emotional and tangible. It offers a target. It promises clarity. The second message is harder. It asks you to diagnose systems instead of enemies. It doesn’t offer instant relief.

So where have those two messages led us?

The grievance message has dominated airwaves, algorithms, and campaign rallies for years. And yet wages for many working men have barely budged. Housing remains out of reach in much of the country. Male loneliness has increased, not decreased. Political rage has turned into political violence. But we still don’t see any individual problems solved.

Anger has been loud. It has not been effective.

The second message has been less theatrical, but the results are real:

When we expanded the Child Tax Credit and cut child poverty nearly in half, that wasn’t about being “nice.” It was about stability. When we cap prescription drug prices, that’s not softness. It’s about whether families can breathe. When we talk about raising wages or making health care less tied to your job, we’re talking about whether people can take risks, start businesses, change careers, and build something without one emergency knocking them flat.

In a culture that still links manhood to responsibility, economic instability feels like personal failure—even when it’s systemic.

If strength means taking responsibility, then policies that stabilize families and create real opportunity are about strength.

Here’s the part people don’t like to talk about.

Not all of this anger is economic. Some of it is cultural. The country has changed quickly. Conversations about race and gender have shifted. Expectations are different than they were a generation ago. Some men feel like they’re being told they’re the problem.

That discomfort is real too.

But grievance politics doesn’t solve it. It just hands out targets.

It tells men that someone else’s progress is their loss. That equality means displacement. That the way to feel solid again is to push back hard.

There is nothing wrong with traditional families. There is nothing wrong with clear roles in a household. Plenty of people choose that life. What’s wrong is demanding that everyone live that way and calling it weakness when they don’t.

Women are not responsible for propping up male confidence. They are not required to shrink their ambitions so men can feel taller. A politics that suggests otherwise isn’t defending strength. It’s defending control.

And control is not the same thing as strength.

Where Democrats have stumbled is by letting others define the terms. We’ve allowed “strength” to mean loud. We’ve allowed “toughness” to mean punitive. We’ve allowed care to be framed as weakness.

But if strength means building something that lasts, then protecting Social Security is strength. If strength means keeping communities safe, then investing in prevention and smart policing is strength. If strength means being able to provide for your family without working three jobs, then wage policy is strength.

Those aren’t maternal instincts. They’re practical ones.

I think about my two boys when I watch all of this. One day they will be grown. They’ll hear these arguments. They’ll see which behaviors get rewarded and which get mocked.

I don’t want them believing that whoever yells the loudest is the strongest person in the room.

I don’t want them thinking that dominance equals direction.

Anger can be useful. It can tell you something isn’t right. But it’s not a blueprint. It’s a spark. What matters is what you build after the spark.

If we don’t reclaim the meaning of strength—not as noise, not as control, not as blame—then we shouldn’t be surprised when young men chase the loudest version available.

The boys are not all right.

Reclaiming strength—in our politics and in our homes—will require us to define it clearly before someone else does.