The irony should be lost on no one by this point: Aggrieved masculinity—that definitive feeling of entitlement to impermeability—spreads through porous bodies. What would it look like to approach the culture wars this way, as if virus mitigation were the charge?

That's an honest question. If I’m being real, I’m not sure how to answer it. So I took to verse while I pondered, inspired by recent laughter with a friend over an old American ode to the pelican. I suppose my amateur limerick is as good a place as any to begin our conclusion. Consider it a call to arms for a new kind of cultural warfare.

Parting with the pufferfish (is no easy task)

This book began by slowing down the usual read of New Populism as a socioeconomic symptom. We took our time with the spirit of the symptom, rather than take it at its word. By staying curious about what it does more than says, we discovered that the symptom is about something else.

New Populisms share a signature move, and their global rise to power as anger management (government by—not of—anger) brings that move to a whole new scale of consequence. Were this a dance, it would be called ‘the pufferfish.’ At any threat to your strength, blow up. Literally inflate the body: Puff up the mouth, voice, chest, limbs, and gait, whatever defense is on offer. Arm yourself in barbs (no masks, please) and release deadly venom. To prove your strength, perform “deimatic” display (biology's term for puffing, bluffing behavior) that makes everyone, including yourself, more vulnerable.

‘Doing the pufferfish’ tells a different story about populism, one that points to gender instead of class as a starting place. Leading with gender, we are better equipped to identify the feeling of endangered manhood that animates the symptom, the manosphere that propels it around the world, and the regional variants by which it claims ever more hosts.

New Populism looks quite different in this light—less like a genuine socioeconomic uprising and more like a gender-laundering service, a political front for manly grievance. Through New Populism, aggrieved masculinity hijacks class inequality for its own bidding.

To what end? Or what does the pufferfish want, beyond the escalation of anger? To avenge wrong done to manly right. To restore his rightful place at the head of the line. To retrieve the gender binary, so he alone can reign as universal subject, put the Others in their place, and rest assured of self-containment.