Clarence Page, syndicated columnist

Perhaps it’s only coincidental but this, the summer of “Barbie,” also is the summer of our discontent in politics — over manhood.

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, helped to get the ball rolling with a new book, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.”

I thought it was rather amusing since my vivid memories of Hawley on Jan. 6 included two newsmaking images: One was a photo of him raising a defiant fist of support toward the crowd of Donald Trump loyalists who were about to storm the Capitol. The other was a video clip of him running swiftly through the Capitol to escape the same crowd after it turned riotous.

That’s politics. Conditions can change on you. It doesn’t take away from Hawley’s manly manliness for him to know when it’s time to get away from a riot.

Hawley also knows when it is the right time to sell a book about manhood, a topic that has produced a long line of books in recent years, such as Jordan Peterson’s 2018 bestselling “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos,” which my son recommended to me, although I am not sure whether he actually read it.

Peterson, I soon learned, is a Canadian psychologist and YouTube star who broke through in 2016 with a series of videos criticizing a Canadian law to introduce “gender identity and expression” as prohibited grounds for discrimination. Peterson argued, not unreasonably, that the bill would make the use of certain gender pronouns “compelled speech.”

He quickly became the darling of conservative critics of political correctness and identity politics. Although he often described himself as a classic British liberal and traditionalist, he became a star of the conservative lecture circuit, thanks to a content distribution deal with the conservative media company The Daily Wire. His podcasts have gathered millions of views.

That’s how I heard about him, thanks to my son, who is better wired into content that has youth appeal these days than I am.

As little as these men would appear to share in common, they each have been cited numerous times in various media stories and broadcast discussions of today’s reputed “masculinity crisis” and the various reactions to it.

This is hardly a new topic. I recall historians in the late 1960s declaring a “crisis of masculinity” to describe the anxieties of middle-class men in the Vietnam War era and the resurgence of the largest women’s liberation movement since American women won the vote.

Now I hear similar lamentations about a new rising generation of young men. It began with genuine concerns about misogyny and women being treated as subordinates through discrimination, dominance or abuse.

It turned into accusations of “toxic masculinity” which I and countless other men learned was a genuine problem for women, just as “second-class citizenship” was a genuine problem for racial minorities and the Civil Rights Movement.

Much progress has been made on those issues, yet we also see a very different sociopolitical landscape these days, and not just for women and minorities.

“This is a generation that is living increasingly without purpose or place, without meaning, without direction,” Hawley said to the “Stronger Men’s Conference” in Springfield, Missouri, where pastors, sports figures and niche Christian influencers sermonized about masculinity.

Such are the responses to changing times that we have seen emerge on the right and the left in recent years, although with very different ideas for remedies.

For those who lean toward the progressive agenda, the suggestions for this rising generation of anxieties seem obvious.

Raising the federal minimum wage would quickly raise the living standard for those who struggle in the lower income brackets and undercut the ability of working-class immigrants to put downward pressure on wages. We see this beginning to happen already as states and local governments raise their minimum wage, but more could be done.

We could pass universal health care and pay for it with higher taxes on the superrich as Democrats suggest, which also would reduce economic pressure on the working class.

In the name of supporting families, we could take steps to establish universal day care, pass federal paid family leave and bring back that lovely child tax credit that actually cut child poverty in half, to its lowest level in history during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In other words, we have the tools to deal with the problems of Americans who have the desire to work hard, support their families and try to step up the ladder of upward mobility but could use a little help in getting started.

We have the resources and the brainpower to deal with these problems. But I ask my fellow Americans, are we man — or woman — enough to do it?