Whether it’s Proud Boys storming the Capitol or Shamed Men penning public apologies for egregious sexual misconduct, men aren’t always making it easy to rush to their defense. Nevertheless, two recent books by unlikely bedfellows, the first by feminist critic and essayist Jessa Crispin and the second by liberal political commentator Richard Reeves, do just that — looking beyond the ways in which men cause trouble to observe that they’re in trouble.

From the outset, Crispin’s My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains and Reeves’s Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It promise to have little in common. Crispin is an American feminist firebrand with a literary sensibility, while Reeves is a self-described “worried wonk” who left a career advising Britain’s Liberal Democrats to work for the Brookings Institution. But they share a conviction that men — not just traditional masculinity, but real living men — are in crisis, and they both observe that this crisis is especially acute among working-class men.

In professional elite circles, it can be hard to perceive this crisis, let alone muster the energy to care. After all, women are still struggling to break the glass ceiling in almost every professional field, and, as the #MeToo movement demonstrated, untold men with power have gone to great lengths to abuse it for personal gratification. People primarily socialize within their own class, and consequently the class-privileged women who set the agenda for mainstream feminism are disinclined to look beyond these gender inequalities in the upper echelons. When they think abstractly about the vastly larger demographic of men without elite educations and economic advantage, their minds may turn to crude culture-war archetypes. For professional women weaned on liberal media, working-class white men in particular are likely to conjure images of spittle-spewing conspiracists and chest-thumping Trumpers — hardly sympathetic figures.