The particular alignment of politics and gender behind “snowflake,” though, was forged in the 1950s — a decade during which, even in public policy, masculinity became associated with all that is independent, instinctual and pugilistic, and femininity with the communal, nurturing and systemic. Early in the Cold War, the threat of Communism was cast as not only a red scare but also a pink one. At the same time, cultural critics warned of a sinister feminizing threat from within: the defanging of the middle-class man in office buildings. In 1956, William Whyte’s “The Organization Man” denounced the “soft-minded” harmony of a corporate life that was predicated on “togetherness.” Two years later, an Esquire essay by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued that men had retreated “into the womblike security of the group” — that democratic society itself constituted an “assault on individual identity.” And if “people do not know who they are,” Schlesinger wrote, it follows that “they are no longer sure what sex they are.”

In the American political imagination, Republicans became men and Democrats became women — one group associated with the West and “real” masculinity, the other with the East Coast, with intellectualism and elitism, with femininity. The New York Daily News called Adlai Stevenson “fruity” but also an “egghead,” dismissing his supporters as “Harvard lace-cuff liberals” and “lace-panty diplomats.” Today, when conservatives razz liberals for their markers of high-class cultural refinement, from John Kerry’s windsurfing to Barack Obama’s arugula, they may call them “out of touch,” but the subtext is that what they’re really alienated from is their own manhood. When Jacobs was body-slammed, conservative critics zeroed in on the detail of the glasses: “What kind of a wuss files charges over broken glasses?” Derek Hunter of The Daily Caller asked. And when the Newseum acquired the spectacles for its collection, one Twitter critic sneered: “Another artifact for the Snowflake Museum.”

These alignments between politics and gender are not natural or static: They have shifted, time and again, with changes in America’s society and economy. According to E. Anthony Rotundo, the author of the 1994 book “American Manhood,” colonial men were actually respected for a “communal manhood” that prioritized care for others, including children. It was later in the nation’s history that the ideal turned toward individual achievements and, eventually, toward toughness, competitiveness and symbolic displays of virility.

Even recently, the ideal of traditional conservative masculinity has still been mediated by notes of femininity: a manly man who was soft around the edges, especially to women and children. Reagan was a grandfather figure; George W. Bush a “compassionate conservative.” Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in countless films as a muscled killing machine, but he also humanized his image with movies that placed him in classically feminine roles, like “Kindergarten Cop” and “Junior,” in which he is actually pregnant. These days, the flagship model of the old-school G.O.P. man may be Vice President Mike Pence — an earnest patriarch who calls his wife “Mother” and won’t dine alone with other women.

With President Trump, however, the masculine archetype seems to have regressed. Trump is less the strict father than the petulant child: a boyish figure who rejects advice, shirks discipline and refuses to be beholden to behavioral norms. He is rarely even seen as the patriarch of his own family; as Melania Trump said after he was caught boasting about assaults on tape, “Sometimes I say I have two boys at home.” His supporters among the so-called alt-right, too, have, in addition to embracing racist views and conspiracy theories, worked to scrub away the sober adult trappings of conservative masculinity, branding them as compromised and conformist.