The War on Manhood
The governing logic behind our regime is fear of manly self-assertion.
It is pointless to seek a rationale behind the abuses that our ruling class inflicts upon us daily. The civilized instinct to understand one’s opponent, to get to know why he thinks what he thinks and maybe reach some compromise with him, is nothing more at this point than a wearisome exercise in futility.
Why is COVID-19, which has a 98% survival rate, a threat great enough to bring all human life on earth grinding to a halt, whereas a vaccine against COVID-19 must be yanked from circulation if (much like birth control) it causes clotting in a small number of women? Why is looting a Walmart or shooting a cop a brave cry in the language of the mostly-peaceful unheard, but traipsing through the Capitol in Viking drag is a dangerous insurrection? Why aren’t we even allowed to see the data California uses to justify keeping us on house arrest?
These are pointless questions and it’s stupid to keep asking them. Because, that’s why. Because we win and you lose. Also, shut up.
So, far be it from me to march you tediously through another thinkpiece about “The Left’s Rationale.” But I do think it’s worth noting that many seemingly contradictory acts of predation on the part of our oligarchs suddenly make sense if we understand them as unified by one governing imperative: extinguish manhood everywhere.
Why can’t you shout at sports games, even though you’re already masked and sitting six feet apart? Because that raw release of energy is part of why men like sports, and it just seems like it must be dangerous. Why were so many gyms closed for so long when exercise is one of the best ways to stave off death from COVID? Because gyms are, and always have been, schools of manhood—they are where men go to compare notes on how to be men.
And why must we defund the police in the name of Black Lives, when 81% of black people see plainly that to do so would be a disaster—for them and their communities most of all? Why do pregnant women need not only to be in the army but to have special maternity uniforms? Because the protection of human life and national security by physical force is the height of manhood. Every male role must be made a mockery of and undermined at every turn, even if it makes us less safe and less free.
I’m not suggesting that these principles are always explicit in the minds of the people making these cockamamie decisions. But I do think that the gut instinct of our ruling class is to stifle and frustrate manly self-assertion. They just don’t like it: they find it distasteful, toxic, uncouth, insensitive, and unacceptably risky.
Well, masculinity can be risky and insensitive—it’s also indispensable. The middle part of the soul that Plato called thumos, the passionate forcefulness we associate with both anger and courage, the mediator between principled belief and the will to follow through: no civilization can accomplish anything great without a healthy dose of that thumos, that virtù, coursing through its veins. In our degraded and materialist age, we have settled on calling this manly life force “T” for testosterone. But it’s more than a chemical. It’s a spiritual property. And the low-T dweebs who run our country hate it so, so much.
I think I know why. In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there’s a brief episode in which a drunken lout named Boggs is shot by an iron-willed aristocrat named Colonel Sherburn. The townsfolk band together with the intent of lynching Sherburn. But he turns on them and, in one of the book’s best speeches, stops them cold. “The pitifulest thing out is a mob;” says Sherburn, “that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness.”
The Marxists who burn buildings on our city streets, the sheep who mouth woke slogans at the front of classrooms and force their students to repeat them, the feckless Party hacks who put a desiccated old coot in the White House: they are a mob without any man at the head of it. What they cannot stand is the idea that some virtuous few might plant their feet down—might simply have the stones to refuse their mandates, to laugh in the face of their sickly lies, to shrug off every baseless accusation and simpering piety they invent to shut us up. And so of course, that is exactly what we must do.
Could not agree more. That is what they hated about Trump. He was a man, walked like a boss, he made them all look small and stupid. American men have been maligned because a bunch of ugly women, feminists, could not find a healthy, smart man to love them.
I raised two sons, married with children and wonderful wives. They are professional, but hunters and fishermen. Pure men with strong wives that appreciate and love them. Their children are cherished and will grow up to be like their parents.
American men are funny, smart and need women that want to be women not mini-men.
Time for conservative patriots to push back against the forces that wish to destroy America.
I agree that 'thumos' is an important term which we should be using to bridge that gap (or chasm) between unchecked passions and cold, hard reason in our confused age. But I find your argument around the Greek term 'thumos/thymos - θυμός' rather puzzling. Of course the success of liberal democracies in the western world since the early nineteenth century has depended to a large extent on that delicate balancing act of what Fukuyama calls 'isothymia', the recognition of equality with others, and 'megalothymia', the demand of superiority to other individuals (and yes, I'm aware they are neoclassical compounds, but seen as you're a kind of neoclassical guy, I hope you don't mind too much).
When you lament that there are no real men at the head of a mob or tribe, are you referring to Nietzsche’s ‘men without chests’? Do we need more men with a quasi-Nietzchian super-ego who can project their virile ‘megalothymia’ across the fractured landscape of a broken America? Are you really arguing that it is this more aggressive form of ‘thymos’ that is needed in both private and public life if America is ever to get closer to the ideals of the Founding Fathers? Wasn’t it the Founding Fathers themselves who created a system of checks and balances to avoid the very situation of a Caesar-type leader from taking over? i.e. someone with a heavy excess of super-ego/’megalothymia’ and a substantial lack of ‘isothymia’.
I notice that you yourself barely keep in check certain aspects of ‘megalothymia', despite your best efforts to disguise the blunt passions behind impressive knowledge of classical rhetoric and western history: ‘These are pointless questions and it’s stupid to keep asking them. Because, that’s why. Because we win and you lose. Also, shut up.’ Sure, you’re being ‘ironic’ and tongue-in-cheek. Haha. I get it. But not everyone will read your words with such an open mind. To others, this is the supreme act of double-bluffing – slip in moments of bare-faced ‘ironic’ arrogance amidst the classical rhetoric for performative effect. Very clever of you. I’m afraid you don’t convince this reader; the only thing you convince me of is a writer who is trying too hard to convince himself of his own intellectual position, i.e a highly educated liberal who is espousing a nativist, ethnocentric narrative for a return to some mythical ‘golden age’ of American supremacy and relevance.
But I know you probably don’t care, because maybe in your world this would be the highest form of compliment?? Let’s go through your article methodically to see what’s going on here. Your first sentence – ‘It is pointless to seek a rationale behind the abuses that our ruling class inflicts upon us daily.’ But isn’t this precisely what you attempt to do anyway? - ‘I do think it’s worth noting that many seemingly contradictory acts of predation on the part of our oligarchs suddenly make sense if we understand them as unified by one governing imperative: extinguish manhood everywhere.’ You claim that the ruling elites – ‘the low-T dweebs’ – abhor displays of testosterone or even ‘thymos’, but who are you to decide what narrow definition of ‘thymos’ is appropriate for a government which is dealing with unprecedented challenges? Wouldn’t you say that a recognition of others and their equal rights under the law, especially those who look and sound different to you, is just as worthy a display of classical virtue and ‘spiritedness’ as projecting an image of butch gym-bro manliness? Again, I’m sure you don’t care and I’m wasting my time here. But just some food for thought.
I’m also intrigued by your definition of what a ‘man’ is, or what he is meant to be. ‘Gyms are, and always have been, schools of manhood – they are where men go to compare notes on how to be men.’ OK, sure thing. Gyms are useful to work on your body, become fitter and healthier, and have some great banter with male friends. But let’s get real here – are you seriously suggesting that men who do not go to gyms are somehow unworthy of the label ‘man’? Someone who would rather go for brisk walks every day, and spend more time working on artistic or creative pursuits is somehow an example of a twenty-first century man displaying an excess of ‘femininity’ or even ‘isothymia’ (god forbid)?
Also - ‘...national security by physical force is the height of manhood.’ Interesting. That would explain the hundreds of wars over the last five centuries which have been started overwhelmingly by…….oh. Men. But war is OK, no? Because real men have to find an outlet for all that pent-up rage and testosterone AHEM, sorry ‘thymos’, coursing through their veins, right? Women already have pain. They’re born with it, and they carry it through their lives every single month. Men have to seek it out. There is some truth in this, but I find it astonishing that a writer and scholar of your standing should have such a narrow-minded view on what constitutes ‘proper’ masculinity, as well as femininity presumably.
From someone who has found a political and ideological home with the Claremont Institute, don’t you think it is truly ironic that you are claiming in this article that the government is seeking to ‘extinguish manhood everywhere’… ‘...even if it makes us less safe and less free’, and yet you are given a platform to offer your view on anything you wish to the entire world on the internet. If the government really wanted ‘to shut us up’, you would not be writing this article, and we would not be reading intellectually bankrupt opinion pieces by an author who perhaps believes he is the man to lead that mob to the promised land.