Trump’s Mandate: A Masculine Renaissance
Editor's Note
Masculine virtue is needed more in war than any other time. This is what makes Trump the ideal leader for our moment. But the crisis that calls for a manly response has for years undermined American manliness itself. G. David Bednar surveys the scene and concludes that Trump has a mandate for a renaissance — if he can fight courageously, and inspire others to do the same.
The significance of men in the 2024 election has been widely, but not fully, noted. Young male voters swung for Trump between 2020 and 2024 more than any other demographic (+28). Men united across creed and color for Trump. His sports: UFC, college football, NASCAR. His people: Tyson, Hogan, White. Trump entered the GOP convention to the song “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”
The metanarrative of November 5 was the reassertion of manliness. Men delivered the votes, but manliness drives the movement. The phenomenon should not be lost in bloodless exit polls. The Left senses the threat of a mortal enemy revived. The Right should understand what it has awakened. A void of manliness caused our problems, and a return to manliness can fix them.
The reconquest of manly domains is only at its inception. Men’s problems are legion. Declining: college matriculation, workforce participation, average incomes, mental health, physical fitness, and life expectancy. Increasing: Suicide. The archetype of the immature, unserious, irresponsible man abounds. Sitcoms and commercials are “how-tos” for the flabby underachiever. A recent Department of Defense survey found sitting on the couch eating chips, drinking beer, and wearing shirts you don’t have to tuck in means 72% of military age males are not even fit enough to apply to serve.
Men’s demise seems less a natural disaster than a plan. Ritalin and Adderall are “solutions” to boys’ natural unruliness. Relentless propaganda insists that men should be “sensitive,” “vulnerable,” and “in touch with their feminine sides.” The infamous “Man Enough” ad telling male voters it was okay to vote for Kamala revealed the Left’s idea of masculinity: an androgynous coterie, including a morbidly obese guy in a cowboy hat, posed uncomfortably near pickup trucks and bales of hay. La Cage aux Folles meets Brokeback Mountain. We learned that being a man means not being afraid of women!
Politics has never been more downstream of culture. Imagine avatars of the two political parties. MAGA is a man, wearing a familiar red hat relishing UFC 309. Kamala, meanwhile, trumpeted the outsize role of young women in her campaign. Unmarried women voted Kamala +19. Sadly, we know from Pew Research and the CDC that young, progressive women are the unhappiest people in America. This is the avatar of the Democrat party. Kamala’s campaign promised “joy” because it was precisely what her base was missing.
The liberal project of modernity had benefits, but not all benefits. We became less judgmental, but we limited our aspirations. Not to judge, we surrendered judgment. We were encouraged, then required, to ignore the most obvious truth in the world: men and women are different.
Psychology, biology, sociology, neuroscience (and any parent) can tell us that boys and girls are not interchangeable. Men are confrontational, stoic, risk-taking, focused on abstractions and ideas, larger and stronger. Women are accommodating, emotional, compassionate, nurturing, focused on people and relationships, smaller and weaker. We ignore these generalizations of the truth and the science we don’t like. What greater error could a society make than misunderstanding humanity’s most important relationship? We have created men who are bad imitations of women and women who are bad imitations of men.
At the most basic level a woman’s purpose, her essential value in the human enterprise, was always clear; men must prove theirs. Even before Homer you might summarize a man’s role: protecting females from violence. Erasing the distinction between men and women has collapsed the distinction between these roles. Today, men are expected to support, as a matter of virtue, the blowing to pieces of their wives and daughters on foreign battlefields. Like an unused organ, manliness has atrophied.
We have reached an unsustainable, bleeding edge. MeToo required us to affirm female infallibility: believe all women, all the time — no matter what. Tampons in men’s bathrooms absorb any surviving trace of masculinity. The Uvalde school shooting was our rock bottom: seventy-five men, trained, fit, and armed stood by for ninety minutes while a teenager terrorized wounded and dying women and children.
But Heraclitus is being proven right: “You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps coming back.”
History as progress is a lie. The old Greeks celebrated a concept we have lost entirely. Thumos appears seven hundred times in the Iliad. We have no word for it. Sometimes defined as “spiritedness,” it is “the central natural passion in men’s souls.” Thumos is energy that drives action. It creates, builds and protects. Plato said thumos seeks not pleasure or wealth but is “the ambitious part of the soul that covets honor.” It is righteous anger, a need to fight injustice, the fearless instinct to go down swinging. It is powerful but dangerous; it must be harnessed and directed. Thumos gets in barfights, and it raises the flag on Iwo Jima.
Trump is the modern embodiment of thumos. Fight, fight, fight.
Our times require more courage and less empathy — more of the masculine virtues, and less of the feminine ones. Ungoverned compassion, “suicidal empathy,” has allowed 10,000,000 illegal migrants into our country. It has created $36 trillion in national debt.
A restored manliness will change the way we speak and what we can speak about. CNN asked a young Hispanic male why he voted for Trump. Was it inflation, the border, immigration? “No,” he replied, “it was because he has the courage to speak his mind.” DEI is racist; China is ripping us off; women don’t belong in the infantry; illegal aliens are, by definition, criminals. The meek, unsure Mitch-and-Mitt GOP is over.
Politicians are starting to speak like normal people. Post-inauguration beat-downs of the media by Trump, Vance, and Miller proclaim the old “racist” and “insensitive” trump cards worthless. The new press secretary, a 27-year-old woman, in her first day on the job treated the D.C. press corps like spoiled children as they deserved. USAID and Volodymyr Zelensky know Daddy is home.
A man is not a helpless follower. But a decline of agency has been driven by the growth of distant, impervious institutions that dictate what we see, eat, inject, and learn. The lower an organization’s testosterone, the more dramatic its decay. See American academia, exemplified by the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. Big corporations are almost as bad. CEOs surrendered their companies to the women in HR. Silicon Valley has been accused of a failure of ambition, creating product after product to broadcast cat videos rather than forging new hardware wonders.
Even the manliest organizations have suffered. Perhaps Mark Milley assumed that stuffing himself into the same uniform Ike wore would be a sentimental distraction from his failures. But men don’t sign up to fight for Ibram Kendi.
A manly vanguard is slaying these dragons. Brash Wall Street trader Bill Ackman did more to reform Harvard in three months than decades of op-eds and alumni complaining. Trump’s Davos takedown of Brian Moynihan for discriminating against conservatives was schoolyard justice for billionaires. Milley’s portrait is down at the Pentagon; “lethality” has replaced “diversity,” and recruiting has hit fourteen-year highs.
A friend is the father of three children. It was his job, he once remarked, “to push and challenge” his kids; it was his wife’s job to “comfort and encourage” them. But what if all you have is comfort? Perhaps a pandemic of young men “failing to launch.” The diseases of fatherhood trace the sickness of the nation. We need the “kick in the ass” back, the timeless tool of fatherhood.
The hero is the epitome of manliness, but our society has lost its understanding of the word. Plutarch’s Lives (Emerson called it “a Bible for Heroes”) was reputedly the most popular book in America in the 19th century, after the Bible itself. Today, every nurse and policeman is a “hero.” Liz Cheney is a hero.
The devaluation leaves no word to describe men like Second Lieutenant John P. Bobo, USMC, who sacrificed his life for his men in Vietnam. Like Lt. Bobo, thirty men have won the Congressional Medal of Honor in our recent wars. Eleven were awarded posthumously. How many know their names?
President Trump wants to erect statues to heroes again. “Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism,” said a man of the old standard. Daniel Penny was the president’s guest at the Army-Navy game: a reminder to the men of America of our obligations, and our potential. Men do not stand by; they charge into the breach.
At Butler, PA, Trump — long maligned for “bone spurs”, affairs, and Tweets — showed us who he was. With a shield of orange and a red tie sword he has defeated all comers: lawsuits, impeachments, the media, Hollywood, corporate America, the opposition party and his own. Trump does not apologize. When he rose defiant, blood on his face from an assassin’s bullet, he seemed to add the blessing of Providence.
The essential value of a hero is the capacity to inspire. You know a leader because he is being followed. Next to Trump, the Obamas, the Clintons, the Bushes appear as mediocrities and dwarves. Men voted for Trump because they were inspired by his journey. He showed us that manliness could be asserted without apology.
Manliness has the con. But MAGA’s foes are manliness’ foes. The obituary of the new masculinity has been written: childish, aggressive, erratic, ultimately ineffective. Indeed, men must be assertive but the assertion must be true to creative, protective and noble ends. This is the challenge to men; it always has been. Manliness must win, or die trying.