It’s not every day that a stranger cries right in front of you.
But that’s what happened to me in 2018. I had been invited to speak at Grove City College, a small Christian college outside Pittsburgh, and a young man picked me up at the airport for the 90-minute drive to the school.
During our conversation, he asked me, “Do you know who Jordan Peterson is?” I said yes. Peterson’s self-help book, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” which had been released earlier that year, was an enormous best seller. It has sold 10 million copies worldwide.
I’d read the book and liked it. It’s not a political tome. It’s written to provide meaning and purpose for a generation of young men who too often don’t know what to believe or whom to trust.
The book’s “rules” — such as “make friends with people who want the best for you” and “compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today” — provide a kind of common-sense road map to living a life of greater meaning and purpose. At its core, it’s a self-help book. Think of something like Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” but with far more biblical references.
Peterson “saved my life,” the man said. He choked up. After he’d finished his enlistment with the Marines, he left the Corps with no job, very few friends and no plan. He descended into depression. But Peterson taught him to find meaning in small accomplishments, in making the next day better than the last, and now he was on his way — he had a job, he was finishing a degree and he was making something of his life.
That young man is not alone. If you dive into the Jordan Peterson universe, especially in the days before the pandemic — before his politics (and manner) became more bizarre and conspiratorial — you’ll hear countless stories like that.
For young men who were lost, Peterson’s words were a ray of light. And very few of these stories had anything to do with politics; they had everything to do with purpose.
I thought of that young man when I read a fascinating report by my newsroom colleague Shane Goldmacher about Democratic soul-searching after November’s defeat. “Democratic donors and strategists,” Goldmacher writes, “have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.”
One of those proposals is a $20 million effort to “to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online.” The goal is to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.”
Goldmacher’s report generated a considerable amount of mirth online — most of it centered on the notion that Democrats have to spend millions of dollars to learn how to speak to men. The Daily Mail declared that Democrats were being “roasted” for the plan. Fox News called it “bizarre,” and Mediaite called Goldmacher’s report “brutal” for the Democrats.
I don’t fault Democrats for trying to reach men. Donald Trump’s gains with men were instrumental to his victory last November. It will be difficult for Democrats to win back the White House if men keep tacking to the right.
Yet I’m afraid that too many people are getting the challenge of reaching young men backward. At its core, the manosphere is not about politics, certainly not party politics. Yes, it’s always had political aspects and implications, but its roots are cultural, and much of its growth was an organic response to a deep personal need.
These cultural roots have profound political consequences. Think of the young man with whom I began. He found his way to Peterson because, like so many other young men of his generation, he felt lost. There was nothing the least bit political about his story. He was seeking hope and purpose, not to join a political movement.
But if you’ve found a mentor whom you credit with saving your life, aren’t you going to be far more open to that person’s political views, even if they’re radical and strange? When Peterson talks about politics, for many of his fans, he’s building on a pre-existing bond of trust. They’re more inclined to listen to him because of his positive impact on their lives.
You can’t write a history of the manosphere without acknowledging that it was a response to a genuine crisis.
Yes, men still do well at the very top of the American pyramid. Boardrooms of leading American companies are still mostly male, for example, but the vast majority of American men will never sit around those conference tables. Instead, they’re falling behind women at a startling rate.
This month, my colleagues at The Upshot published a sobering review of the relevant research. More girls are enrolled in college than boys, and girls have higher G.P.A.s. More boys are suspended from school than girls.
Boys commit suicide at a much higher rate than girls. A higher percentage of boys have mental health problems than girls, and boys are, The Upshot noted, “roughly twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with A.D.H.D. or autism.”
At the same time, there’s considerable evidence that fatherlessness has a terrible impact on young men. In other words, boys have a desperate need for male role models and mentors.
Enter the manosphere.
The constellation of writers, podcasters and influencers didn’t arise as part of a conscious strategy for seizing political power (though that certainly became part of the program), but rather in response to a genuine void in many young men’s hearts.
Jordan Peterson gave them hope for a better future. Joe Rogan entertained them, inspired them and provided a never-ending series of fascinating conversations that appealed to young male minds.
In the darkest corners of the manosphere, even a vile man like Andrew Tate — just this month prosecutors in Britain announced that Tate and his brother Tristan face 21 new charges including rape and human trafficking — preached his own cynical, misogynistic version of self-help.
If there is one thing that they all have in common, it is that manosphere influencers approached young men from a perceived place of love and affection. “I like you,” was the message. “I want you to live a good life. Let me show you how.”
The contrast with the approach of the cultural left was profound. Men could see that there was much love for women on the left, but they didn’t see the same regard for men. Slogans like “the future is female” created the impression that the sexes were in competition, and for women to win, men had to lose.
When the American Psychological Association published a report in 2019 arguing that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful,” the message seemed clear. Men, you don’t have a problem; you are the problem.
But look again at that definition of traditional masculinity. Stoicism has many virtues, and while it’s hard to find any virtue at all in dominance, competitiveness and aggression aren’t necessarily vices, they’re characteristics — to be molded by good mentors into virtues at the right place and time.
Just as we rightly loathe the aggression we see in criminals, for example, we appreciate the aggression of American infantry on, say, June 6, 1944.
Excessive competitiveness can transform a person into an intolerable jerk, but competitiveness, rightly channeled, can cause a person to reach levels of professional and physical accomplishment he’d never achieve otherwise.
So the manosphere had a point.
But in its success, it has been planting the seeds for its own failure. It’s one thing to recognize that aggression and competitiveness have their place in a young man’s life. It’s another thing entirely to revel in aggression and competitiveness, seeing them as inherent virtues to be indulged and amplified, much less to serve as organizing principles of life.
And the marriage of the manosphere to Donald Trump means that too many men are doubling down on the worst versions of themselves.
Making matters worse, they celebrate this aggression and defiance as a form of strength and moral courage. They’re defying the woke establishment and forging their own path. But becoming anti-left (or anti-feminist) is not the same thing as becoming pro-male. Misogyny should be anathema to any truly virtuous definition of masculinity.
Think of the last night of the Republican National Convention, about which I have written before. It was a celebration of MAGA masculinity, featuring Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan, Dana White and Trump.
But how many fathers want their sons to grow up to be like those men? They’re successful, certainly, but Kid Rock has a sex tape and faced an assault charge for a fight in a Nashville strip club. Hogan had an extremely strange sexual relationship with a friend’s wife. White was caught on camera slapping his wife. And Donald Trump is, well, Donald Trump.
Time and again in the Trump era, the pattern repeats. A cultural problem exists that the present establishment hasn’t been able to address (or has even exacerbated). Trump and the MAGA movement claim to be the voices of reform, but they replace something bad with something much worse.
In this case, that means a brand of masculinity that harms women and wrecks men’s souls.
I began this newsletter with that young man’s story because I wanted to show how the relationship between young men and influencers like Peterson transcends politics.
As Goldmacher reports, the Democrats’ $20 million strategy for reaching American men includes this admonition — “Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone.”
Well, yes. That’s necessary. But I’d say that there is something much more important. The manosphere succeeded not by refusing to condemn men and not by avoiding a moralizing tone, but by choosing to love them and by choosing to help them.
The answer to the manosphere’s dark turn is rooted in embracing men with sincere affection, shunning the zero-sum calculus of the gender wars and offering a vision of masculine virtue that inspires men to heroic acts of compassion rather than vicious acts of aggression.
In MAGA excess there now exists an opportunity. But it’s an opportunity for civil society far more than it is for a political party.
America doesn’t need a left-wing version of Joe Rogan. What it needs is our parents, pastors, teachers and coaches to fill the void in young men’s hearts. Our sons should not have to turn to books or podcasts or social media to hear this simple and powerful message: I like you. I want you to live a good life. Let me show you how.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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