It Doesn't Matter Anymore

Progressive Culture and the Crisis of the American Male

Harry got up dressed all in black
Went down to the station
And he never came back
They found his clothing scattered somewhere down the track
And he won't be down on Wall Street in the morning

He had a home
Love of a girl
But men get lost sometimes as years unfold
One day he crossed some line and he was too much in this world
But I guess it doesn't matter anymore

• Don Henley “New York Minute”

Most Americans understand, in their hearts if not in their heads, that American men are deep in crisis. From a pure numbers perspective, American men are the majority of our homeless, our prisoners, our chronically unemployed and underemployed, our veterans with severe PTSD, our addicts, our suicides and our opiod overdoses. Increasingly young men are dropping out of the workforce and taking a pass on critical life-building steps like college and marriage. And then, after all that, men are proceeding to die much younger than they should.

in 1966 Timothy Leary told his followers to “turn on, tune in, drop out”… in 2024 America’s men seem to be adopting a different version… “tune out, drop out, piss off.”

The Culture calls this “male priviledge.”

None of this is a secret. Journalists and opinion writers primarily on the right, but also occassionally on the left, have written extensively on the subject.

The problem has been so well known for so long, that it has even made appearances in the Hollywood feature film zeitgeist going back at least as far as FALLING DOWN in 1993. But it was 1999 that would become a true banner year for movies about disaffected young men.

There were three major studio releases in 1999 which told the story of a promising young man who wakes up one day to find that his life has not turned out like he hoped it would… that everything he was told by government, the media and our insitutions was a lie. And, as a result of this realization, he makes a conscious choice to break with the reality he has always known in favor of something else… something new… a thoroughly anti-social life and identity which he chooses for himself.

Those three movies were THE MATRIX, FIGHT CLUB, and AMERICAN BEAUTY.

Wildly different genres, certainly, but each movie telling fundamentally the same story, and each a herald of things to come… an entire generation of lost young men choosing to drop out of a world that has lied to, neglected and mistreated them.

Nevertheless… despite the voluminous evidence at his disposal, Harvard’s Scold Laureate David Hogg somehow managed to make it all the way to January of 2024 before finally discovering a fact that the rest of us have known for decades.

Last week, Hogg, a man who is most famous for surviving the Parkland school shooting, going to Harvard, and then building a social media brand as an online Progressive policy influencer, tweeted this:

We have got to start doing work to address the significant number of young men leaving the Democratic party. I think a number of things cause this. 1) Trump’s strongman energy/masculinity. 2. a growing education gap between men and women. 3. Right wing masculinity influencers like Andrew Tate taking advantage of the isolation that COVID brought and giving young men someone to blame (women, liberals, feminists).

What Hogg is doing here is truly fascinating. First note the highly cynical framing. Hogg has identified the issue, and it is none of the horrific statistics with which I opened this essay, but rather the fact that men are leaving the Democrat Party that is the real problem. To make matters worse, having boiled the crisis down to “young men aren’t voting the way I want them to”, he immediately skips over the analysis and problem-solving steps of the process so that he can move directly to the blame casting and sentencing phase of the trial.

And of course when it comes to the question of who is to blame, Hogg has some very specific Conservative villains in mind. I’ll give you three gueses who, but you won’t need more than one.

In typical Progressive Year Zero style, when casting about for people to blame for this shocking state of affairs which he has only just discovered, Hogg can think no further back than the appearance of Donald Trump on the national scene in 2016… the day that all of history began for small-minded incurious men of Hogg’s ilk. But the societal neglect of American men goes back decades, well before the bolt of lighting which heralded the beginining of the Trump Era. For much of the last twenty years, the goal of the Progressive Left has been to reject masculinity entirely… even masculinity of the positive and culturally necessary kind… perhaps especially that kind.

To the extent Trump and Andrew Tate… or Tucker Carlson or Jordan Petersen or Joe Rogan or The Raw Egg Nationalist or Dana White or Jocko or “Zuby” or Mike Rowe are “guilty” of anything at all, they are guilty of filling a void that already existed. A void that was metastasizing for decades right under the noses of supposedly concerned citizens like Hogg’s ideological fellow travelers. A void that was, let’s be absolutely clear, created by a culture which is dominated by the Left. If there were “better” more Progressive men out there who could have stepped in to fill that void before men like Andrew Tate could, they were either too oblivious or too cowardly or too complicit to do so.

In THE MATRIX, Neo is red-pilled by Morpheus, a good and decent man… but that was during a time when the Culture was still willing to treat disaffected young men with sympathy and respect… to consider the possibility that they might have a point. Out here in the harsh and unsympathetic landscape of the real world circa 2024, men often have to take what they can get.

But as long as we’re on the subject of Andrew Tate… let’s take a minute to consider whether David Hogg’s fears about Tate’s influence are actually warranted. There are something like 160 million men in America, and Andrew Tate has 8.7 million followers on Twitter aka X. It is at least possible that David Hogg’s fixation on Tate is typical social media-style “catastrophizing”, and that Tate actually has very little influence on American men at all. It’s even possible that a significant number of Tate’s followers are not disaffected men, but rather Progressive “journalists” like Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz, who seem to use Tate’s Twitter feed primarily as a source for alarmist stories about men behaving badly.

Regardless… it’s a pretty nice racket to tell men they are unnecessary, that their time in the sun has passed, that they must step aside to accommodate a new generation of strong women, that their hopes and desires are toxic, or that they are a dangerous cancer on liberal society, all while simultaneously blaming them for listening to male authority figures (scrupulous and/or otherwise) who are at least willing to tell them the truth… that they are being lied to by a system that does not have their best interests at heart.

Look, we all know what this is really about. Hogg did not just discover that men are in crisis. He knows. He’s always known. How could he not? After all, the horrific crime which provided the platform from which he now lectures us was committed by a lost and mentally ill young man with no father to guide him into manhood, no career or romantic prospects and no hope. The cynical reasons Hogg is suddenly so willing to discuss this crisis now, are that A) it’s become a problem for his party’s electoral prospects and B) he’s finally found a way to blame it on Trump.

But even if we accept Hogg’s ridiculous Year Zero framing of the problem… is it even true that Trump is to blame for pushing men away from Leftist culture and its dominant political party?

Because as I look out at that culture, I notice a few critical things. I notice that it was not Trump who launched campaigns to eliminate toxic masculinity, mansplaining, manspreading, microaggressions and the Patriarchy (whatever that is). It is not agents of Trump who write articles with headlines like “Workout Culture Is White Supremacy”or even “Straight Black Men are the White People of Black People.” It was not Trumpian comic book executives who attacked their mostly male audience by “re-centering comic art to defeat the male gaze”… as if there were something definitionally wrong with an appreciation of the female form. It’s not Trumpian education officials telling young naturally hyperactive boys that they must sit still in one place for eight hours or else be put on dangerous psychoactive drugs, and then making good on the threat. It wasn’t Trump who shamed and cancelled an accomplished rocket scientist for celebrating the first landing of a spacecraft on a comet while wearing a shirt featuring whimsically drawn sci-fi comic book-style women in bikinis. It was not Trumpian studio executives who decided movie stars should be built like Timothee Chalamet rather than Arnold, Bruce and Sly. It was not Trump who declared that certain popular video games like Call of Duty, table-top games like Dungeons & Dragons, or the Lord of the Rings series of novels… things enjoyed primarily by men… represent right-wing extremism, toxic male culture or both. It was not a right wing publication which labeled OPPENHEIMER’S Golden Globe win “a troubling return to Hollywood’s macho ‘dad movie’ days.” And it was not the Trumpian Right who browbeat NFL quarterback Drew Brees so badly that he felt the only way to recover his reputation and career was to put the name of a violent man with a history of alleged sexual assault on his football helmet. All for the crime of telling an interviewer that because of his family history of military service, he did not agree with disrespecting the American flag by kneeling for the National Anthem.

These were all humiliation rituals… struggle sessions aimed at traditional American men and their favorite pastimes. All of them engineered and prosecuted by the Progressive Left. And they are working precisely as they were intended, which is to say badly, for American men.

No wonder so many men are leaving the Democrat Party… it has been an abusive relationship for quite some time now.

The problem is that the success of the Progressive equity project requires equality of outcomes. How the culture achieves that goal is immaterial. The ends will always justify the means, no matter how brutal the means need to be in order to get the job done. If you cannot raise everyone up to a higher standard, then it follows that you must bring everyone down to a lower standard. And any system as morally bankrupt as the one I’ve just described is bound to attract unsavory types with ulterior motives to its leadership… vindictive activists whose ultimate goal is not justice, but retribution.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum…

And that is how you find yourself in a situation where, in pursuit of equity, any traditional male pursuit must be converted into something enjoyed by an equal number of women, or else it must be destroyed. Whether or not women actually want to read comic books, play Call of Duty, watch action movies or read Tolkien is immaterial… the only thing that matters is that we arrive at an equitable outcome.

Is it any wonder then, as Don Henley sang, that men are dressing all in black, disappearing down the tracks and never coming back? They must be thinking that surely there is someplace out there where we can read about Aragorn, Gandalf and Frodo, or spend an hour pumping iron and building muscle, or look at comic book art featuring beautiful women in spandex without being cancelled for it…

And if there is not, then more and more men will decide, “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”

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• Thanks to all those who pointed out that New York Minute is a Don Henley solo song and not The Eagles. I have corrected the attribution.