Tony! Tony! Tony! (The Sign Guy)

The Rise Of Masculinity, Both Comic And Heroic. Camille Paglia Saw It Coming

One of the sucky things about living in Europe is that major American cultural events involving sports (like the LSU-Alabama game, or the much less important one, the Super Bowl), come on too late at night to watch. So I woke up this morning to see that the Iggles put a hurt on the Chiefs that Brillo can’t get off. I don’t care, because no SEC team was playing, but congratulations anyway, Iggles.

What I do care about is … America is back! Watch Jon Batiste’s great New Orleans rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and how the crowd reacted when the camera rested on El Trumpo Magnifico.

A friend and reader of this newsletter sent me overnight this terrific, hilarious clip of Tony the Sign Guy. Turns out this great American humorist has other short clips, and he’s a marketing genius. Seems like LC Signs is for real, too. (Caution, most of these are NSFW.) Vibe Shift™, for sure! I want an LED sign now.

Tony the Sign Guy, a great American

So the Trumpissimo is imposing big tariffs today. Bad idea? Good idea? I dunno. But I do know that it feels so, so good that we don’t have to pretend anymore that all the crazy-ass nonsense imposed on us all over the past decade is good or normal. That makes me happier than if the Tigers had shut out the Crimson Tide. I know I’m dumb about this, but it feels like the first day of spring after a long and miserable winter, and that feels great.

I recently highlighted in this space a great essay by Mana Afsari, in which she talked affectionately about what she called the new Romanticism of the (young) men of her generation — men who aspire to Be Serious about things like ideas, culture, and all the things they were denied by their experience in our woke universities.

Matt Feeney liked the essay, it seems, but can’t figure out why these guys are so enamored of Donald Trump. Excerpts:

This is the psychological model by which otherwise intelligent and discerning young men purportedly seeking higher enlightenment would find themselves hero-worshipping a huckster businessman, a TV personality, a politician, a cranky old man who’s clearly beneath the soul-ideals they’ve been training themselves to seek and appreciate. Their Trump-worship is the opposite of Romantic, a machine output of personal media technology that has insinuated itself into their brains. It’s important to dwell on the historical strangeness and novelty of this form of political engagement. It much more closely resembles the identification that young men have with their famous and infamous online role models — Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate — than it does the more abstract political fandom that Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy inspired in earlier regimes of media technology.

On top of this, Trump’s own way of doing politics, notoriously “transactional” in its use of presidential power, is also transactional in a more personal way. He performs love toward those who show love for him. Trump’s classes of fans — working-class people, rural people, young men — say they feel seen and recognised by him. This is a potent political talent to have, the ability to make people feel as if, from your Olympian remove, you literally see them, recognise them in their specific predicaments and identities. This effect is both enabled and magnified on the internet — just consider Trump’s insulting and preening and perpetually complaining presence on social media, the fact that he can be personally followed and RP’d and @’d, the fact that you can look up the hateful people who attack him, and hate them like he hates them.

More:

The second Trump administration is already revealing the wisdom in Greer’s pessimism. As I write, Trump has just announced that America is going to “take a long-term ownership position” on Gaza, as if “Gaza” is a tradeable stock, or a golf course and subdivision complex in Florida. This is obviously unworkable. But triumphalism from Trump’s narrow victory, and the well-founded loathing of the progressive regime he replaced, have instilled in his supporters a sense of historical destiny: what he’s doing will work out, whatever it is, however shallowly and passingly he’s considered the practical questions himself.

This all makes recent days seem eerily like the ecstatic months between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, when the pleasure of those upwelling spirits merged with convictions about the manifest villainy of our adversaries to generate theories of American destiny that were disastrously innocent of practical insight. This is the problem with programmes of political action that are grand in scope but based on Romantic feelings. Those feelings are no substitute for knowledge and judgement. At some point, practical payment will come due for those manly feelings and the disruptive ambitions they inspire. That payment is typically steep.

Gotta admit Feeney has a point. I was having pints with a fellow American expatriate conservative at a pub near Paddington on Saturday, and we were both on a big high about how Trump and his team are wrecking wokeness and all its pomps and works. Yet my friend said that he has this nagging feeling that this might not end well. “It feels like the way I felt leading up to the Iraq War,” he said, and I got what he meant. Conservatives like him and me, we felt this surge of heroic destiny for America. It was clear who we were as a country, and what we had to do. It felt great! And it ended in disaster.

I know perfectly well that I’m wrong to exult in Trump’s anti-wokeness and not to care so much about things like tariffs. On the other hand, let me say a few words in favor of the Vibe Shift.

My friend, who is white, also told me about his son, in college, and how right-wing the kid is. This is the second friend my age who has recently reported that his college-age son and their friends are all-out right-wing. The details they shared indicated that these guys have just had it — Had. It. — with being told by the overculture, and the overculture’s institutions, that they are pieces of crap because they are white and male, and because normal manifestations of masculinity are signs of their unworthiness, even wickedness. So they don’t care. This is a kind of Live Not By Lies courage that has been conspicuously missing in American life over the past decade. It is a sign of recovery that it is emerging again.

That said, I agree with my Paddington friend that this could go to a very bad place if we aren’t careful. Historically, Romanticism fed into the worst politics of the 20th century. It is certainly true that the Left provoked all of this with its pathological politics, both cultural and legislative. But you know, Al Qaeda provoked the Iraq War response, which still ended quite badly for America. I’m not sure how we channel this new heroic masculine vibe into constructive goals. I mean, I love what Elon is doing with USAID, and I look forward to him turning the same thing on much larger agencies of government (Defense Department, I’m looking at you). But caution is in order.

Still, check out self-described “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington’s superb recent piece on the return of Heroic Masculinity as a means of re-enchantment. It begins as a sort of review essay of the work of Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset, and a new, aligned book by a guy named Constantin von Hoffmeister, titled Esoteric Trumpism. Excerpts:

For Hoffmeister, Trump sits in opposition to this chthonic, tentacular “Swamp”. He is recast in a kaleidoscope of heroic terms: the “Frontier King”, the embodiment of America’s Promethean spirit, even the catalyst that will unleash the Power of Grayskull and transform “gay and emasculated Prince Adam” into He-Man. Similarly, for BAP the way forward is a revival of masculine agency and heroism, echoing ancient pirates and warbands; their return will, he thinks, re-orient women from disdain for men toward hero-worshipping the ones who earn it. Having “voted for Hitler, Mussolini, and many others, with some enthusiasm”, he says, women would “set their bodies on fire with passion for a saviour”.

Well. At the level of logic and political theory I have a many questions about the worldview presented by both authors. But engaging logically is to miss the point of these texts. Their aim - stated explicitly in BAM and implicitly in the title of Esoteric Trumpism - is not logical persuasion but fuelling the vibe shift. This kind of writing is way, way upstream of anything that will ever be published by Respectable Thinkers in the mainstream press, or indeed yours truly. It’s not an argument; it’s an intervention. And the vibe shift, as many have already observed, represents a pivot from the egalitarian, actuarial and risk-averse mindset of modernity to one more overtly hierarchical, entrepreneurial, and heroic. Meanwhile, as a great many other “classical liberals” have also been lamenting for years, another vibe shift has long been tilting culture from the civil, the rationalistic, and the objective toward the poetic and memetic: the nuclear core of re-enchantment. And reading BAM and Esoteric Trumpism together makes clear the link between these phenomena. In a word: you can’t re-enchant the world without re-enchanting men, and you can’t re-enchant men without re-activating masculine archetypes.

What Mary is onto is the importance of understanding why what seems to be half-baked theorizing by these guys is so important. You can’t read them on the surface. You have to grasp what they’re up to at a deeper level. If you roll your eyes at their stuff, you are making a significant mistake. More Mary:

I suppose you might say okay, maybe you’re right and mythic roles are taking on greater cultural significance. But perhaps we could persuade men to embrace just the quietist ones. How about the farmer, the scholar, the monk, or the husband? To which I can only say: good luck with that. Watch little boys playing, and it’s obvious that the combat instinct and yearning for glory runs very deep, in at least some of them. Trying to extinguish it will not end well (is not ending well). And while, yes, that yearning can have highly disruptive effects, and can be turned to wicked ends, it’s in any case not as though a proceduralist, managerial civilisation affords no scope for horrors of its own.

So we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere. This is already evident in daily news headlines now coming out of America. Whatever the doubtless more nuanced reality of the work done by USAID, the exultant male response to recent work by Elon Musk and his "warband” of young tech-bros in dismantling that institution is powered by triumphant male support for a small group, understood archetypally as doing battle against a vast, miasmic foe whose aim is the destruction of masculine heroism as such. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but understood at the level conveyed by these two books, that’s what is occurring.

She says it doesn’t really matter what she thinks about all this: the fact is, it’s happening, and we’re just along for the ride.

Mary is right about the horrors of “proceduralist, managerial civilization.” This is what Tony the Sign Guy mocks. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that I think the fact that America had turned itself into a country that cut off the balls and the breasts of its children, called it progress, and demonized anyone who disagreed, was perhaps the clearest sign of deep, deep decadence. El Trumpissimo is a Hulk Smash reaction, and I’m thrilled by it. It has long been clear that you cannot negotiate with these Cluster B Commissars; you can only defeat them. As my Paddington pal said, it probably took an absurd figure like Donald Trump to come in from the outside and do the hard, necessary things that so many normie, institutionally-tamed politicians of the Right could not and would not do.

But, but, but. We have to hope for and work towards a sane balance. I don’t believe that we can ever have a return to status quo, pre-work classical liberalism. That’s what got us into the woke catastrophe in the first place: this idea that liberalism is neutral, is merely procedural. So where can we hope to end up, in the best case? I’m honestly not sure. As I’ve been saying for years, the only way we can right the badly listing ship is by a serious and widespread return to Christianity. I’m not saying that as a partisan Christian. I’m saying that as an observer of culture.

Like it or not, Christianity is the source code of Western civilization. As historian Tom Holland argues in his great book Dominion, all the things that liberals like him love about Western civilization comes out of its Christian heritage. That certainly does not mean that the West was edenic, until it lost its faith. Not at all! It does mean, as Alasdair MacIntyre saw decades ago, that without a shared, axiomatic commitment to a transcendent source of authority for our laws and morals, we cannot help but have chaos and instability. (This, by the way, is why any hope for constructive reform in the Arab world will have to be built on the foundation of Islamic culture and values — and it won’t look like the kind of model that makes obvious sense in the faculty lounge.)

A concrete example: the US Civil Rights movement was led by black Christian pastors, who did so on an explicitly Christian basis. Yes, they argued for principles of the American founding, which had been unjustly denied in the case of black Americans, but they also argued, correctly, that by discriminating unjustly against its black citizens, America had betrayed the Christianity it professed. Their case and their cause was so successful in large part because America was still a Christian country — in the sense that however attenuated, most Americans still believed that the Bible told us who we are and what we are supposed to do.

That’s gone. That departed around 1968, though we wouldn’t realize it till later. Race relations after that became a matter of Will To Power. You younger readers cannot imagine the whiplash of people like me, who were educated to think about race in MLK terms (e.g., judging people not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character), waking up in a world in which the progressive thing to do was to profess, in a left-wing key, the race essentialism of the segregationists, and to base public and private policies on that.

That seems, happily, to be over, at least for now. But Christianity has not returned. It yet may, but I don’t see it yet. In Live Not By Lies, I wrote about wokeness as a softer form of totalitarianism. I don’t need to rehash that argument here, but in one chapter, I wrote about Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism, and how the contemporary US, as well as western Europe, are ripe for totalitarianism. I also wrote about Philip Rieff’s mid-century prophetic insights into the “anti-culture” we have created. Excerpt:

How did maximizing a feeling of well-being become the ultimate goal of modern people and societies? The American sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff was not a religious believer, but few prophets have written more piercingly about the nature of the cultural revolution that overtook the West in the twentieth century that defines the core of soft totalitarianism.

In his landmark 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff said the death of God in the West had given birth to a new civilization devoted to liberating the individual to seek his own pleasures, and to managing emergent anxieties. Religious Man, who lived according to belief in transcendent principles that ordered human life around communal purposes, had given way to Psychological Man, who believed that there was no transcendent order and that life’s purpose was to find one’s own way experimentally. Man no longer understood himself to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who traveled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness his ultimate goal.

This was a revolution even more radical than the 1917 Bolshevik event, said Rieff. For the first time, humankind was seeking to create a civilization based on the negation of any binding transcendent order. The Bolsheviks may have been godless, but even they believed that there was a metaphysical order, one that demanded that individuals subordinate their personal desires to a higher cause. Almost a quarter century before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rieff predicted that communism would not be able to withstand the cultural revolution coming from the West, one that purported to set the individual free to pursue hedonism and individualism. If there is no sacred order, then the original promise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden—“[Y]e shall be as gods”—is the foundational principle of the new culture.

Rieff saw, however, that you could not have culture without cult—that is, without shared belief in and submission to a sacred order, what you get is an “anti-culture.” An anti-culture is inherently unstable, said Rieff, but he doubted that people brought up in this social order would ever be willing to return to the old ways.

Even church leaders, he wrote, were lying to themselves about the ability of the institutions they led to resist the therapeutic. Rieff foresaw the future of religion as devolution into watery spirituality, which could accommodate anything. Rieff lived long enough to see his 1966 prediction come true. In 2005, the sociologists of religion Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton coined the phrase Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to describe the decadent form that Christianity (and all faiths, in fact) had taken in contemporary America. It consisted of the general belief that God exists, and wants nothing more from us than to be nice and to be happy.

In therapeutic culture, which has everywhere triumphed, the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish. This goes hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which, along with ethnic and gender identity politics, replaced the failed economic class struggle as the utopian focus of the post-1960s radical left. These cultural revolutionaries found an ally in advanced capitalism, which teaches that nothing should exist outside of the market mechanism and its sorting of value according to human desires.

And so, to Arendt, who said the most important predictor of totalitarianism is mass alienation and loneliness:

Totalitarian movements, said Arendt, are “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” She continues:

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

The political theorist wrote those words in the 1950s, a period we look back on as a golden age of community cohesion. Today, loneliness is widely recognized by scientists as a critical social and even medical problem. In the year 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, an acclaimed study documenting the steep decline of civil society since midcentury and the resulting atomization of America.

Since Putnam’s book, we have experienced the rise of social media networks offering a facsimile of “connection.” Yet we grow ever lonelier and more isolated. It is no coincidence that millennials and members of Generation Z register much higher rates of loneliness than older Americans, as well as significantly greater support for socialism. It’s as if they aspire to a politics that can replace the community they wish they had.

Sooner or later, loneliness and isolation are bound to have political effects. The masses supporting totalitarian movements, says Arendt, grew “out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class.”

Civic trust is another bond that holds society together. Arendt writes that the Soviet government, in an effort to monopolize control, caused the Soviet people to turn on one another. In the United States, we have seen nothing like the state aggressively dismantling civil society—but it’s happening all the same.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam documented the unraveling of civic bonds since the 1950s. Americans attend fewer club meetings, have fewer dinner parties, eat dinner together as a family less, and are much less connected to their neighbors. They are disconnected from political parties and more skeptical of institutions. They spend much more time alone watching television or cocooning on the internet. The result is that ordinary people feel more anxious, isolated, and vulnerable.

A polity filled with alienated individuals who share little sense of community and purpose are prime targets for totalitarian ideologies and leaders who promise solidarity and meaning.

Americans’ loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies began in the 1960s. In Europe, though, it started in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Surveying the political scene in Germany during the 1920s, Arendt noted a “terrifying negative solidarity” among people from diverse classes, united in their belief that all political parties were populated by fools.

Are we today really so different? According to Gallup, Americans’ confidence in their institutions—political, media, religious, legal, medical, corporate—is at historic lows across the board. Only the military, the police, and small businesses retain the strong confidence of over 50 percent. Democratic norms are under strain in many industrialized nations, with the support for mainstream parties of left and right in decline.

In Europe of the 1920s, says Arendt, the first indication of the coming totalitarianism was the failure of established parties to attract younger members, and the willingness of the passive masses to consider radical alternatives to discredited establishment parties.

A loss of faith in democratic politics is a sign of a deeper and broader instability. As radical individualism has become more pervasive in our consumerist-driven culture, people have ceased to look outside themselves for authoritative sources of meaning. This is the fulfillment of modern liberalism’s goal: to free the individual from any unchosen obligations.

But this imposes a terrible psychological burden on the individual, many of whom may seek deliverance in the certainties and solidarity offered by totalitarian movements.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim observed that many people who had been set free from the bonds of religion did not thrive in their liberty. In fact, they lost a shared sense of purpose, of meaning, and of community. A number of these despairing people committed suicide. According to Durkheim, what happened to individuals could also happen to societies.

You can destroy as much by failing to build as by actively wrecking. Philip Rieff said the collapse of a civilizational order begins when its elites cease to be able to transmit faith in its institutions and customs to younger generations. Political scientist Yascha Mounk, observing the collapse of liberal democratic values among the American elites, tweeted:

It’s telling that, in the year of 2019, the notion that one purpose of civics education might be to convince students that there is in fact something worthwhile in our political system seems to strike many members of elite institutions as faintly bizarre.

Remember that my book was published in 2020, a time in which the media and the universities had been preaching that American civilization was nothing more than a vile collection of bigotry, brutality, and hypocrisy. So here we are in 2024, with Trump in the White House, and his people — led by Elon Musk — have been revealing that, at least in the case of USAID, the sense that the institutions of government, and the people that ran them, were rotten to the core, is true!

Here is an example that I found really striking. It turns out that USAID funneled money to the Rockefeller Foundation and to the apostate Republican sage Bill Kristol, who sent it on to an anti-Trump Evangelical ministry run by Russell Moore, David French, and Curtis Chang. That’s right: the state funded anti-Trump religious agitation. I don’t really care that there were and are politically active anti-MAGA Evangelicals. I care very much that the government funded them with grant money laundered through middlemen!

I’m very happy that Trump is exposing it and tearing it all down. But what will replace it? I don’t think any of us know. Besides, if we lack a shared sense of a transcendent basis for our politics, how do we keep it from becoming a continuation of the Will To Power campaign fought successfully for decades by the Left, in its long march through the institutions? Is that even possible?

To press the point: America is still a very divided country. How can we be sure that we aren’t in a period like Spain in the early 1930s, when both left-wing and right-wing democratically elected governments lurched so spasmodically, and, in power, prioritized punishing the other, eventually arriving at civil war?

Don’t think it couldn’t happen. It certainly could. It wouldn’t look like America in 1860, or Spain in 1935, but this sense that we live in irreconcilable realities, and the only thing left to do is fight — that could easily happen.

The woke regime is too rich and entrenched within the state and in public and private institutions to simply roll over and admit defeat. But after what Trump has done, and is revealing to Americans about the way our system has been run, I can’t see people of the Right, broadly speaking (I include fed-up liberals who voted Trump out of disgust for the Democrats), going back.

The exhilarating sense of liberation from the soft-totalitarian nonsense of Woke, and the bureaucratic stranglehold it had on American life — funded in large part by taxpayer dollars directed by ideologues in power — can’t distract us from the temptation to suspend critical judgment now that “our side” is in power. Mary Harrington is right to point out that this Heroic Masculine moment is upon us, and is a deep cultural force that cannot be controlled.

Camille Paglia saw it all coming — or at least hoped she would. In 2014, with wokeness ascending, she told an interviewer that “what you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide.” She meant by denying male-female biological differences and their cultural salience, and by suppressing masculinity. She went on:

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. “This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it’s all about neutralization of maleness.” The result: Upper-middle-class men who are “intimidated” and “can’t say anything. . . . They understand the agenda.” In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by “never telling the truth to women” about sex, and by keeping “raunchy” thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America’s brawny industrial base, leaves many men with “no models of manhood,” she says. “Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There’s nothing left. There’s no room for anything manly right now.” The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm “inspires me as a writer,” she says, adding: “If we had to go to war,” the callers “are the men that would save the nation.”

Here is something Paglia said at a UK ideas conference in 2016 (you can watch the entire video here):

Almost ten years ago, Paglia — a self-described pro-sex pagan — saw the rise of transgenderism as a sign of the end of our civilization. And here we are, with the Orange Caesar in the White House, and many of us grateful that he is hulk-smashing the corrupt, decadent order that the liberals created. Well and good. The Left brought it all upon themselves.

But let us remember something. Here is a BBC report about why so many young men in Germany are turning to the far right. Excerpt:

"What my parents taught me is that they used to live in peace and calm, without having to have any fear in their own country," says 19-year-old Nick. "I would like to live in a country where I don't have to be afraid."

I meet him in a small bar on a street corner in the ex-mining town of Freiberg, Saxony – where he is playing darts.

It's a cold, foggy night in February with just over two weeks to go until Germany's national election.

Nick and his friend Dominic, who is 30, are backers or sympathetic to Alternative für Deutschland - a party that has been consistently polling second in Germany for more than a year and a half, as the far right here and elsewhere in Europe attracts an increasing number of young people, particularly men, into its orbit.

One particular reason why Nick – and many other young German men – say they are afraid is the number of attacks in Germany involving suspects who were asylum seekers – most recently, the fatal stabbing of a toddler and a man in a park in the Bavarian city of Aschaffenburg. Immigration is now Nick and Dominic's main concern, although they don't oppose it in all forms.

"The people who integrate, who learn, who study here, do their work - I have no problems with them," says Dominic, though he is critical of anyone he sees as taking advantage of the asylum system.

"But these days such statements are seen as hostile," says Dominic. "You're called a Nazi because of Germany's past."

When normality is coded by the establishment as “far right,” then you are going to see more and more young people, who long for normality, embracing the “far right”. And normality, note well, includes normalizing traditional masculinity, including virtues associated with masculinity. Germany is disintegrating now. If it doesn’t get the AfD — the “far right” party, though don’t you dare be foolish enough to trust the US and UK media to tell you what AfD is really about; read AfD’s platform yourself — it’s definitely doomed.

Ross Douthat once said something like, “If you don’t like the Religious Right, wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.” We’re starting to see it now. As Mary Harrington says, it’s Bronze Age Pervert, it’s Constantin von Hoffmeister. In its somewhat diluted form, it’s Donald Trump. In its even more diluted form, it’s Tony the Sign Guy. Yes, it feels great to anti-wokes like me. If we’re lucky, this will be a radical corrective to the degenerate and sclerotic liberalism that has taken over American life, driven by elite institutions. If we’re not, well… .

(Note to readers: I’ll be traveling tomorrow, and won’t be posting. This past Sunday’s newsletter will substitute for Tuesday’s paid content.)