Make American men great again, argues Senator Josh Hawley in his recently released book. In Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, Hawley relies on tales from his own family, Biblical stories, and philosophies of both manhood and citizenship to argue that American men must cultivate courage and commitment, if our nation is to remain strong and prosperous in the twenty-first century. In the broadest sense, the senator’s observation that “all is not well with men in America,” and his contention that American men must “shoulder their responsibilities and develop the strength of character needed for self-government,” are correct to the point of being indisputable. 

Hawley has described the book as an open letter to his two young sons, whom the senator hopes will enter manhood ready to demonstrate the strength, fidelity, and responsibility that he terms the “masculine virtues.” 

The fly in this otherwise appealing ointment is the fact that the senator’s book largely fails to embody those very characteristics. In Manhood, which is an expansion of his speech at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, Hawley deploys on behalf of American men exactly the kind of self-exculpatory, structural explanations for problems that he claims to deplore in his progressive colleagues. Although he does admittedly encourage American men to take responsibility for their lives, families, and virtue, Hawley mostly blames the “Epicurean elites” for the “campaign of nihilism” that “leaves man impoverished … longing to find the permanent things but told that no such things exist.”

What distinguishes Hawley’s victimology from the policy solutions proposed by someone like Richard Reeves, who argues in Of Boys and Men that (among other initiatives) boys ought to begin school a year later than girls, is that the senator sees men’s problems as mostly cultural while Reeves sees them as mostly structural. Where Reeves sees policy problems that have policy solutions, Hawley sees existential problems that are somebody else’s fault. 

Like Hawley, I have young sons—three of them—and I, too, desire nothing more than for my boys to grow into strong, virtuous, and independent-minded men, free from the unreason, victimology, and passivity that the senator rightly calls out as excesses of today’s left. 

Moreover, Hawley’s assessment of American corporatism’s amorality and his lessons for men as husbands and fathers are well-taken. Many that do not share the senator’s conservative ideology, do nevertheless share his understanding that Americans’ “astounding affluence,” when applied to “relentless pleasure-seeking,” leads ultimately to “despair.” 

This profound and important foundation of admitted truth notwithstanding, Manhood mostly illustrates an important hypocrisy of the populist right to which Hawley gives voice. Namely, despite criticizing the left for doing so, he can’t help but play the victim card.

According to Hawley, elites’ Epicureanism and secularism are largely to blame for males’ increasing educational, health, and employment woes. Those on the “American left,” Hawley claims, “welcome” and “helped drive” the collapse of American manhood.

It’s easy to see why Hawley believes this. The mainstream and elite marginalization of fatherhood, marriage, and traditional family arrangements have indeed contributed to the problems presently besetting American men at alarming rates. Hawley is correct that the ubiquity of the Epicurean pleasure principle, which says “happiness is all that matters,” has done few favors and much harm to the temporal prospects of working and lower-class men, women, and children in particular—as well as grave spiritual harm to men, women, children of all classes. 

The truth is, however, that conservative men are complicit in these progressive excesses. The devolution of the family and the marginalization of grit in favor of passivity were not inflicted on men; indeed, without male facilitation, such pathologies would not exist.

In other words, although conservatives are fond of prescribing “personal agency” as an alleged panacea for the problems of the predominantly minority poor in Democrat-led cities, they simultaneously wield their own personal agency to share the nihilistic pleasures of sexual liberation and the amoral ease of no-fault divorce. And all the while, they blame progressives. Neither the sexual revolution nor the dissolution of the family could have so uniformly overtaken American culture without the complicity of an increasingly post-religious right. Just ask the thousands of fatherless children and impoverished single mothers in forgotten places like Hawley’s deep-red parts of Missouri. 

Meanwhile, as if turning men into victims weren’t bad enough, Hawley also misidentifies the virtues he rightly seeks to inculcate in his own sons and in American men writ large as the unique purview of males. By acceding to the very definition of “traditional masculinity” that he rightly blames the left for condemning—arguing, for example, that “today’s liberals … do not want men [my emphasis] to be ‘strong and courageous’” but to “abandon masculinity altogether”—Hawley overlooks the one thing that the “Epicurean elites” fear more than strong men: strong women, whose rejection of elite nihilism can’t be so easily chalked up to “toxic masculinity.” 

After all, strength, responsibility, and fidelity must be (and have historically been) every bit as constitutive of American womanhood as they have of American manhood. 

When the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early nineteenth century, he was particularly impressed by American women. He wrote in Democracy in America (1835–40) that the unique industry and ingenuity of the United States could be attributed in large measure to the “superiority of their women,” in whom he noticed uncommon reason, courage, strength, and firmness. 

Hawley’s “manhood” seems a lot like Tocqueville’s American womanhood. It may also ring a bell for my fellow women who remain unbeholden to the kind of delicate victimhood that Manhood simultaneously blames on feminism and claims for men. 

After all, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that American femininity was deemed antithetical to the virtues that Hawley rightly lauds but wrongly claims as the sole purview of males. In the mid-nineteenth century, America was industrializing; labor moved off the farm and into growing urban areas. In the newly wage-dependent economy, middle and upper-middle-class white women who could afford to do so focused their energies on domestic concerns, as homes were newly deemed sacred havens, separate from the now-sordid business of labor. Thus, femininity became synonymous with domesticity—that is, distance from production. Meanwhile, newly free Black people and recently immigrated Irish Catholics began to fill the nation’s cities—where Black women, Irish women, and poorer white women typically participated out of financial necessity in the industrializing and urbanizing economy. 

Out of the racist and classist desire of white upper-middle class Americans to differentiate women of their own race and class from those marginalized as lesser, the popular image of American womanhood went from industrious matriarch to delicate “angel of the house.” In this way, femininity itself became the sole purview of white, upper-class womanhood and its aspirants. After all, angels deemed too pure for participation in the economy are also too pure for acquaintance with harsh reality: A new piety demands deference to white, upper-class women’s feelings. 

So, it is no accident that, today, college-educated, upper-middle-class women too emotionally delicate to engage the simplest truths without severe mental distress are disproportionately represented among extreme progressives. 

I don’t have a daughter; but, if I did, I would be just as alarmed about the ways in which such infantilization could twist her relationship with her own womanhood as I am about its potential to damage my sons’ relationships with their eventual manhood. 

Hawley is correct that we need a national recommitment to the self-reliance, firmness, and strength that merited praise from Tocqueville. But we need these virtues among women just as much as we do among men. 

What we don’t need is the elite perpetuation of a given group’s victim narrative. Such excuses are, if nothing else, unmanly.