A recent speech by Josh Hawley about the cultural Left’s assault on men, manhood, and masculinity has kicked up a predictable cycle of debates. David French and Josh Hammer have rehearsed again their spat over whether Reagan-style fusionist conservatism is inherently weak and unmanly, as Hammer contends, and whether Trumpism is unduly obsessed with a particular vision of toughness, as French contends. The New York Times published an essay by Liza Featherstone arguing, as one would expect from the Times, that appeals to masculinity risk being “homophobic and fascistic,” that what men really need “requires public funding,” and that “many men also need the freedom not to be ‘men’ at all, but rather to become sissies . . . or even women.” Hawley must be wrong about men, Featherstone tells us, because he “has opposed just about every common public project recently proposed, from the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the Build Back Better Act to the Green New Deal.”
Hawley’s full speech is worth reading, and one need not agree with every particular, or embrace Hawley’s well-known enthusiasm for Teddy Roosevelt — or, contra Featherstone, endorse every vote the man has cast — in order to see the problem he identifies:
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