In Politico, Adam Wren has come to a realization:
More than a month before the election cycle’s first debates, the 2024 presidential contest has careened into a kind of testosterone primary, a frenetic fit boy summer sidequest in which candidates are drawing fewer contrasts on policy and proving more keen on comparing feats of strength.
His examples are real. They include Francis Suarez’s running, Vivek Ramaswamy’s tennis-playing, and even Asa Hutchinson’s pick-up basketball. These are all Republicans; on the Democratic side, however, there is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who proudly brandishes a muscular physique.
What accounts for this? From the Republican side, there is, Wren argues, a resurgent appetite for the kind of masculine bravado not entirely uncommon in American politics (think Teddy Roosevelt) arising from Donald Trump’s manly aesthetic. And from the Democratic side comes the desire to contrast with Joe Biden, a frail, aging president whose most famous recent brush with exercise involves falling off a bicycle.
Sure, it can get a little silly. As a runner myself, I endorse Suarez’s running, but his 5K time wasn’t actually that good, as Ramaswamy’s team pointed out. Yet Ramaswamy’s claim about his tennis chops (“I’m probably about the level of somebody who was, if they were a Division 1 college tennis player, but they were like, maybe five to ten years out”) seems like classic over-the-hill-athlete boasting.
And it’s a little weird that Trump has inspired some of this, given that he reportedly believes that the human body is like a battery, with only a set amount of energy that every act of physical exertion reduces; discourages his friends from working out; and views his rallies as a form of exercise. This is to say nothing of his weight problems (Dr. Oz, his handpicked Pennsylvania Senate candidate, advised him to slim down; he refused) and fondness for fast food.
But is it really “getting out of hand,” as historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told Wren? She offered the possibility that all the candidates are just “in this alpha male competition” that causes them to “lose all sense of reality.” But she also ventured that even those, such as Suarez, who got mocked for “mediocre” athletic accomplishments achieve what they want, as they know “that this is performative” and are “just putting that signal out there, and being perfectly fine when they get kind of ratioed on Twitter because it just elevates their profile just a bit.”
If these candidates are rewarded for their physical prowess, or punished for their duplicitous lack thereof, that’s a good thing. In America today, all sorts of health indicators — obesity, life expectancy — are trending in the wrong direction. And genuine concerns about the Left’s attack on authentic masculine virtue are being dismissed, and thereafter curdling into something toxic.
It’s time our public figures started modeling a better way. Indeed, there is something to Suarez’s contention that “physical fitness should be considered an asset for a president in terms of someone who has a comprehensive sense of what it is to be healthy.” Physical fitness is not automatically an indication of good character; there are plenty of counterexamples. But as I wrote earlier this year for Law & Liberty, there is “a moral framework at least implied in exercise and athletic contests, and a concomitant potential to facilitate virtues that can apply beyond.”
Maybe the “testosterone primary” has led to some silliness and will lead to more. But mocking the very idea of presidential candidates displaying physical prowess is unwise. Our public life should become more welcoming of such things, not less.