It’s Time to Reinvest in American Men

Men have something unique to offer America, but they are struggling today. And the Left is to blame.

by Josh Hawley for National Review

Liberals and reporters get awfully sensitive when you criticize pornography and video games. They get even more sensitive when you blame modern liberalism for men’s addiction to them.

If these pastimes are so popular, so healthy, so pro-social, why wouldn’t those on the left embrace them?

They won’t because they know the truth: These habits embody the spiritual emptiness that plagues many men in America today. They fill the void left as men have withdrawn from work, family, community, and the task of self-mastery that it was liberalism’s project to discredit and displace.

Liberals refuse to own this misery. Instead, they attack anyone who acknowledges it, as they have since I began speaking out on the subject last week. They know their assault on men can only persist if its targets are silent, if conservatives let left-wing lies about men continue unchallenged.

So we need to start telling the truth: Men have something unique to offer America, but they are struggling today. And the Left is to blame.

In recent decades, the number of adult men between the ages of 20 and 64 not working — not even looking for work, but entirely out of the labor force — has quintupled, skyrocketing from 3 million in the 1960s to more than 16 million in 2015. But the damage goes deeper than that. Fewer and fewer men fill college classrooms. Today, men make up only 40 percent of American college students, and that number is expected to drop further. They’re putting off marriage, sometimes permanently. And they’re certainly not raising children. By 2020, over 18 million American children lived without a father present. That’s more than a quarter of all children in America.

The Left acknowledges aspects of this crisis only selectively, in the service of its agenda. Its answer to joblessness is more welfare; to isolation, legalized “sex work”; to male academic floundering, the medication of “hyperactive” and “aggressive” school-aged boys.

To double down on this agenda would only make the problems facing men worse, for it is the Left’s agenda that put men in this unhappy place to begin with.

For decades, the Left worked to replace jobs in the “dirty” trades like skilled manufacturing and, today, the energy sector, with service work from which men have historically shied away. Today, as the Left always dreamed, the ladder of opportunity — to those lucrative service jobs — runs through college. This means it runs through dependence on government-subsidized debt, the sort of debt that makes it hard to start a family and that can never be discharged. Only those who graduate with good grades reap the rewards. America has no answer for those who don’t, because today its economy, which prioritizes cognitive ability and academic aptitude above all else, fits with what the Left has long wanted.

But many men have more to offer than test scores can measure, and America needs those virtues: courage, strength, risk-taking, and commitment. These are the virtues that sustain an entrepreneurial and independent republic. But for decades, the Left has been engaged in a social project even more destructive than its economic one. It has pathologized these virtues to suppress the independence they foster. Liberals long ago recognized that independence was a bulwark against tyranny. So they chipped away at it, year after year, by attacking manhood itself.

The era of COVID — of attempted government command and control of churches, schools, and more — will be a harbinger of the future if we do not recover that spirit of independence. And that means confronting the Left’s most destructive campaign — its effort to destroy gender itself — head-on.

As is often the case, the schools are the tip of the spear in this war on gender. There, it affects girls, too, in the attack on girls’ sports and the elimination of girls’ restrooms. So mothers and fathers, now mobilized to fight critical race theory, should turn their attention to the assault on gender. We see this assault on multiple fronts, from the guidance counselors who conflate boyhood enthusiasm and energy with ADHD, to the denigration of athletic excellence, to the radical indoctrination that teaches boys and girls that gender has no meaning and that they cannot be secure in the most basic realities of their own biology.

Such lessons, which begin in school but continue in the professional world and are reinforced by left-wing media, teach that all our essences are mutable, and in doing so imply that manhood might be worth muting. That’s the message we must tell men to reject, from boyhood to manhood to fatherhood. We must come together as a people to reject the poisonous view that men are contemptible, and that the nation they fought to build is an agent of global evil. Nothing could be further from the truth. American men are and can be an unrivaled force for good in the world — if we can strengthen them, if we can empower them, if we can unleash them to be who they are made to be.