Senator Hawley and the Twilight of American White Masculinity (II)
The Cultural Left and Conservatism
The Cultural Left and Its Effeminate Masculinity
Because of the erosion of the power and authority that for millennia naturally inhered in men, masculinity has become the butt of the joke of the Cultural Left, and this in a literal sense. Everywhere in the West everybody is welcome to say any shit, to take cheap-shots and to poke fun at and mock the expressions, the deeds, and the ways of heterosexual white men, and as it goes without saying, of whiteness and heterosexuality in general. In tacit acknowledgment that masculinity was always classically white, a new concept of masculinity is propagated that is modeled on femininity and femaleness. A masculinity that retains in potentiality virtues and values that however cannot be actualized and activated will necessarily become poisonous to those in whom such potency inheres. It should be not so shocking then if there are what the Cultural Left likes to mock as “angry white men.” And yet, the truth is that anything born out of confusion and befuddlement expresses itself as anger, even when it might not be. That is, feminists, homosexualists, transsexualists, woke antiracists, and radicalized liberal whites will not see that white men, and soon enough most of the white world population, are more befuddled and confused than they are angry as the result of their inability to explain, first to themselves, where things went wrong for them and what exactly is happening to their lot.
For no efforts have been made in that direction. For instance, although most of them receive public funds, no help on this front could have ever come from the “Gender Studies” departments polluting American academia; rather all to the contrary. Operating undisturbed from within its walls, the Cultural Left is the concocter of the notion that white masculinity is toxic merely because it is essentially heterosexual. But this only bespeaks of the degree to which for instance feminism and homosexualism have been successful in their struggle for the effeminacy of masculinity as much as for the feminization of society. In the context of the technological advances of society, that is economically accomplished because modern technology turns almost anything there is to do into soft tasks. That situation facilitates the feminization of men whose inherent masculinity never had the opportunity to reach its full potentialities, because of their youth, or because there are in society large enough numbers of men whose masculinity has been alienated by the process of technological developments in tandem with feminist and homosexualist activities, and it is no longer viable to express its potentialities as virtues and values. So that, those who cannot succumb to effeminacy cannot “overcome” their alienation. This alienating state is what is derided as “toxic” by those who have thus succumbed. For example, actors and entertainers—because everything that there is to do in their world can be characterized as the softest of tasks—their every step and deed breeds the effeminacy and homosexuality that are quite common in their world. That offers a glimpse into why for instance Benedict Cumberbatch or Daniel Craig hold so acidulous opinions about white masculinity. There is also the fact that they are paid ridiculous amount of money to say ridiculous things.
That is, whatever conceptualizations produced by the Cultural Left from Academia against masculinity get taken over by Hollywood, to be turned into big money, to the delight and material benefit of the political establishment of liberal whites. But it is not only Hollywood and American Academia. White liberals of the ilk of Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, Degeneres et. al, and online propagandists like Vice, Digg, Netflix, HBO, etc., and alongside these, an almost endless array of electronic publications, as well as live shows and events (practically the whole independent and corporate media and the entertainment establishment), are dedicated to shut down the white heterosexual men who have yet to succumb to the feminization and effeminacy promoted by them under one guise or other. For instance, under the claim to “diversity.” White heterosexuality gets berated and dismissed as “toxic masculinity” to expedite its succumbing, or to get it to acquiesce and to fall in line. Therefore, these media play a role as propagators and enforcers of a substitute masculinity modeled after femininity. Hence, now a man is more “manly” the more effeminate his tastes, demeanor, acts, and self-presentation. Everywhere in the West men in high-heels and makeup have become the ideal of manliness. In the new ordering of things of technologically advanced society, a complex compound of sex, sexual preferences and/or proclivities, and identitarian race-based irrationalities, for reasons sketched above wearing the makeup and lipstick of “equality,” declare manliness and masculinity “toxic” to the end of furthering the alienation of white heterosexual men. As it can but be, in return what they get is more “toxicity,” more “angry white men,” often with guns ready to use them, or, in the less dangerous cases, sexual and/or socially misbehaving to exact revenge on their users and abusers. For it is a distinct feature of masculinity to always hit back in one way or another. In Classical Greece as in Rome this was clearly understood by everybody. Hence masculinity was respected in those places.
The Windowless Man-Cave
The twilight of Western white masculinity. That is what is being experienced in varying degrees and at many levels in every society where technological rationality and the cultural rationales—the identitarian irrationalities espoused by Liberalism—converge into one another, facilitating the latter’s taking over society. Thus, such crisis does not consist in the fact that millions of men have no jobs, look not for work, refuse to start a family, and prefer to stay in their man-caves playing video games and watching porn. That is just the epiphenomenal manifestation of what the true crisis consists of, in its essence.
To see this, as shortcut to a demonstration, one just has to notice one or two factors. For example, concerning Candy Crushing and video-gaming: women have been fast catching up with men; in some surveys they even top the male demography of gamers. Concerning porn: there are relatively as many women at any given moment doing and watching it in varying formats as there are men only watching. It is just men we hear more about. And then, women also get to have most of the jobs not doing porn. And concerning jobs—if this “patriarchal” society has allowed women to overtake men in graduating from college; and if the technologically advanced society (the knowledge-based society) makes it prerequisite to have a college degree to get a job and on top of that values inventiveness, creativity, and hands-on experience less than academic degrees obtained on Easy-A’s—why is it surprising that more and more men must stay at home? As often as not, they are forced to do so or find it less psychologically hazardous.
Furthermore, if large numbers of white men decide to stay at home it is not because they “have gotten ‘the point’,” as Senator Hawley phrases it. Men seek refuge in their man-caves because laws and policies have been put in place and a work ethos has been fomented in society to make white masculinity to feel unwelcome and uncomfortable practically everywhere. Thus, in the workplace—sexual harassment laws that under a veil of impartiality are overloaded with biases against men of any color and race; but the same laws make sure they are easier to enforce in the workplaces or areas of business where white men have traditionally thrived more than men from other races. The same has been going in Academia. The Federal Civil Rights Acts against discrimination in the workplace have been used and abused by the academic branch of the Cultural Left to enact academic policies that sneakily discriminate against white men and at the same time also introduce an ideological, sex-based divide between white men and white women.
That divide is there to aid in fomenting an ethos that implicitly isolates white heterosexual faculty and students by regarding them as suspects of already having transgressed or being about to transgress at anytime against either the women, blacks, homosexuals, or transsexuals under their academic supervision, or against their peers. And likewise in public spaces. In larger cities around the country, “sexual harassment” policies and ordinances modeled after the Federal Law for the workplace keep being introduced that intentionally or not have the direct effect of suspecting, stigmatizing, admonishing, and/or prosecuting the ways in which heterosexuality and masculinity manifest themselves in reaction to the ways of female sexuality. At the same time, the same legal policies allow ample freedoms or tolerance for women to let the exhibitionist dimensions of female sexuality to manifest themselves. So do the ways of female sexuality virtually, that is, visually appropriate the public space for itself in all impunity. For, more in the liberal democracies of the West than anywhere else, female sexuality fashions itself as a challenge to masculinity, which masculinity is dissuaded from responding to.
Therefore, the man-cave. The man-cave is one of the few places where heterosexuality can go or be to escape becoming subject to the legal tools and political ethos through which feminism, homosexualism, transsexualism, and/or identitarian woke antiracism surveil and punish white masculinity. It seems that Foucault’s Panopticon can control from “below,” too. However, the rationales for the man-cave are too derived from technological rationality. Apart from providing the gaming technology, technological rationality sanctions staying at home and playing; its logic tends to eliminate the fundamental differences between “playing” and “working.” Which is explained in the fact that for the technologist working happens as a game. Engaging with technology on its own logic is to play. In their man-cave and before the screen, whether video-gaming or watching porn, do white men find tasks that neither impede nor impeach their masculinity, at the same time offering ways to reaffirm their heterosexuality because only there it is most welcome: there is their masculinity free from getting the “toxic” label slapped on it. In that way do men momentarily experience some degree of power over their world, even though they also know that to be a delusion. That is the consummation of the alienated psychological state of white male heterosexuality in the technologically advanced societies of the West, in which feminization and effeminacy almost inevitably predominate.
Are there any ways out for masculinity and white heterosexuality? Those who have not put enough time in thinking through the extent and complexity of the “men’s crisis,” e.g., Senator Hawley’s Conservatives, believe the solution thereof resides in “men getting married and starting a family.” And that is a cause to keep worrying. But, even if that were a suitable solution, which it is not, the question to be asked is: Where are white heterosexual men to find women they can get to know well enough to take those steps?
The predominant ethos in American Academia spoken of above provides the answer. For even if the number of academically qualified applicants that get rejected merely for being white heterosexual males is virtually impossible to establish, the dwindling numbers of heterosexual white males around campus as students and as faculty in whole areas of the humanities and the social sciences are indications of what has been taking place in higher education, and against whom. It is not as if the white male gene-pool has been becoming progressively stupider while continuing to be the fount of the bulk of scientific and technological innovations that has guaranteed the enduring success of the American economy, and by extension, of the West. So, this suggests that women overtaking men in education (white men, specifically), is the outcome of sophisticated strategies pursued nationally by the academic branch of the Cultural Left. So, the question remains: where are white heterosexual men to find suitable women to marry and have families with? That they have been systematically derided and demeaned by feminism, homosexualism, and woke “antiracism” certainly does not help here—demoralized as they have become through being divested of masculine power and authority.
Where have American Conservatives been through all this? Wherever they have been, Conservativism obviously has not noticed the so many radical changes that the advanced technological developments of society have wrought on its social fabric. One of those changes: large numbers of women do not want to get married and do not need to get married. On the one hand, modern technology has made it possible for women to get the same kind of education in every field which men alone used to be able to have, and this has enabled them to compete against and to displace men from the market. As result, women do not need to marry men. On the other hand, partly resulting from feminism’s unrelenting campaigns of demoralization of men, even when they do, women do not necessarily want to marry them. Furthermore, also a byproduct of the technological society, as suggested earlier, feminism has managed to make the “patriarchal” society adopt feminist rationales as the official ideology of the State in every matter concerning the genders. That gets reflected too in the Child Custody and Spousal Alimony laws of many states, through which men are placed at a disadvantage vis-à-vis women, both at work and at home. At work as well at home, the twilight of white masculinity manifests itself as the loss of power and authority suffered by male white heterosexuality before the courts. In addition, unlike black heterosexuality, white men can count on neither the sympathy of the institutions involved, nor on the understanding of society.
The Cultural Left: The Collapse of the American Family, and American Conservatism
Apart from that, marriage itself has changed: in a time when marriage can legally take place inter genus, it does not anymore confer any distinguished status on men precisely because it does not necessarily have but technically presupposes not to have the bringing up of a family as its main justification, as was the case since antiquity until very recently. “Gay Marriage” has neutered marrying to become Pater Familia, something which through the centuries men everywhere took the highest pride in. Only white liberals should be expected to be so gung-ho about doing that, not a Conservative like Senator Hawley.
In any case, to desire not to marry, and to desire not to raise families are also off-shoots of the computerized technological developments of society. In this society people grow to be less inclined to sacrifice the many comforts it offers to the thankless job of rearing children. Technological rationality leads to a situation in which men have the least to gain from rearing children: such rationality systematically further erodes parental authority because it provides society with all the rationales possibly available at any given time to carry on through life without parental intervention. And, in a society where this same rationality makes as much available as accessible the ethos of the Cultural Left, men who raise daughters might just be acquiring a political enemy at home (in the form of a feminist daughter, or ditto in the form of a homosexual, “gender-fluid,” or non-binary son).
As made obvious by his speech to the Conference of Conservatives, Senator Hawley would not believe there is no logical sequitur between being married and raising a family, and conversely, between not being married and still raising and providing for a family. Obviously, too, his mode of thinking is not from this century or the one before. So, his “solution” to the “men’s crisis” as he sees it is anything but. As is the case with American Conservatives, it has yet to dawn on him that it was because men traditionally made of getting married and raising families the center of all their preoccupations that eventually society developed in a direction which they could not have foreseen how badly off it would leave them as a gender vis-à-vis feminism. That central preoccupation was precisely what prevented white men contemplating the historical rise looming against them coming from the “Left” as society was being transformed by computerized technology. Marrying and raising families as their raison d’être also kept white men from articulating socio-political and cultural strategies for their self-preservation under the new social reality brought about by the phasing out of old preindustrial and industrial technologies. Centered almost exclusively around marriage and family, white male heterosexuals historically primed themselves for becoming fathers, but not for becoming and being men in the first place; instead, it made becoming men depended on getting married and raising families. As a result, look at fatherhood now in the postindustrial technologically advanced society in which, through liberalism, feminism prevails. Fatherhood has become nothing but a cash-machine with a “dad bod,” or rather, it has become just a purse. That is what Senator Hawley is proposing men start over again. He wants men to go on repeating the errors of their past.
But that is because, anchored on a 19th Century conceptualization of “family, God, and Country,” he and his Conservative fraternity still believe in the myth that “family is the basic unit of society” as much as they also believe the myth that marriage is the backbone or precondition for families. Those have been the dangerous lies that have consistently stood in their way to moving on to the 20th and the 21st Centuries and to acquire a conceptual grasp on the historical present. The truth is the family has never been the basic unity of modern society. Whereas in Antiquity nations were born out of and had the family as their basic unit, no modern nation has been born or even preserved on the backbone of the family. But then, for Antiquity the family was not what it has become for modernity.
America is exemplary in this socio-historical development. Because America had the good or bad fortune of having been born already modern, the family never had a determinant role in its emergence as a nation. Had it been otherwise, then the American foundation and its Independence from the Brits would have been too costly for both sides, to the point that it would have probably never taken place when it did and how it did. The inevitability of spilling their own blood would have dissuaded the Anglo-Americans from pursuing their Independence from England, and the Brits would have not taken up arms against their first cousins. That their own blood was spilled on both sides regardless their blood ties, already signaled that the concept of “family” had begun to undergo an irreversible transformation. Blood ties had started to show themselves to be not strong enough to trump the desires for independence. Politics trounces biology: that is the philosophical meaning of American modernity. Breaking of their blood ties to the Brits is what inaugurated the modernity of the American spirit. And the American family, as a concept, but also in its functions and its compositions, has been evolving ever since. That evolution is what gets epitomized in “Gay marriage,” and in the “two-dad” and “two-mommy families.”
As it turns out, this latest incarnation of the concept of “family” makes it forever impossible to build on or even to preserve the continuity of a nation. For, the only way the family can be thought of as the basic unity of society is if, as in Antiquity, the continuity of bloodlines can also be thought of as the basic structure of the family itself. Hence, Blood and Land— until the irruption of America into the world’s history, Blood and Land was the simple formula that guaranteed the founding and continuity of nations. Therefore, those nations, like Iran, China, or Russia are still around and will still be after America collapses. Because Blood and Land are the only ground nations can be built on, they last onto the Nth biblical generations.
Alas. The typically American white family begins with the grandparents and ends with their grandchildren. End of the line. How can something so narrow and short be the basis for anything meant to last? But then, only where “Blood and Land” rules as principle can marrying and raising families have profound meanings for men: there lies the possibility and future of a nation. It was in situations like this that masculinity historically arose and fostered its virtues. Because Americans have never seen any importance in the continuity of the bloodline as the basic unit of the nation, the nation lacks essential continuity: families break down, bifurcate, or come to an end every few decades after they were started. And so, the sense and meaning of “nation,” and the loyalty toward it constantly fluctuates, wobbles, and breaks down accordingly. The fact of its having been born already modern in the sense above also always already forebears the eventual death of America as a nation. The incipient breakdown of the family is the founding event of the American nation that goes on repeating itself every other two decades throughout its history: every time the children move away from home to marry and to procreate or not. Without a bloodline to be preserved, the small narrowness of the family always reasserts itself, marking the end. America was born atomized at birth.
It doesn’t seem from this analysis that Senator Hawley’s “solutions” for what he inaccurately terms the “men’s crisis” could lead anywhere but backward. “Marrying and starting a family.” The real problem with Conservatism is that it cannot understand this literally parochialist mentality is the main reason American men, and their nation, have landed where we are.
Thus, Hawley cannot see the deep historic-anthropological relation between men marrying and starting atomized, small narrow families without bloodlines that can be traced back to the birth of their nation or their states, and a nation that systematically or massively shuts down its factories and brings them to foreign lands, just for profits and material gains. But why would capitalists and investors need think twice about dismantling their American factories and give jobs to foreign workers in foreign lands since from the small narrowness of the American family all other families in America are foreign to theirs? That is globalism in a nutshell. Thus, it is not only a question of taxation policies as American Conservatives are inclined to believe.
In any case, the postindustrial rise of the technological, computerized society among many other things means that factory jobs no longer yield social prestige, family authority, or political power. So, even if the voluntarism of American Conservatives could bring all factory jobs back (but it cannot), it could hardly help white masculinity and white heterosexuality to recover and forge a way out of their twilight. Not when women are set to monopolize on most of the career jobs in fields and professions which, oh historical irony, used to be dominated by men for the only reason that it was men that created them! The voluntarism expounded by Senator Hawley and his fraternity of Conservatives will not do. Voluntarism: (“Let’s tell men to marry and start a family”; “Let’s us bring back the factories”; “Let’s teach men that…”) Their poor understanding of historical processes misleads them into believing that if only they believe it, it will happen. That is neither politics nor philosophy; that is bad religion. It betrays profound ignorance of decisive components of American history. Their ingrained anti-intellectualism and anti-philosophic culture does not help them there.
Derrida, Hawley, and Foucault in their Man-Cave
Thus, attempting to explain to the Conference attendees what he has only a loose grasp on, Senator Hawley grabs the names of Derrida and Marcuse to lay on two foreigners the blame for what are the very complex deep-seated historical causes of what he superficially thinks of as the “crisis of American men,” ignoring that it is only the American manifestation of a larger phenomenon: the twilight of Western white masculinity in the computerized technological phase of Western societies and the rise of the Cultural Left. But then, Marcuse’s and Derrida’s teachings have almost nothing in common with each other. For instance, Marcuse is not a practitioner of Deconstructionism; Derrida is.
To be sure, Derrida wrote a lotta bullshit sophistry and sophisticated nonsense that got swallowed whole by the Cultural Left. But his philosophic deconstructionism can only be linked to the “men’s crisis” theme through being unwarrantedly appropriated by the lesbianic feministic writing, best represented by authors like Judith Butler, which for several decades has been widespread in Academia through her and her mostly female acolytes and parroters. You see, Derrida’s arch-narrative is that the West, from Classical Greece on, had gotten almost everything wrong or rather backwardly not only in philosophy but also in the sciences, the arts, religion, and everything through which and as which Logos is manifested, and he sets himself up to “correct” that, by overturning it. His philosophical project, whose unstated, delusory aim is to surpass all main philosophers who came before him as they are somewhat indebted to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotele, necessarily hinges on the “overcoming of Metaphysics worldview” everywhere he could spot it, which he prophetically found it everywhere he looked. That called for, and of course presupposed, depended on, and necessarily led to the “deconstruction” of anything that emanated from Western Man, which means to say, everything including Man himself. And that’s where the anti-men lesbianic feministic writing of Judith Butler and her acolytes comes in: they took it from there, literally.
But that project has succeeded up to now because there was nobody among American Conservatives who could get rid of Derrida for good by reminding his academic clones that one of the two modern philosophers Derrida badly emulates, Nietzsche being the first, realized in time that, as he wrote in Human All Too Human, “once we have succeeded in overcoming metaphysics, we must return to it.” The other philosopher Derrida badly emulates is Heidegger. Yet, the eminent German philosopher never saw to overturn but to complete, and recast in a new light, the Greek and Roman thoughts. He is always with the Greeks, on whom he firmly stands as much as he does on Aquinas; and his philosophy on Being (Dasein) cannot be correctly understood by those unfamiliar with the natural religion of Ancient Rome. And, yes, Heidegger too had proposed the “overcoming of metaphysics” as one of the aims of his philosophical project. But what he sought was removing the limitations that metaphysics represented to the correct understanding of the spiritual greatness of the West, which for him presupposed Western science, technology, art, and religion as much as philosophy. And he was in many places of his writing set against the “modern.” Quite the opposite to Derrida—the great mystifier of Logos.
Yet, harder to understand is Senator Hawley’s attack and dismissal of Herbert Marcuse. One wonders if he ever really held in his own hands any of his two most important works. For, neither in Eros and Civilization, nor in The One-Dimensional Man can one read anything that can be interpreted as an attack on masculinity, manliness, or whiteness. On the contrary, the second of these books should be read as a coded warning to Western men and Westernized cultures with piety toward our classical arts to be specifically aware of what was lurking in the displacement and relegation of classical, Logo-centric rationality by technological computerized rationality. The message seems to have been received in China. Everything Marcuse writes in The One-Dimensional Man is correct down to the letter, and the social reality we have been living through since this book was published (1964), proves him right over and again. If clarification is needed: The “One-Dimensional Man” in the title is a metaphor for the technological society, not for “America,” and refers to how technological rationality subsumes and assimilates to it human rationality in all its manners, modes, and forms in all the spheres of life, and how everything in society is compelled to reflect this rationality back to itself. So that society becomes one-dimensional. And “Man” therein does not mean the literal man as in “manliness”; “man” is a Germanism. In German, that word is genderless and can be used to refer to either man or woman, but also to mean “people,” “folk,” and by extension, “society.” That is how Marcuse uses it in his native German language. And since we are making clarifications: at a personal level—a German man from that era who married three times and helped to successfully raise three sons, two of them not biologically his own, sounds like the kind of man Senator Hawley wants all men to be. Only, Marcuse was by far a better man than the men of today, and his philosophy exudes pure manliness as only Nietzsche’s does among the modern.
To be sure, Marcuse did sympathize with the Student Revolt of the Sixties; and yes, he did give a handful of speeches to adoring crowds who likely did not come close to grasping the profound implications of his sober analysis. And again, the New Left claimed him as one of their own, but not with his consent. But he was not and was far from being a mere agitprop. He was a cold-headed philosophy and psychology scholar most comparable to Aristotle, and his study on the technological transformation of society should have been mandatory reading, especially for white males and all conservatives. In short: without thoroughly grasping the meaning of his works one cannot begin to see why American and Western masculinity, and classical studies and culture, have encountered their twilight. Incidentally, the same can be said of the works by Daniel Bell, the eminent Harvard sociologist and American conservative who takes after Marcuse, and whose American Conservatives chose to ignore, to their own regret. They both raised the alarm when there was still time to enact a manly reaction to feminism, homosexualism, and even to woke “antiracism” before it came into being. Unfortunately, everything Marcuse and Bell implicitly warned us was coming for, has come for us: Political correctness; the cultural irrationality of the Left and the Nationalism of the extreme Right; the relegation and subordination of Reasonability; and the enthroning of racial and sex-based sensibilities and ethos even in the most sacrosanct institutions of the West (look at the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the State Department, the American Military, etc., etc.). All that and more can be surmised from Marcuse’s work as the future of America. On the other hand, sympathizing with the Students Revolt was the ethical thing to do then, whether you were to the left or the right of its demands. It is not as if there were not legitimate claims to be raised without also embracing the excesses of the Revolt.
And yet, and yet... Strangely, the man who alone deserves not only the scorn but to be implacably confuted by anyone who still clings to Reasonability and Reason; the man whose books, were it not too fascistic to do so would have deserved to be burned in their original—that man’s name does not appear anywhere in Senator Hawley’ speech. That man is Foucault. Clearly, no author is personally responsible for the effects his writings may have on his readers or for the social processes and the outcomes his writings might bring about. But that is provided the author does not systematically manipulate his sources by extrapolating, over-stretching, and over-interpreting them beyond what should be deemed methodologically sound, misrepresenting his research as objective, unbiased scholarship but indeed proceeding from the dark need to justify with historical allegories his own sexual aberrations, catapulting it into the identity politics of at least three generations of readers in the West. Foucault is such an author. We get an indication of this if we consider that, while foaming and babbling in writing about how his very peculiar conceptualization of “power,” by conducting scientific inquiries or by demonstrating a formal discursive interest on a legitimate subject of inquiry, has allegedly invented sex, sexuality, heterosexuality, homosexuality, the races and racism, the individual, the Self, the bourgeois family and practically anything else that directly or directly involves the body and having one. And he babbles in this way while at the same time abrogating for himself the power to deny that biology and natural processes have anything whatever to do thereof, and this without him making recourse to scientific demonstration but solely based on his not believing it necessary, since for him science is precisely a form of “normative” discursive power we must reject.
Obscurantist Foucault. And yet, no less problematic is that while he went on and on babbling his foam about how sexual pleasure and sexuality were invented by discursive or repressive “power,” he was also availing himself of his own discursive power to prostitute and fuck little boys in cemeteries around Tunisia.
How could someone so abject make it through a Conference of American Conservatives without even a passing mention? Likeliest answer: because Senator Hawley and his conservative pals have been paying less attention to the going-ons in American society and culture than they would admit to. It just happens that Foucault’s writing is the most noxious and pervasive influence American college and high-school students have been exposed to through at least three to four decades now. Not a single one of the trends that have been dominating the thinking attitudes and the cultural and political practices of Americas and the rest of the West, at a personal and collective level, on campus and off campus, in the media and on the screen that touches on sex, sexuality, race, representation of the body, fashion, genders, transgenderism, fluid and provisional identities, religion, and prominently, on education itself—none of this can be understood or explained without direct reference to Foucault.
To offer just one example concerning the subject at hand: whereas Nietzsche posited that “Man is something that must be overcome,” Foucault taught that “men must be eliminated, literally.” Whereas for Nietzsche the overcoming of Man is metaphorical, in that it can only be achieved through Man overcoming himself as humanity, the ideal for that being the Overman (another metaphor), Foucault makes a call to feminism, homosexualism, and yes, woke “antiracism” for the elimination of white masculinity, it being in his opinion the source of colonialist and post-colonialist oppression and of “power” as Foucault conceives of it. Again, Foucault did his anti-colonialism teaching while physically colonizing the prepubescent bodies of Tunisian boys.
The Way Out of the Man-Cave
Again: where was Senator Hawley’s flock through all this?
That is rather concerning. It is rather concerning that the only side of the political establishment that at least is not totally blind and deaf to the plights of masculinity and white heterosexuality possess only botched knowledge of the society and the groups in it their ideology should reflect and naturally make to gravitate toward it. Indeed, that is more than just concerning. For, if America should ever again reacquire even a resemblance of its former greatness (even if it never was truly all that great) men will be needed who possess the intellectual lucidity and above all, the deep vision and solid intellectual and artistic culture that characterized masculinity in all ages in which nations were ever said to have been glorious. How else can one serve as guiding lights to so many men groveling in the darkness of their man-caves?
Lacking that, men will continue to sit in their quarters video-gaming, getting high and drunk and watching porn while worrying that they might be left behind by women even at this. Women are always so able to ape men when these are at their worst. If not sitting quietly in their caves, the other immediate options for men are either continuing to join cavernous Neo-Nazi men groups or online Incel groups, or to continue to engage in senseless mass shooting out of alienation and despair but also out of an excess of self-spoiled goodness that has left itself down, and has then been misunderstood by everybody else.
Yet, what personally worries me the most is that I, a non-white man, must be the one to come forward to make this diagnosis of the alienated state of Western heterosexuality and white masculinity, and to set down the philosophical grounds toward its defense. I, however, do it because all the things I know that have served me well in life that I am proud to have learned, were offered to me from the ever-rich European intellectual world I was bred and born in. I have gratitude for all that. And gratitude is the solemnest of all masculine virtues.