The danger of leaving men behind

The “campfire-burning, horn-tooting, macho revolt” by Canadian truckers has caught many of us by surprise, says Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish. When did our “gentle neighbours” to the north get so angry? This populist fury, triggered by new vaccine mandates, is really part of a much broader backlash by the “angry macho right”. The most obvious figurehead for this “testosterone tribe” is Donald Trump, who often boasts of his support from “the tough people”. Another is the unashamedly masculine podcaster Joe Rogan, whose largely male audience has strongly rallied behind him amid recent criticism over his Covid coverage. Then there’s Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor whose pushback against the idea of “toxic masculinity” strongly resonates with men across the Western world.

Progressives see all this as a “fevered backlash to white patriarchal privilege finally being dismantled”. But what’s really driving the anger is that men are being told masculinity itself should be “deconstructed” because it is “inherently oppressive”; that “the future is female”. This cultural castration is particularly painful because men really are being left behind: only 40.5% of college students are male, and about a third of American men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. This isn’t healthy. The more we bash traditional masculinity, the more likely it is that “a dumb and dangerous masculinity will fill the void instead. In fact, to a dangerous extent, it already has.”