Series: “Manhood”
Title: “The Plight of Man”
In this episode, Dan continues to examine what, precisely, Josh Hawley, thinks the problems are that confront American men. Hawley consistently ignores history and the actual complexity of American society to make his points. But why does he do this? Why is he so concerned with “manhood” at all? And how does this supposed concern express a deeper Christian nationalist agenda? Listen to this week’s episode to find out!
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Axis Mundi Sous-titrage ST'501 Hello and welcome to It's in the Code.
The series is part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Lammar College.
Pleased as always to be with you.
And as always, I want to say thank you to those of you who listen and support us in so many ways.
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Would love to hear from you.
Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller, SWAJ at gmail.com.
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And want to shout out to the colleague who suggested the topic that is is currently occupying us today and for the next however many episodes as we look at Senator Josh Holly's instruction book on what manhood is and how it will save America, his book entitled Manhood.
And in the last episode, we introduced our friend Josh.
And I offered some general reflections about what perspective he's putting forward, who he is as a person, how he came to sort of write this and sort of oriented the book generally.
In this episode, I want to spend some time decoding what he has to say about what I'm calling the plight of man.
That is, what is the trouble confronting men and why does he present it the way that he does?
As always, of course, my interest is not so much just with the what, the you know, what does he say, but why does he say it?
What is the significance of what he says?
Not just what is he discussing, but how and and where does it take us and so forth.
And as I noted in the previous episode, Holly writes, and this is a quote: no menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood, the collapse of muscular strength.
And he goes on and says that what most centrally threatens the American Republic is the crumbling of male virtue.
And we're gonna we're gonna unfold male virtue throughout the rest of this book.
But that's his statement.
And so men, quite simply, for him, are not embodying the virtues necessary to preserve America and the American way of life.
So in his first chapter, what he does is he lays out what he sees as the evidence of this collapse of male virtue and some of its causes.
The rest of the book is going to focus on spelling out the solution to this crisis in greater detail, which sort of outlines that in this chapter as well.
And I think it's important and fair to note that lots of commentators from different backgrounds and from all over the social and political spectrum have noted a what we might call it a crisis among American men.
Whether that's disillusionment among young men, which is part of what leads their radicalization, whether it is the epidemic of male loneliness, whether it's employment issues and so forth.
So Holly highlights some of these things, and again, in terms of some of the facts, they're they're probably fine.
I have maybe some issues with the sources he goes to find those, but the the facts as they stand, yeah, those those those those I'm willing to grant him.
I'm willing to grant him the facts because we're going to see about this.
It's not about the facts.
That's what I mean when I say it's not about the what.
It's about the how and the why and why does it matter and so forth.
Okay.
So there are points where he identifies real problems that stand in need of solutions, but we know that the very best lies or the best acts of misinformation are those that are wrapped up in facts and truth.
So Holly picks up on some real issues.
That's true enough, but there are multiple places where he misrepresents those issues, and his solutions are no solutions at all.
Okay.
So let's start looking at the crisis as he understands it.
And as we do, we'll see this interweaving of information and misinformation, which together create the image Of America and American men that he wants to show us, and we're going to see how that relates to his interest as a Christian nationalist.
Okay.
So after he finishes telling us about the scores of men bearing their hearts to him as their law professor, yes, it's a snarky remark.
If it doesn't make sense to you, go back, listen to last week's episode.
Okay.
He highlights then the can the issues confronting men.
Okay.
And he starts by identifying three measures of what he calls male Malays.
The first is what he calls living habits.
And he notes that over half of 20 something lower skilled men live with their parents.
And he notes that among those who are not employed, the numbers closer to 70%.
The second sign of male Malays is work.
And he cites a study that says in 2015, a quarter of men ages 21 to 30 had no work to speak of.
And this is a problem for him because as he says, this is quote, historically a cohort strongly attached to work and the labor force.
And he also points out that those who are working are earning comparably less than their fathers did at the same age.
And the third measure of male Malays that he identifies is actor academic underperformance by men and boys.
And specifically, he highlights poor performance in school, low reading proficiency, college dropout rates, and so forth.
Okay.
These are real problems.
There is very little about which I'm likely to agree with Josh Hawley.
But I do agree that all of these are serious issues and signs that they're real problems in America.
I do.
I buy that.
But as soon as Hawley moves from description to analysis, the wheels come off.
And if we take a few moments to decode the analysis he offers, we're going to see this.
So let's start with those label labor statistics he offers.
Okay.
Assuming that Hawley's numbers stand up, he he goes beyond facts and veers into the territory of dogmatism and misinformation through what he doesn't say.
Okay.
So there has been a lot written about the labor challenges confronting young men.
A lot.
But what he fails to acknowledge here is that this is due to a tremendous degree to his own political party.
The GOP has long been the party of neoliberal economics or trickle-down economics or reagonomics, take your pick on the names.
And one of the most well-known knock-on effects of neoliberalism has been precisely the fact that real wages have decreased over the past several decades.
You take that and you lump on the fact that lots of people in the GOP don't really want to do anything about curbing EI and so forth.
What do you have?
You have a job market of their own creating.
The bookjacket extols Hawley as quote, defending the unsung heroes in America who go to work, raise a family, and deserve a fair chance to get ahead.
But the GOP has been the party for almost half a century that has actively adopted an economic orthodoxy, ensuring that most Americans cannot get ahead.
And there's there's no mention of any of this for Hawley.
And on and on this point, there's just no issue related to a lack of virtue.
Okay.
It's just the culmination of a half half a century of GOP policies that consistently privilege the wealthy.
That's that's what we're seeing.
And you yes, you add some contingent things on, like you know, the post-COVID economy and so forth.
But it it's it all maps onto a long-term trajectory that the GOP is overseen.
I think his summary of the significance of declining education standards is also telling, right?
Because he he gives that data and then he says, you know, just trotting out a standard GOP party party line that this tendency is tendency is evidence of men not trying.
Men are just not trying hard enough.
This is just basic GOP dogmatism at this point.
If you're not getting ahead in America, it's because you're not trying hard enough.
Can never be because of systemic things, it can never be because of historical things.
No, you're just not trying hard enough.
Okay.
And then we also get to places where he he says things that could sound significant, but I think just aren't.
So he goes on to drop this pearl of wisdom for us.
Okay.
He tells us that it turns out, you ready for this, folks?
It turns out that men who are employed tend to have different daily schedules from men who are not employed.
Hmm.
He cites research showing that unemployed men spend more time in quote, socializing, relaxing, and leisure, End quote than men with jobs.
Now, we could judge that any way we want.
We could, you know, talk about how they should be spending their time or what is leisure and so forth.
Okay.
But here's my point.
It seems pretty obvious that people without jobs have more time on their hands than people working full time.
Okay.
And it turns out he says that unemployed men spend almost twice as much time at leisure activities than men who work full time.
Well, thanks, Josh.
So he's painting this image of laziness when I just don't think it's really there.
I'm like, of course, you'd spend less time working, doing non-work activities if you don't have a job.
Okay.
But that brings us to the real reason he highlights.
Okay.
The real reason that he highlights why this significance, this different use of time is significant.
It's the real reason he gives us.
What is it?
What are these men doing with that time?
Here's what he says.
Screens, leisure, and porn.
There it is.
There what is, Dan?
Porn.
It can only be a matter of time before someone on the right manages to make everything confronting men about porn.
Like you cannot have a discourse about masculinity on the right without porn coming in at some point.
And I've talked in other episodes about the porn fetish among cultural and conservative Christians in America.
And I'm not going to rehash all of that.
I'm just going to say here Hawley just takes up the right, the typical right wing line that one of the destroyers of America is porn use.
And so just to reiterate the point that the porn is like a bogeyman that appears in virtually any right-wing discussion about gender and masculinity.
And that focus, in my view, on the right, is far out of balance with reality.
But what we see here is Josh Hawley veering from the statement of fact to this notion that what is missing is male virtue.
And he's just not really doing any work to get there.
He's just making these leaps that don't make any sense.
And this is typical of the discourse of the right.
So to reiterate for Hawley, then, all of this is evidence that male virtue has collapsed.
And to make this point, he just makes the classic move of imputing causation where we just don't think it's there.
This is what he says.
Page seven.
And I'm I'm going to quote him on page seven.
I'm going to give you the page number because I'm going to make a lot out of this quote.
Okay.
He says, much has been said in recent years of the divisions in American society, the dangers to our democracy, and our growing polarization.
Surely it is no coincidence that these ills have proliferated while American men have struggled.
It can't be a coincidence.
The struggle of American men, the collapse of male virtue, all that laziness and porn, that that's got to be what's causing this.
After all, he has said that the collapse of muscular masculinity is the biggest threat facing the Republic.
Now, it would probably be possible to put together an entire other series just digging into this piece of logic that he puts forward.
I'm not going to do that, I promise.
Okay.
And we could come at it from a lot of different directions.
But here, I want to highlight one more dimension of right-wing thought that's coming out here.
And this is really central, I think, in to this chapter.
It's central, it's going to be central to everything that Josh Hawley has to say.
So what is this dimension of right-wing thought?
It is the imputation of America's past as some sort of golden age.
It's typical of conservatism generally and right-wing populism and nationalism more specifically to present the past as a kind of utopian age from which the present is a departure.
And that's what Hawley is doing here.
Men now are facing these troubles.
Once upon a time, we didn't have this loss of male virtue and society was better.
This is why the right always looks to the past for answers.
All we have to think about is like make America great what, Donald Trump.
Again, they always want to roll back the proverbial clock.
Of course, if you're in the U.S. context, it's rolling it back to before the 60s and civil rights movements and so forth.
Okay.
But here's the point.
This backward looking move looking at a past utopian golden age, it is always a mythical construction that ignores real historical complexity.
Any serious examination of American history reveals immediately that, quote, division in American society has always been present.
There has never been a time when American society wasn't riven by divisions of one sort or another.
Democracy in America has always been, quote unquote, threatened, not least by the American framers who are hardly full-throated endorsers of democracy.
People in America have always been fighting to make America into a democracy.
Of course, democracy has always been threatened.
And yes, polarization is very pronounced in American society at present, but this is not the first time this has happened.
It's not something new.
It has ebbed and flowed throughout U.S. history.
What's my point?
My point is that this has not something that has arisen, quote unquote, in recent years, as he says.
Now, Hawley sounds like he's making the mistake a lot of people do when they assume that because something is new to them, it's new full stop.
I don't know if Hawley knows his history.
I don't know if he recognized what American society has been like.
I know he's a part of a political party that works to make sure that we can't teach those things and inform people about what society used to be like.
I know that that's his vision of society.
So let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he just didn't know this.
He's like the person says, Well, you know, a lot of people don't know, and they say something that they didn't know that maybe a lot of people did know.
That's what Hawley's doing here.
But here's the significance.
Because it isn't new, because he's a big ongoing issues in American society for as long as there has been, quote unquote, American society, it is completely implausible to blame it on the lack of male virtue.
Unless male virtue has never been in place.
And of course, that goes against everything Hawley is arguing.
He's looking to a past in which male virtue was present and kind of reigned supreme.
So we could argue that this notion of male virtue is itself a myth.
Wink wink.
That's what I think.
I think it's its own myth.
We've got mythology happening here in real time.
So that's what Hawley says.
He he overlooks history and complexity as the right often does.
That's what he he needs to do to make this an issue so that you know it can be about male virtue.
But this is what brings us to perhaps the real point of this chapter.
Okay.
The real point of his analysis and completely predictable.
So for him, the collapse of male virtue, which has brought the collapse of America upon us.
It has been caused by the left.
The left, in quotes, the left.
Raise your hand.
You don't have to raise your hand if you're driving or something.
Please don't raise your hand.
But metaphorically, raise your hand if you're remotely surprised to learn that the collapse of male virtue and the American Republic is because of evil leftists.
Anyone surprised to hear something like Josh Hawley say this?
Of course not.
Everything that's wrong with America is the outcome of the conspiratorial acts of an American left that controls all the mechanisms of power in the country.
He says that those on the left, quote, welcome the collapse of masculine strength.
He says they have helped drive it.
He writes, quote, in the power centers they control.
What are the power centers that the left controls?
The press, the academy, and politics.
They blame masculinity for America's woes.
And then he goes on to offer the usual litany of culture culture war issues, demonizing the left.
He takes all the enemies of the current GOP and like lists them and sort of says, these are the reasons why male virtue is collapsed.
They're the ones destroying America and so forth.
Okay.
Let me tie these pieces together because it is important to decode what is going on here, because it's absolutely central, not only to Hawley's project, but the entire project of the right.
As I've said many times, I'm reading these books, not just so that you don't have to, but because they are typical of broader discourses on the right.
And this is the same with Hawley here.
Hawley needs the social problems he identifies to be recent problems.
He needs them to be recent.
He needs them to be something that's arisen, quote unquote, in recent years.
He and the right have a strong vested interest in this in presenting these as new problems.
Why?
They can't admit that America has never been monolithic or unified as they present it.
They can't acknowledge that the economic policies championed by their political party for decades has brought about much of the economic malaise Holly identifies.
They can't acknowledge that partisanship waxes and wanes in America or acknowledge the explicit intention of Trump and the Christian nationalists to feed partisanship for the last decade.
Why can't they acknowledge that?
Because then they couldn't blame the left.
The left is the bogeyman at play right now.
And here's the question.
Who or what is the left?
It's just like when they talk about cultural Marxists or something.
Like, well, what is that exactly?
Like who is that?
Or they say that somebody is quote unquote woke.
You're like, okay, like so cool, I guess, but like, what is that?
If you ask them to define it, you know, who or what is the left?
We know the answer to this.
The left is anyone who doesn't follow the MAGA Christian nationalist line.
Anybody who is not a Christian nationalist and a member of MAGA, they are the left.
And this is important because this book is only nominally about manhood or masculinity.
What it's really about, the purpose of it, what it really drives is promoting a Christian nationalist vision of America.
All of Josh Hawley's discussion of manly virtue or masculine strength, it's going to be in the service of that project.
That's what this book is about.
And to advance that project, to make it seem reasonable, to present it as an alternative to something radical and dangerous.
Christian nationalists need to cast everyone who challenges them as a political enemy and a threat to America.
They are part of the amorphous left.
So we can't be misled when Hawley tells us that masculine virtue is what will save America.
What will save America for him is the imposition of Christian nationalism.
And that's what we're going to see as we go along.
That is the vision of the Bible and Christianities he is going to have is men as the agents of Christian nationalism.
That's going to be his model.
So to be sure, Hawley does advance a particular vision of masculinity and masculine virtue.
But the reason he advances that, it is in the service of restoring a support, a supposed golden age of America.
And how do we restore that?
By making America into the Christian nation that Christian nationalists envision.
So the attack on the left, they show me that this isn't a vision of masculinity that's really about helping men.
That's not Hawley's real concern.
It's a vision that is about punishing and demonizing anyone viewed as an obstacle to the Christian nationalist agenda, whether they be a man or otherwise.
That's what's really going on here.
So why does Josh Hawley talk about manhood?
It's not just a concern for men.
It's not just to, I don't know, help men be able to get jobs or stay in school or get a better education.
Those would be laudable goals.
It's not really that.
It's to make sure that America stays the Christian nation that he imagines it to be, that it can return to the Christian nation that he imagines in the past.
That's why he's discussing male virtue.
That is why he's discussing manhood.
The plight of man for Josh Hawley has to be resolved if we are to successfully convert America into the Christian nation that he and everybody else on the right envisions it to be.
Again, thank you for listening.
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Please reach out.
Let me know if you have thoughts on the episodes that we've been doing, the topics we've been doing.
If you have ideas for upcoming episodes, upcoming topics, the new sources I should be looking at.
I've looked at Ali Beth Stuckey's book, looking at Josh Holly's book now, open to new ideas in that vein as well.
Please pass those along.
Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller, S W A J at Gmail.com.
