For Schlesinger, who would go on to work as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, the answer was not to reassert some John Wayne macho attitude to counter growing female empowerment but to rebuild a sense of individual identity to fight back against the stifling bureaucracy and economic centralization of postwar America. In other words, lose the gray flannel suit and “organization man” ethos and instead develop a sense of the irreverent, of the artistic, of the moral, of the political — this was the way, according to Schlesinger, for men, for people, to resist uniformity. In Bly’s view, part of the answer was to recreate ancient rites of male initiation and restore mentoring between young men and their elders, a relationship that instructs boys to channel, but not suppress, their instincts.
It is easy to raise an eyebrow at Hawley’s book — a lengthy lecture on masculinity feels a bit like overcompensation when it comes from the guy whose raised-fist salute to pro-Trump protesters on Jan. 6 was followed by a senatorial sprint through the Capitol hallways to avoid the rioters — but there is much to take seriously in its pages. He calls for the subordination of the self to the needs of those whom we love. He argues for the dignity of all work, no matter whether it is denigrated as a “dead end” job. He recognizes fatherhood as a daily reminder of the ways we are flawed. And he urges young men to assume greater responsibility for their own lives (“Ditching porn is a good place to start,” Hawley writes) as a step toward glimpsing that missing vision of manhood. To dismiss or mock such views merely because they come from Josh Hawley is to let partisan commitments overwhelm intellectual ones.
Now, if Hawley had simply written a book about the very real struggles facing young men in America, appending his preferred recommendations for how to live a more fulfilling life, “Manhood” could have been a worthwhile effort. Even more so had Hawley further explained why “no menace to this nation is greater than the collapse of American manhood” and how, absent the restoration of masculinity, “we will be no longer a self-governing nation because we will not have the character for it.” For these warnings to be more than rhetorical flourishes, they deserve greater exploration.
But Hawley does neither of those things. Instead, he turns “Manhood” into a familiar assault on a godless, judgmental, pleasure-seeking left, which, he contends, is attempting to subdue men and transform them into complacent, androgynous, dependent consumers. “Much of today’s left seems to welcome men who are passive and tame, who will do as they are told and sit in their cubicles, eyes affixed to their screens,” Hawley writes. The left’s “woke religion” purports to supplant the God of the Bible, and demands that we “renounce manhood, womanhood, Christianity, and other supposed markers of ‘social power’ and submit to the corrective tutelage of the liberal elite.”
In Hawley’s telling, the left regards men as the source of their own problems. “In the power centers they control, places like the press, the academy and politics, they blame masculinity for America’s woes,” the senator writes. Hawley is not necessarily wrong when he complains about the mixed messages aimed at young men today — Your identity is yours to shape and claim, but why are you so toxic and oppressive? — but he seems not to notice the contradiction at the heart of his book: Hawley spends chapter upon chapter telling young men to stop blaming others for their troubles, urging them to take personal responsibility for their lives and failings … and then he proceeds to give those same young men someone to blame for their fate.