It’s D-Day for modern masculinity The online Right could learn from Eisenhower

Weeks before the 1960 election, Mailer wrote his first political essay. Published in Esquire, his aim in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was not just to boost Kennedy as the hero Americans needed, but to attack and discredit everything the Eisenhower era represented: its deeply “square” ideas of manhood — arising from notions of duty, responsibility, self-control and an engrained respect for authority — sounded almost Victorian to Mailer’s ears. “A tasteless, sexless, odourless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles has been the result” of Ike’s leadership, he claimed. In place of the conformist “organisation man” of the Fifties, Mailer envisioned a new and vital masculine archetype for the Sixties, someone who can “touch depths in American life which were uncharted”.

Holding up JFK as the vessel, Mailer hoped that politics could be fused with the “underground river” of the American psyche — the unconscious realms of myth, art, instinct and aesthetics — and thus turned into an arena for limitless self-expression. His vision was a potent expression of the Sixties ethos, predicated as it was on the individual’s restless spirit of rebellion against the institutions.

Though that decade saw the rise of feminism, a no less important but overlooked development was the change in the dominant models of masculinity. The old masculine archetypes — the GI, the pioneer, the sheriff, the crew-cutted astronaut — represented the austere vanguard of modernity which heralded the arrival of civilisation and progress. The new male archetype birthed by the post-Boomer pop culture — the long-haired rock star, the brooding beat poet, the hippie wildman, the Third World guerilla, Mailer’s own “White Negro” — were sensuous rebels against modernity, who sought to topple the structures of civilisation in the name of a heedless and undefined freedom.

This permissive cultural emancipation of the Sixties after Kennedy was then enlarged by the neoliberal economic emancipation of the Eighties under Reagan, which entrenched the new moral status quo, or what may be called “the Boomer consensus”, based on the formula of hedonism plus markets. This dispensation was embodied in equal part by the two dominant Boomer politicians of the Nineties, the liberal Bill Clinton and the conservative Newt Gingrich, who both expanded the reach of unregulated markets, shrank the size of the state and subjected US politics to their boundless egos and libidos.

Three decades later, the results of this social revolution for each of the genders are clear enough: women have made great economic and cultural strides — a welcome development — but the opposite sex appears to have faltered. On a host of metrics, from educational achievement to economic performance and career advancement to life expectancy and cultural prestige, men are shown to be either falling behind women or underperforming relative to previous generations of men. Yet structural explanations and conventional policy prescriptions have little resonance among today’s “angry young men”. They have, instead, turned to far more radical answers.

Enter the rise of a revanchist masculine identity politics on the online Right, where “vitalist” movements call for the overthrow not just of liberalism but of the pre-modern Christian foundations of Western civilisation. Inspired by Nietzschean thought, they seek the revival of a pagan morality that glorifies primal ideals of strength, beauty and sensuality. The most prominent expositor of this view is the pseudonymous “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP), later unmasked as one Costin Alamariu. They are distinguished by their fondness for bodybuilding, eccentric natural lifestyles and garish aesthetics, conveyed through homoerotic imagery and classical art. Throw in racist and misogynist “shitposting” that playfully straddles the line between irony and sincerity, and one gets a fuller picture of their sensibility.

Among competing narratives around male decline, this has garnered the most widespread following among a certain class of ambitious, educated, intellectually inclined and highly online professional young men. Scouring the ranks of Congressional staff offices, Ivy League schools, conservative think tanks, as well as the worlds of tech and finance, may reveal sizeable cadres of “Bronze Age” followers, who will reveal themselves when they are “in front of the control panel”, as one such devotee put it to The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood — that is, when they are ready to seize power.

For all their frightening and exotic “reactionary” flairs, however, these currents are best understood as inversions of the Sixties countercultural Left, sharing its militant subversive and anti-institutional dispositions. All that’s really happened is that it has come full circle: this sensibility began on the far-Left but has now migrated to and metastasised on the far-Right. And just as the original counterculture was easily co-opted to serve neoliberalism (“woke capitalism”), so too is the online Right — with even less resistance — being made to prop up the same, with the emergence of “based capitalism”. This is shown by Alamariu’s rambling endorsement of Javier Millei and his attempt to sell an ideology of Aryanised Reaganism on steroids to impressionable followers: by dressing it up with edgy memes, he has essentially found an ingenious way to make neoliberal policy attractive to discontented youths, who would otherwise have turned away from the GOP’s free market dogmas. (He is thus revealed to be little more than a “red-pilled” Paul Ryan.) BAP and the online Right now amount to a Millennial mirror image of Mailer-ism and the Boomer counterculture. It matters less that Mailer was an idiosyncratic Marxist or that Alamariu is a would-be race warrior, for the result is the same: hedonism plus markets.

Indeed, as adjacent influencer “Zero HP Lovecraft” admitted, they aspire to “a precise mirror of the world in which we live today”, only with all the progressive slogans and aesthetics swapped for reactionary ones, but with presumably the same malfunctioning economy and decaying infrastructure left in place. Such statements reveal the inherent limitations of this movement, which deals in memetic forms of discourse that discard all programmatic content in favour of pure subjectivism and impulse: a “vibes-only politics”. Consider BAP’s fixation on looks as a political criterion; or more troublingly, his giddy glamorisation of violence; or his disdain for family life, which supposedly dilutes the male spirit (all things he happens to, in varying degrees, share with Mailer). Vapidity, nihilism, and cruelty are the whole point. And for all their apparent dislike of legacy conservatism, this is what allows these reactionaries to be repeatedly co-opted into some variant of neoliberalism.

If today’s dissatisfied young men want to achieve greatness, they can do so not by trying to rehash the failed faux-radicalism of the Boomers, Mailer and Alamariu, with its degenerate libertinism and contempt for institutions, but rather by rediscovering the non-reactionary masculine ethos of the Eisenhower era. Far from being stale or parochially conservative, the Fifties were actually a time of great institutional creativity and innovation as embodied in post-war mixed-economy industrial capitalism (the antithesis of neoliberalism); this was, after all, the decade when the mass-middle class was forged, a status and standard of living which many Millennials and Gen Zs have been denied.

This will require rejecting romanticism and personal liberation in favour of a different value set for young men, one that: abides by the logic of institutions rather than that of aggressive individualism (even as they seek to reimagine and reform their institutions); realises the need for rational, long-term plans of mass coordination as a means of steering society at the level of both state and market; and accepts reasonable limits on personal autonomy in the name of these larger national goals and imperatives. This is, in other words, the same disciplined high modern ethos that made D-Day possible — that won the Second World War and built the greatest economy in all history — after the preceding era of institutional collapse in the Thirties necessitated renewal. For this generation, masculinity was forged within and through institutions rather than against them: the family, the army, the state, the corporation, the union, etc. The very things Mailer and his like have railed against as tyrannical and effeminising were in fact the bedrocks of American strength. To restore that order and dynamism that were Eisenhower’s legacies, young men must dam the “underground river” and re-establish boundaries between the mythic-aesthetic and material-political dimensions of civilisation, lest they be constantly seduced and intoxicated by the former, as they are now, while losing sight of the latter. For the true rebirth of vitality in the West will not come from a miserable narcissistic dictatorship of bohemians, dandies and aesthetes — of the kind that Mailer and BAP would revel in — but from practical feats. The matchless heroism of D-Day, when free men fought and triumphed against barbarism, stands as just such an example: one more encapsulation of what is missing in contemporary masculinity, and of what may yet be regained.

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Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.

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