It would be easy enough to retort that Marx is hardly the first great thinker to have feet of clay. But in truth, his repudiation of paternal obligation wasn’t much of a departure from the utopian political vision he and Engels outlined. For since The Communist Manifesto was published, three years before the birth of Freddy DeMuth, perhaps its most controversial doctrine has been family abolition. In proposing this, the architects of socialism unleashed a vision that has since inspired many feminists and utopians — but that fails even more completely as a delivery-mechanism for heaven on earth than the flawed and fractious families we have.

The architects of communism took aim particularly at the bourgeois family. In Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels argued that the bourgeois family was a recent invention, rationalised as eternal, that served as a means of perpetuating inequality. The Communist Manifesto denounced this con-trick as a fake universal that, for the proletariat, didn’t even deliver joy or intimacy. Instead, it served as a machine for manufacturing new factory operatives: a cynical enterprise in which proletarian children were “transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour”.

More recent critics of the family take this even further. It’s not just the bourgeois family that has to go. It’s every family — even those of the poor, vulnerable, oppressed and helpless, for whom the alternative to relying on blood kin is destitution. This is the argument made by anti-family theorist Sophie Lewis in Abolish the Family: that the revolution must come for everyone. The family, she says, “is to be abolished even when it is aspired to, mythologised, valued, and embodied by people who are neither white nor heterosexual, neither bourgeois nor colonisers”. For it’s only in “collectively letting go of this technology of privatisation, the family, that our species will truly prosper”.

She echoes Marx and Engels in viewing such affective bonds not as a space of respite from the market, but as inextricable from it and a crucial site of its reproduction. For Lewis, though, the harm done by particularistic love within families goes further than perpetuating economic injustice. Families are not just delivery-mechanisms for violence and cruelty. They are sexism, racism, chauvinism writ small: “a microcosm of the nation-state”. As such, they are a tool of white cis-heteronormative oppression, employed to entrench wickedness of every kind.

This draws on a long tradition of Marxist feminism, for which family isn’t just a vehicle for reproducing capitalism but also a key means of oppressing women. Alexandra Kollontai, the earliest and most influential Marxist feminist, decried the particularistic affection granted to family members as “property love”. In Kollontai’s view, this love imposed profound negative consequences on women: the inconvenient calls such love of dependents can make on our time and resources is an impediment to women’s equal participation in public life. To solve this, she suggested, under communism children would be cared for by “society” in general, while “material and moral support” would be forthcoming for mothers.

For Kollontai, this could be attained by expanding the affective stinginess of “property love”. This “narrow and exclusive affection” should bathe not just our particular children but “all the children of the great, proletarian family”, a proposal Lewis views as “magnificent”. Subsequent feminists in the same tradition, such as the radical Shulamith Firestone, envisioned modern technologies helping to bring this about, resulting in “the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women”.

In reviving these arguments, Lewis cements her position as perhaps the most eloquent contemporary exponent of a doctrine that views itself as socialist, but is more accurately understood as the utopian face of neoliberalism: one that sets itself against every given, arbitrary, particularistic and so-called “natural” feature of individual and social human life, in the name of radical liberation.

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This includes attachment bonds, especially those between a mother and baby, where these are an obstacle to self-actualisation. And, in Abolish the Family, this includes all special social or political value accorded to family life. This revolutionary war on relationships must proceed even if, as Lewis accepts, it’s resisted by those for whom there is no protection from the world’s cruelty save the bonds of family. And it can, and should, come at the cost of our selfhood itself: “If the world is to be remade utterly, then a person must be willing to be remade also.”

I’ve written plenty about the transformative nature of motherhood, the value of interdependence and care, and the political importance of grounding what we do in the truths of our bodies and human nature. Lewis, meanwhile, has previously argued that feminism requires us to de-nature motherhood, to view all human reproduction as a kind of surrogacy, and abolish oppressive constructs of “nature” and love. Everything I’ve already said about those arguments also applies to their extension in Abolish The Family.

The title, though, merits comment. It’s subtitled A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. But the reality is that wanting both care and liberation is a bit like wanting somewhere to be both a nature reserve and a golf course. It’s no coincidence that the modern world sincerely believes we can have both; we can, somehow, have all the good things at once, with no contradictions. For “care” has two common meanings: an emotional one, in which we care about someone and a practical one in which we may need to care for them. This is the practical, often intimate, and sometimes gross work of nurturing, nursing and healing — work that usually falls to mothers where babies are concerned, and in general has historically been more the domain of women than men.

A central pillar of much feminist critique is the extent to which this ancient pattern is exploited today by a rapacious market society that takes the socially essential work of carers for granted even as it treats them as second-class. From Kollontai through Firestone to Lewis, the dream is of a world in which this aspect of “care” — the drudgery — is taken over by machines, or perhaps something abstract called “society”. This, the hope is, would free the emotional aspect of “care” to float free instead of being shackled to dull duty.

Firestone dreamed of a “home” where “all relationships would be based on love alone”. Lewis takes this further: instead of the arbitrary, unjust, asymmetrical distribution of love-resources (and also the material kind) within families, she suggests, we should devise “consensus-based modes of transgenerational cohabitation”.

This does, I suppose, sound utopian. But the flip side of socialising the work of care, so that the emotional one may be liberated, is that opt-in affection is also opt-out affection. What does “consensus-based” even mean where the care of a baby is concerned? It’s not “consensus” that gets a breastfeeding mother out of bed to her crying child at 3am after a few hours’ broken sleep. It’s an animal compulsion to care for our particular baby, which has a biological component and which we share with many other species.

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Good thing, too. Humans are imperfect and often unreliable. The pre-rational devotion that underwrites practical care of a baby is sometimes all that stands between a normally loving mother and the dark thoughts that can bubble up when we’re woken from deep sleep, by a screaming baby, for the twentieth time in a single night. Yes, it’s true: families can be a bit shit. But if we truly treated the care of babies as amenable to “liberation” (which is also to say, voluntaristic), a great many more infants would die.

Why even try? One of my rules of thumb for understanding both family politics, and the large-scale sort, is that what people say motivates them may be sincere, while also not being the whole picture. Utopians are, well, utopian — and often not wholly conscious of their own blind spots, to say nothing of the lurking goblins of self-interest. I have no doubt that many of those who have historically argued for family abolition, in the name of the greater human good, were sincere in their aspirations. When you map that onto how those individuals behaved, though, a more nuanced picture comes into view.

Alexandra Kollontai, for example, clearly had little appetite for dull domesticity: she left her first husband and abandoned their son to pursue public life as a socialist campaigner. And Marx certainly walked the walk on family abolition when it came to leaving the care of Freddy DeMuth to “society” — for all that this decision hardly looks like something anyone would wish to aspire to. Some might retort that Freddy was the fortunate one to have his family thus “abolished”; neither of Marx’s acknowledged daughters grew up to be happy adults, and both committed suicide.

Perhaps all we may learn from this is that (as the philosopher R.H. Tawney put it) freedom for the pike is death for the minnow. That is, not everyone is equally well-equipped to make the most of liberation. And freeing care from care doesn’t just liberate the overburdened. As the story of Freddy DeMuth illustrates, it also frees the irresponsible, the lascivious, the selfish or the morally cowardly from their obligations to even radically dependent others.

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Worse still, it “frees” those who need care from any hope that social pressure will be brought to bear on those who might otherwise be under pressure to provide it. All that’s left in the gap is what Firestone dreamed of: relationships “based on love alone”. But love in the absence of duty, social pressure, or raw animal attachment is a weak foundation — especially in those situations where providing care is a gruelling long-term slog. Firestone herself battled schizophrenia for decades as she aged, during which period her “sisterhood” fell away one by one, leaving her to die alone and impoverished. Her body wasn’t found for several days.

It is, of course, demonstrably true that the existence of families is no sure-fire guarantee that this will never happen. No one should ever rejoice in such suffering and alienation or suggest that Firestone in any way “deserved” it. But it’s far from clear that decoupling care from care does anything to make it less likely; quite the opposite, in fact. For the truth is that “care” in the practical sense will always be at odds with “liberation”. And as long as you pretend otherwise, and insist that it must coexist with absolute freedom, you’ll be cheerleading for a world where “caring for” someone needn’t involve ever having to care for them.

The suicide note left by Laura Marx, Karl’s second daughter, in 1911 is a chilling foretaste of what the prospects are, in a world where care is uncoupled from care, for those who find themselves to be a “burden”. She writes:

“Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others.”

Today, the practical effect of such liberation can be seen in the growing push for legal euthanasia, as a final remedy for anyone who perceives their position as Laura Marx did. In Canada, site of the world’s most permissive euthanasia regime, a growing body of evidence suggests that medically-assisted voluntary self-deletion is increasingly the option of choice for those so poor, friendless or defeated by obdurate bureaucracies of state “care” that continuing with their atomised (sorry, liberated) life no longer feels tenable.

To escape this trap, we need to think of relationships in terms of both obligation and love, rather than treating the two as mutually exclusive. Lewis’s inability (or refusal) to do this is clear in her reference to families as a place where “care is privatised”: a casual conflation of how families function with how businesses do, as though there’s no meaningful distinction between the permanent, unconditional relatedness of kinship and the transactional, deal-based kind that characterises the business world. In the book, she denounces Emily Oster’s explicit call to treat family life as a business, but seems herself unable to imagine anyone ever seeing it otherwise.

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Those self-styled “radicals” who seek to liberate love from obligation should not delude themselves that what they proposed is in any way meaningfully distinct from what the cold logic of the market already offers. The only difference is the insistence that if we wish hard enough, if only we can abolish human frailty, we might yet devise a system in which freedom for the strong will never result in the weak falling through the cracks. That the loneliness, selfishness, abandonment and cruelty which inevitably accompanies freedom for the pike could be transformed into cuddly abundance for all, including the most helpless or difficult-to-care-for minnow.

But this insistence is just that: a pipe dream that serves to advance the selfish interests of the market. For no other order is as perfectly designed to prioritising individual desires, or as averse to imposing coercive moral frameworks, as the heartless, lonely, atomised world of technocapital we already have. Liberating care from care delivers utopia only in theory. In practice, it’s mostly freedom for the biggest fish with the sharpest teeth. And at the end of life, as at the start, we’re all minnows.

Contemporary conservatives are especially inclined to embrace this image of the family, although it is not entirely clear why. The “nuclear family” is not the same as the traditional Christian or Jewish family that existed before the two World Wars. On the contrary, the nuclear family is closer to being an invention of industrialisation and the 20th century.

And there are good reasons to think that this form of family is, in fact, a failed experiment, one that has done immeasurable harm to almost everyone: to women and men, children and grandparents. The time has come for us to consider retiring the ideal of the nuclear family, and replacing it with something that looks more like the family of Christian and Jewish tradition.

What is the traditional family? I’d like to propose five principles by which the traditions descended from the Bible channelled the natural tendencies of men and women to establish what I’m calling the traditional family:

1. The lifelong bond of a man and a woman.

The traditional family is built upon the lifelong bond of a man and a woman. Contrary to what is often said, such a bond is not the dictate of untamed nature. Indeed, there is nothing that is more contrary to human nature, and in particular to male nature, than a man marrying a woman with the intention of foregoing all other sexual interests for the rest of his life. But by this artifice, biblical religion summons up the forces of loyalty, honour, and the urge toward purity and holiness, turning these against the urge to seek sexual gratification outside of marriage; and harnessing them to the project of establishing a strong household and giving it permanence and life. In this way, marriage brings peace to the broader society, which no longer tolerates barbaric scenes of men shedding blood over women, and of loose children who know nothing of their father. Instead, these competitive energies are turned to the building up of the household and all its members. This institution of lifelong marriage is indeed the first pillar of what we consider a civilised life.

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2. The lifelong bond between a father and mother and their children.

Similarly, the traditional family is built upon the lifelong bond between a father and mother and their children. Many suppose that this bond is natural as well, but this is not the case either. Children are by nature in awe of their parents in early childhood, but as their body and spirit grow to adult proportions, they are often filled with self-regard and treat their parents with defiance and contempt. In this way, nature prepares children to leave their parents and lead an independent life. Yet in the traditional family, the principle of honouring one’s father and mother establishes a lifelong relationship between parents and children that is much like marriage. By this artifice, the forces of honour and loyalty are turned against the natural tendency of adolescents to grow contemptuous and abandon their parents. This permits children to continue learning from their parents throughout life, forming a permanent community of interlocking generations; and barbaric scenes of the elderly cast aside with none to care for them, and of children preying on their parents to advance themselves, are banished.

3. The traditional family is a business enterprise.

Because liberal society considers one’s “career” to be the defining characteristic of the individual, we have largely forgotten that the traditional family was usually a business enterprise. The average family was engaged in farming, commerce, light manufacture, or a profession; and the family business was usually conducted close to the home, if not within the home itself. Often both parents were deeply involved with the family business, a custom that is vividly described in the Bible. Parents taught their children their business, and children gained self-esteem as well as practical skills by contributing actively to the family livelihood. Where children went to school, this was balanced against responsibilities to the family business. And the family itself was often extended by the informal adoption of unmarried relations, or of young men and women who were hired to help with the business and had no other home.

4. The traditional family consists of multiple generations in daily contact.

The traditional family often consisted of three generations (or even four) in daily contact with one another. The bond between parents and children was not yet imagined as something that undergoes a rupture when a child turns 18 or 21, and so the relationship of parents to children continued throughout life. And where there is no rupture between adult children and their parents, grandchildren grow up with grandparents and perhaps great-grandparents. Thus young children were able to learn the skill of honouring their father and mother by watching their parents do it. It also meant that in raising children, grandparents were often a crucial presence, providing stores of wisdom and attention to children who learned to honour earlier generations as an integral part of growing up.

5. The traditional family is part of a broader congregation.

The traditional family was part of a broader loyalty group — the clan, which in later versions became the community or congregation — with which it was concerned on a daily basis. Such communities or congregations often included adult siblings and cousins who had chosen to live in proximity to one another, assisting one another. But many members of the clan, community, or congregation were not kin relations in this sense. Rather, they were members of an alliance of families, who together formed a kind of adopted and extended family, which came together to celebrate sabbaths and festivals, to teach and train the community’s children, to provide relief to those in distress, to improve their communal economic assets, and, where needed, to establish security and justice as well.

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Of course, not every family was successful along all five of these dimensions. Nevertheless, once these principles are examined together, it becomes clear that the traditional Jewish or Christian family was a far more active, extensive, and powerful organisation than the family as it exists today.

As anyone who has lived among such families can immediately see, the nuclear family is a weakened and much diminished version of the traditional family, one that is lacking most of the resources needed effectively to pursue the purposes of the traditional family. When this conception of the family became normative in America and elsewhere after the Second World War, it gave birth to a world of detached suburban homes connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains, automobiles, and buses. In other words, the physical design of large portions of the country reflected a newly rationalised conception of what a family is.

In this new reality, there were no longer any business enterprises in the home for the family to pursue together. Instead, fathers would “go to work”, seceding from their families during their productive hours each day. Children were required to “go to school”, seceding from the family during their own productive hours. Young adults would then “go away to college”, cutting themselves off from family influence during the critical years in which they were supposed to reach maturity. Similarly, grandparents were excised from this vision of the home, being “retired” to “retirement communities” or “nursing homes”.

Under this new division of labour, mothers were assigned the task of remaining by themselves in the house each day, attempting to “make a home” using the minimalist ingredients that the structure of the nuclear family had left them. Much of this involved increasingly desperate efforts to keep adolescents somehow attached to the family — even though they now shared virtually no productive purposes with their parents, grandparents, and broader community or congregation; and instead spent their days seeking honour among other adolescents. The resulting rupture between parents and their children was poignantly described in numerous books and films beginning in the Fifties. But these works rarely touched upon the reconstruction of the family, which had done so much to inflame the natural tendency of adolescents toward agonised rebellion, while depriving parents of the tools necessary to emerge from these years with the family hierarchy strengthened.

But mothers had the worst of this new family life. Some did succeed in maintaining the cohesion of their families in a world in which grandparents and other family relations had grown impossibly distant, the family business had disappeared from the home, and the congregation or community with its sabbaths and festivals had likewise been reduced to something accessed by automobile once each week, like a drive-in movie. However, many other “housewives” despaired and turned to the feminist movement, which, not without reason, declared the nuclear family to be a tomb for women.

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Feminist writers were mistaken in supposing that the reconstructed household of the post-War era was itself the traditional family. But they were right that the life of a woman spending most of her productive hours in an empty house, which had been stripped of most of the human relationships, activities, and purposes that had filled the life of the traditional family, was one that many women found too painful and difficult to bear. Many of these mothers quickly joined their husbands and children in leaving the home during the day — thus completing the final transformation of the post-traditional “nuclear family” into a hollowed out shell, a failed imitation of the traditional institution of the family.

Much has been said about the dissolution of the family in liberal societies. Both scholarship and polemical treatments tend to focus on a number of important symptoms of this dissolution: marriage now happens later in life or not at all; the birth rate has declined; divorce, childbirth outside marriage and fatherless households are now all common.

These and many other indicators reflect a widespread failure to hand down the traditional institution of the family to future generations. But very little is said about the disease itself, which is the removal from the physical household of much of what the family was a little more than a century ago. Now that the household is no longer the location of a common business enterprise, of devotion to God and the study of Scripture, of a direct responsibility for the education of the young, of a direct responsibility for honouring and caring for the old, and of significant responsibilities for the establishment and growth of the community and congregation, why should anyone be surprised that what remains is neither terribly sturdy nor especially attractive to the young?

If I had been writing this a few years ago, I would have assumed that most of my readers would have had few experiences that confirm my argument. But the Covid-19 pandemic has changed this. The extended closings of businesses and schools, churches and synagogues, have offered many people some insight into the potential power of the traditional family. Suddenly, they have found themselves conducting their business at home, their schooling at home, and their religious life at home. Suddenly, many young adults have found themselves returning, over great distances, to live with older and younger family members or to be in close proximity to them. Suddenly, many families have discovered the healing joys of preparing and eating meals together according to a regular routine, and the unparalleled riches that conversations in such contexts can bring into our lives.

I know that in many cases, these experiences were not always pleasant. Not everyone lives in a physical home that was built for such an experiment, and having to make a living and educate one’s children under such conditions has often been a genuine hardship. Yet in spite of these challenges, or rather, because of them, many have had their first glimpse of what a family, thrown together and having to rely on its own resources, is capable of achieving when it takes on a more extensive array of common purposes. In particular, many have experienced the kind of heightened cohesion that can come of it. In other words, many have had their first glimpse of what the family was like when it was a strong political institution, in which generations worked together to create a permanent community, very much resembling a little tribe or nation.

Perhaps this difficult event has paved the way for us to think more carefully about what has been lost — and about what each of us can do to make restoration a reality.

***

This essay is adapted from Yoram Hazony’s new book Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery).

Men are slipping, by just about every marker of measurement. Deaths of despair are on the rise, suicide and homicide rates are up, and more men are delaying marriage and the establishment of a family. Twice as many men have addiction disorders as women. As Missouri Senator Josh Hawley declared at the National Conservatism Conference last month: “American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers; they’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse.”

According to Hawley, bad things are happening to men because bad things have happened to masculinity. “Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games?” In his mind, it is not stagnant wages that cause men to feel demotivated at work. It’s not crippling student debt that convinces young men to drop out of university. It’s not the legacy of Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin fuelling their addictions. Taking his lead, perhaps, from popular masculinity influencers like Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, Hawley blames men’s problems on the fact that nobody respects manliness anymore. It’s the feminism, stupid.

Josh Hawley’s constituents in Missouri are among those hardest hit by these issues. The state has, for example, a raging meth problem that’s largely overlooked by the mainstream media. Hawley is responsible for many men like those I grew up with. He should be interested in their complex realities. But, like the self-help gurus he emulates, the senator mystifies. He might be able to accurately describe the state of affairs, but he misdirects men on both its roots — vaguely blaming “the liberal left” — and what to do about it. He wants a “a revival of strong and healthy manhood in America”, but isn’t clear about what that actually that means.

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Hawley’s tactics makes sense for the guru — after all, if they were able to solve your problems, you’d have less reason to buy their next book or listen to their next podcast. Some feminist grifters similarly tell women that their problems stem solely from “the patriarchy” or “misogyny” while also shrugging about what exactly to do about it. But this approach is particularly objectionable coming from a politician, especially a United States senator. Hawley is in the position to materially improve the lives of the men he is supposedly so concerned about, but he would rather obfuscate.

Hawley suggests, for example, that men are not marrying because, “The Left is telling America and its men, you’re evil.” But the real issue is class. In surveys of single people, the reasons given for delaying marriage (or partnership, for people whose goal is simply co-habitation) and childbearing are almost always economic. Marriage has become an elite institution, with highest rates among the people who are already best off — the white, the able-bodied, the most educated, the most financially prosperous.

In search of maximum support, Hawley always stays quiet about which “social issues” he’s blaming for the “deconstruction” of the traditional family. But reading between the lines, his finger is pointing at feminism and gay rights. Both criticise the concept of the nuclear family, for the way it makes the rights granted to couples and parents exclusive to those legally married. Hawley’s is a misdirection I recognise. He’s appealing to people like my uncle, who had difficulty finding stable work due to his lack of a formal education. His wife was a nurse, a traditionally underpaid, strenuous job. They blamed feminism for all social ills.

They played Rush Limbaugh almost continually; I remember first hearing the word “feminazi,” as a kid, in their house. They didn’t see feminism as a movement that fought for her rights as a working woman — which, given that by the Nineties the movement’s focus was more on lifestyle than class concerns, was as much feminism’s fault as their own. People in my town saw women and gays demanding the right to organise their own families in the ways they saw fit, and interpreted it as a threat to the integrity of their families.

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In the past that Hawley is harking back to, the man earned a living wage outside the home and the women raised children. You can see why he’s able to blame feminism for the end of an era. Women, the story goes, were radicalised by feminist thinkers who urged them to seek fulfilment through career and financial independence. This flood of new workers, competing with men for jobs, drove wages down — undermining the male breadwinner.

But the truth is, it was the inflation of the Seventies, and the danger of poverty it brought with it, that drove wages down and therefore women to work. Many mothers got jobs out of necessity, not choice, because their partners’ salaries were no longer enough to support a family. Perhaps the men who lost their breadwinner positions felt attacked, but the alternative was usually debt and destitution. And feminism was the result of this change, not its cause: entering the workforce, women found they had to advocate for fair pay and for the removal of obstacles to advancement.

Hawley ignores present-day economic conditions, too. The stresses that families have experienced during the pandemic — from the struggles of balancing working from home with parenting, to difficulties in getting adequate healthcare — don’t get a mention in his speeches. It’s the same tactic conservatives have often used: arguing for traditional family structures — and even incentivising them, through coercions like tax breaks and public condemnation — while refusing to listen to the practical reasons people are unable or unwilling to participate.

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The other institution that used to support masculinity until, according to Hawley, it was subject to “liberal attacks” is the military. In a 2019 speech, he condemned the progressive criticism of American military intervention, saying, “it also regarded America unilateral action as something to be avoided, even a danger,” as if this were a completely misguided belief.

It’s easier for the Right to romanticise the so-called manly virtues instilled by service — discipline, solidarity, and courage — than it is to admit that serving in wars has left thousands of men traumatised. And that many of those men have been abandoned by their governments to deal with that trauma on their own. More than one of my high school classmates has come out of the military only to find himself too damaged to work full time. Their patriotism and sense of duty — fine things, yes — have been manipulated so that they die not for their country, but for oil and capital.

Gays in the military, the feminist critique of male aggression, leftist anxieties about imperialism: all of these have been blamed for the marginalisation of military service as an integral part of the masculine identity. But the truth lies elsewhere. America’s failure to unflaggingly support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq isn’t a comment on the terrible lack of patriotism in our nation. It’s not a sign that our armed forces are going “soft,” as figures like Representative Dan Crenshaw have suggested in their statements railing against a “woke” military. It’s happened because we’ve seen through propaganda, and have stopped believing that young men should die because the Republican party created illegitimate allegations of atrocity and invaded a nation under false pretences.

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Blaming progressivism for men’s problems, then, is an attempt by the Right to let itself off the hook. But it won’t do much good. Ideas about masculinity change because what helps a person thrive in one era is going to hurt him in another. If women hadn’t entered the workforce, men and their children would have starved; if soldiers continued to be seen as a masculine ideal, there would’ve been continued support for forever wars.

But masculinity influencers are fixated on the past, on “tradition”. While Hawley mostly just waffles on about the old, more sensible ways of doing something, his one proposed real-world solution to the crisis in masculinity was to bring back manufacturing jobs. Every politician since the Eighties has promised and failed to bring back well-paid manufacturing work. Hawley must know it isn’t going to work. Globalisation makes it impossible. The world has moved on. We can’t go backwards, but the political Right has failed to find a way forwards.

And so it fixates on the “manliness” of men, as many politicians have in times of crisis. Hawley speaks like a YouTube influencer, but he’s part of a long tradition that includes everyone from President Roosevelt to, well, Benito Mussolini. The trouble is that, because masculinity is something that is defined and measured by action, there’s always a sense that the men are simply not doing enough. You can always do one more rep at the gym, kill one more enemy on the battlefield, work one more hour before you end your day. No wonder men are feeling overwhelmed.

Men should be allowed to set aside the burden of ruling the world, for the sake of everyone. Instead of fixating on turning men back into some patriarchal stereotype, the Right should be helping them get jobs and quit drugs. When I think of the limited or derailed lives of the men I was raised with, I don’t just want them to regress into the structures and lifestyles that drove their fathers and grandfathers to drink, or hit their kids, or work so much they were never around. I want something better for them.