The Rise of the MAGA Manosphere

Have conservatives and libertarians lost a generation of young men to the post-liberal, reactionary right? And if so, what is to be done?

On a special bonus episode of The Reason Interview that aired on Wednesday, May 21, I talked with Clemson University’s

C. Bradley Thompson

, author of the Substack newsletter

The Redneck Intellectual

, and

Jeremiah Johnson

of the Center for New Liberalism.

In his recent article, Right-Wing Gramscianism vs. Classical Liberalism: Chris Rufo’s Challenge to Classical Liberalism, Thompson says that during Trump’s first term, groups like the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, and Institute for Humane Studies were too busy fighting old, Cold War-era battles against ‘socialism’ that were no longer relevant:

…the Establishment publishes yet another white paper on free-market transportation or energy policy. The Heritage Foundation doubles down on more white papers on deficits and taxation policy. The Cato Institute churns out more white papers on legalizing pot and same-sex marriage. The Institute for Humane Studies goes all in to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table by ramping up its videos on spontaneous order featuring transgender 20-somethings.

But conservative and libertarian-leaning young people, especially young men, wanted support in culture war battles that continue to define the contemporary left, Thompson argues. White, cisgender, heterosexual boys, he says, have been told their entire lives that they and the system that benefits them are terrible and Judgment Day has arrived. The result is that reactionaries like

Curtis Yarvin

and

Bronze Age Pervert

(BAP), and pugnacious street brawlers like

Christopher F. Rufo

have siphoned off a large number of young men (and some women) who feel unsupported by bloodless appeals to universal rights of economic freedom and personal liberty. (Worth noting: Heritage Foundation is certainly leaning hard into MAGA cultural obsessions this time around.)

These young people saw their lives and their prospects being eaten alive by the “progressive, cultural Left,” while the organizations they worked for did nothing to defend them.

Jeremiah Johnson, a founder of the Center for New Liberalism, addresses the reactionary right from a centrist-liberal POV; his group is trying to fight off the populist left from dominance in the Democratic Party. In his Dispatch article, "Weak Men Create Hard Times: And Weak Men Love a Strongman," he discusses right-wing trolling culture exemplified by followers of folks such as Yarvin, BAP,

Catturd

, and Captive Dreamer. The MAGA manosphere, he argues, is obsessed with attacking cultural ephemera ranging from Disney movies to TikTok dances and pushing meme-ified calls for a return (or RETVRN, ‘spelled in a faux-Roman style to emphasize how “trad” and “based” the poster is’) to a false past when men were men, women were women, kids were everywhere, and a single income supported families that were uniformly happy. Such malcontents, he says, can’t let a single tweet go unnoticed:

Who does obsess over this stuff? Who actually talks this way? Who goes out of their way to spend hours each day posting slurs on the internet? Who obsesses over harmless cultural artifacts like a silly TikTok dance?

The guy who does this (and it’s almost always a guy) is not someone who is succeeding in his own life. He’s not someone with considerable accomplishments, someone active in making their local community a better place, or someone with a loving family and a rich social life. The people who do this, to state things plainly, are almost always losers.

Johnson says that such high-profile ‘losers’ are the propellant for MAGA and Trump:

Strongmen are empowered by weak men, and it’s that combination that causes hard times. It’s why so many of the prominent MAGA voices are fundamentally sad people—the Hitler-quoting maniac Captive Dreamer, for example, is someone who said a few weeks ago he hasn’t seen a real-life friend in years and whose own father has publicly denounced him. “Catturd” is, according to a Rolling Stone profile, a thrice-divorced man in his early 60s who went through bouts of bankruptcy before striking it big as a MAGA influencer.

This is the core of Trumpism. A strongman rose in America and told weak men that they had been cheated. And they believed him.

Where do I fit into all this debate? On a recent Reason Roundtable podcast, my colleagues and I discussed Thompson’s essay, which I lit into as misguided (I have disowned the ad hominem aspects of my critique). If you’re interested here’s a link to the video, which is cued up to the start of the discussion. I think Thompson is correct that a number of young men defected from what he calls Conservativism and Libertarianism INC. The implications of that are not clear to me, however, especially if you only count people who ‘defected’ to the reactionary right.

As the father of two sons who grew up during the late Aughts and 2010s, I had a front row seat in the growing institutional demonization of young, white, heterosexual men and am very aware of the slumping outcomes of men more generally. If the recent ‘vibe shift’ is real, its best outcome is the reduction of the excesses of identity politics coursing through academic and corporate America. But if a group of people are genuinely discombobulated by the sorts of liberatory social change we’ve seen over the past 10, 20, 30, even 50 years—particularly increasing tolerance and pluralism for all sorts of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities—I don’t exactly how to appeal to them from a specifically libertarian perspective. Indeed, many of the big changes in this century—gay marriage, increasing drug legalization, increased reproductive control for women, skepticism toward foreign interventionism—are libertarian in nature. Calls for ‘free minds and free markets’ don’t mix well with people who want to create a post-democratic monoculture, regardless of the specifics of that culture.

We live in an age of mass personalization and incredible freedom to create the world(s) that we want to live in. The dividing line in contemporary everything is not between right and left, based and woke, but between forces of choice and control. This is what

Matt Welch

and I termed the Libertarian Moment and, regardless of partisan politics, it proceeds apace and is predicated not upon a return to a rigidly hierarchical and dichotomized past but to an embrace of endless hybridization, mongrelization, and experimentation in the social, cultural, and economic realms. In such an operating system, there’s plenty of room for traditional communities and nostalgic experiments-in-living, but not if they are constantly threatening to shut down other people’s ability to try out new things. This goes for the left, too, which is constantly trying to reduce the amount of choice even as they claims to speak for those without voice.

For his part, Johnson’s foregrounding of economic abundance is important and overlooked by virtually all commentators on the right and left (being calling for radical change have incentives to say things are bad and getting worse). He’s right to emphasize how much richer we are compared to the periods fetishized by the reactionary right, both as individuals and as a society:

America is a vastly richer country than we were in the 1960s. We have more wealth and larger homes; we drive cars that are simultaneously faster, bigger, and safer; we live longer lives; we experience less violence; we breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water; and we have better technology across every dimension of our daily lives. Median income has dramatically increased. Median income specifically for blue-collar workers has increased.

Yet his rhetorical emphasis on losers is designed not to persuade but to dismiss. And if he want to reach people who are merely sympathetic to the reactionary right, he’s making his job harder. And it’s worth noting that in the latest election, Trump’s MAGA platform didn’t simply appeal to the Catturds of the electorate, but to virtually all demographics. Indeed, despite running ‘a campaign centered on hypermasculinity,’ Trump did better with women than he did in 2020; the same is true for African Americans, Asians, and Latinos. Indeed, he did better with most voter blocs across the board and improved his results over 2020 in 2,793 counties, while seeing declines in just 319. (Part of this is that Kamala Harris underperformed badly across the board too.)

So Trump’s—and MAGA’s—appeal is not simply to the reactionary right, which is surely something worth acknowledging and understanding. I think the swing back to Trump and the GOP is largely a function of a much-bigger story that has been playing out for most of the 21st century, which political scientist Morris Fiorina has rightly called a new ‘era of no-decision’ in which ‘unstable majorities’ will persist until a new, broadly shared consensus emerges. One worrying thought: Fiorina notes that the new consensus that solved the earlier era of no-decision was Progressivism, which envisioned a much bigger role for government at basically all levels. Today, we are seeing growing similarity between, say, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump on trade policy and even immigration; continuity between Biden’s muscular approach to antitrust and Trump’s; and more.

That’s the background for our conversation, which is lively and disputative. Let me know what you think, both about this specific episode and the livestream format more generally.

Due to technical issues, Johnson shows up around nine minutes in.

Click above to watch at Substack (and take advantage of a built-in transcript). Below are versions on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and Soundcloud.

If you like what I’m posting here, please subscribe and share!

And subscribe to my new YouTube channel for The Reason Interview.

And…check out Reason, the world’s magazine of ‘free minds and free markets,’ bring you principled, libertarian analysis of politics, culture, and ideas since 1968.