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Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
The Trumpist right has a very specific vision of masculinity—one built on violence, domination, and a kind of romanticized manual labor. It’s a vision they promote loudly, and just as loudly resent when many men don’t find it compelling.
In this episode, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by Toby Buckle, host of the Political Philosophy Podcast and contributor to The UnPopulist, to talk about what this vision leaves out—and what it reveals. They explore the gap between the cultural script being pushed by reactionary politics and the actual lives many men are choosing to lead. They discuss the adolescent nature of far-right masculinity, the politics of resentment that animate it, and how liberalism can do more than just oppose it—it can offer a richer, freer, and more pluralistic account of what a good life looks like.
We hope you enjoy.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Powell: In a letter, Sigmund Freud wrote: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is what does a woman want?” I thought of that as I was reading your Liberal Currents piece about whether men want to be heroes and the conception that the right has of what it means to be a man. Since we talk a lot about men right now in the political scene, I figured we could start there. What is it that men want?
Toby Buckle: I guess, to start modestly, I don’t know, man. Other than the fact that I am one, I don’t put myself forward as any great expert. That’s as far as my expertise goes on this. I got writing about it by accident in that I kept seeing “think of the poor men” pieces and I decided to write something about this. So I did, it became quite popular, and then people were saying, “Oh, you have to respond to this Chris Arnade article.” It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. So I wrote about that—about, “What do men want?”
To answer: I don’t know. I can’t speak for all men and I don’t claim to speak for all men—unlike many who write on this. I merely observe in the article that people, usually on the political right, who imagine an intrinsic masculine nature, a set of urges common to all of us, perhaps suppressed by liberal, feminized society, perhaps an intrinsic desire to be heroic, to be a protector, to be a provider ... free choice seems to empirically disprove that. Men today have far more ability than in any past age to go be a soldier or a firefighter or policeman. Whereas, in past ages, class or hereditary hierarchy might have held you back, today, anybody can do those things. And by and large—with exceptions, obviously—men don’t. That was the only point I was making. It was a negative point. I don’t know if there’s some intrinsic male soul or not. But the people who claim to know seem to be describing a world that just doesn’t exist.
Powell: Think back to the Pajama Boy ad that Obama put out. It was back when everyone was talking about “metrosexuals.” It was a guy in pajamas, not a Spartan warrior looking guy, and the right went off on this.
There’s a particular kind of story of what masculinity is, but there’s also an odd sliding between a normative and descriptive claim there. For most men, to be a man is to engage in physical feats of strength on a regular basis that goes beyond just going to the gym—which lots of dudes do, but isn’t sufficient to live up to this conception. It’s also being a provider, but being a provider who provides primarily with upper body strength. It’s defending, but defending in this violent kind of way. The capacity for violence is central to this. But there’s this sliding between: that is what men want and that is what men ought to be. They think men want this, but they think wanting something different is itself a problem.
Buckle: It’s not a coherent vision of the world. I’m not even being rude about it. Just as a matter of fact, it doesn’t all hang together. They want a number of different things that you couldn’t realize simultaneously. They’re working backwards from that normative vision to a kind of biological essentialism, which is just a fancy way of saying: If you’re born a man with certain chromosomes, you’re going to have certain needs, wants, and desires. A liberal or a feminist society might try to repress those desires, but it’ll only end up making you and everyone else unhappy. So, you’re right: they’re working backwards from the normative to the descriptive.
There’s also an element of resentment and restoration here—that something has been taken away, something has been stolen from you, which needs to be returned. That’s a pretty old idea. You can go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans talking about how “men aren’t real men these days” and “we need to get back to real masculinity.” It’s also a very persistent theme in fascist thought that the world has become feminized and that men need to re-masculize the world.
Powell: One thing that struck me while thinking through your argument: It’s not that men don’t want this kind of lifestyle—because there are some who do—but that it’s just not universal. One particular group that I think does, however, is teenage boys. So much of the media that teenage boys consume presents this lifestyle as appealing. The video games that teenage boys play are power fantasy games—whether it’s Call of Duty style games or Medieval warrior style games in which you’re a violent protagonist in a grand narrative centered around you.
And I think the kinds of things that adult men want are not appealing to teenage boys. If you described to 14-year-old Aaron what 46-year-old Aaron does for a living, he’d have been like, “That sounds kind of lame, man.” When you’re a teenager, you have a different perspective on the world and what’s cool. So what occurred to me, while reading your piece, was how much this is just an adolescent view of the world and an insistence that the proper way to be a man is to forever remain an adolescent.
Buckle: Yes, and to maybe even go one step further, it’s an adolescent fantasy. But even within that group, there’s variation. So, no offence to teenage boys, but, statistically, they have higher rates of antisocial or low-level violent behavior. Not all teenage boys, of course, but the average is higher. The army starts recruiting at 16. But even as we talk about men drifting right and men increasingly buying into the Manosphere and men increasingly wanting more traditional roles, fewer and fewer 16-year-old boys are joining the army every year.
“I would say, for men and women, if your life’s not going particularly well, it’s easy to feel like you’re catching the worst of both worlds. If you’re a man, you’ll still expect it to have all of the obligations of the traditional set of norms without having any of the benefits. It can also feel—and I think both genders feel this way—that the other side is opportunistically appealing to whichever norm benefits them in the moment while we’re getting screwed over. Women, the complaint would go, want equal pay and advancement in the workplace, but they also want us to pay for dates. That’s a very common right-wing talking point. Conversely, though, I’ve heard a lot of older women say, ‘Feminism screwed me over. I was expected to work just as long and just as hard as a man, but I still did all of the taking care of the kids and taking care of the house.’ So I think that is a common complaint on both sides.” — Toby Buckle
We all have fantasies. I think men fantasize about violence a lot. But by the same token not every sexual fantasy you’ve ever had would you actually want to happen to you. These are ideas that you have in your head. Men fantasize about being in combat roles, but they usually don’t seek them out. I think, yeah, it’s a fantasy—but it’s a fantasy that they feel has been taken away from them. I think that’s what it’s actually about. It’s not about the fact that men can’t do these things anymore. I think the root grievance is that women now have opportunities that they didn’t before and are no longer automatically socially inferior to men. And a lot of men have been conditioned or raised to find that really unacceptable. So they escape into these fantasies, but also use these fantasies as a political cudgel and as a form of aggressive political speech.
Powell: It sounds like there are three explanations or attitudes driving what might be going on. One is what you just described: essentially a resentment that the range of options available to women has expanded. That’s happened, in part, because liberalism made us rich enough that, when you have more, when you’re richer, you have more options on the table and women are taking advantage of that. Also, conceptions of the narrowness of gender roles have shifted so that women have more options. And there’s a resentment: “Women are getting this expansion that I don’t feel like men have gotten. So even if the sphere of options available to me hasn’t shrunk, it hasn’t grown.”
Buckle: Let’s just stay with this one. Let me try and put a bit more specificity to it. If I were to steelman and give the most coherent and plausible version of what the complaint is here, it would be something like this: Gender roles are changing from the traditional ones in which men and women have defined but distinct roles. There’s things men and women do that are different. Men hold doors open and pay for dates. Women take the surname and submit to their husbands. We all understand that. And then there’s a more modern set of norms, let’s just call it egalitarian, in which your gender doesn’t matter: same pay, equal rights in the workplace, maybe you split the check for the date, so on and so forth. I think right now we live under a mixed regime of both. Sometimes you’re operating by a traditional set of norms, sometimes by an egalitarian one.
If I were to give the most dignified version of the complaint, I would say, for men and women, if your life’s not going particularly well, it’s easy to feel like you’re catching the worst of both worlds. If you’re a man, you’ll still expect it to have all of the obligations of the traditional set of norms without having any of the benefits. It can also feel—and I think both genders feel this way—that the other side is opportunistically appealing to whichever norm benefits them in the moment while we’re getting screwed over. Women, the complaint would go, want equal pay and advancement in the workplace, but they also want us to pay for dates. That’s a very common right-wing talking point. Conversely, though, I’ve heard a lot of older women say feminism screwed me over. I was expected to work just as long and just as hard as a man, but I still did all of the taking care of the kids and taking care of the house. So I think that is a common complaint on both sides. To give it its most dignified form, it’s that as we shift from one set of norms to another, a lot of people feel like they’re getting caught between the cracks. But that’s at its most dignified.
I think a lot of the time it’s just anger that women have freedom and are assertive.
Powell: If it is that transition, then it’s interesting what the reaction to it is. What we’re not seeing—certainly not from far-right grievance types but not even from semi-reactionary centrists—is the recognition that, because we’re in the middle point in this transition period, which is ethically and socially complicated and creates these tensions and friction for people that you’ve just described, the solution then is to become accelerationist.
In other words, we’re not getting: “Let’s complete the transition as fast as we can and get to this world where those tensions will be resolved in the sense that we won’t have the essentialism anymore.” That’s not the reaction we’re getting from many people, including, again, from a lot of normie centrists. Instead, we’re getting: “Well, if we’ve gone this far and the tensions have arisen, we need to pull back. We need to slow it down. We need to shift our rhetoric. We need to restructure the economy.” It’s not accelerationist—it’s literally a reactionary response.
Buckle: Yeah, there’s two ways you can make it coherent. You can either move forward into full egalitarianism or you can move backwards into tradition. I think every society is in a kind of middle ground with respect to norms. Norms change all the time. And, while feminist egalitarian norms are quite new, there have been all sorts of different models of masculinity and the family throughout history. I’ve been spending a bit of time recently with how the Bible came to be written and a lot of that is in a transitional moment between Ancient Near-Eastern norms of the family and Greco-Roman norms of the family. Now neither of those are liberal or feminist but they’re very different from each other and so those people felt very conflicted and torn between two sets of norms and torn between two different identities. What we’ve got going on here in the modern world, where it’s all a bit complicated and confusing and we kind of have to muddle through it, certainly can be frustrating—but it’s also nothing new.
Powell: Yeah, that’s an important point. Part of this narrative is that there was a way that men were for all of history until the 1960s—or pick your arbitrary date—and then we just deviated from what had been the historical norm. But that historical norm never existed. Or if it did exist, it was at a moment in time, and it’s a bit like picking out a snapshot in an ongoing dynamic process and believing that it was permanent.
Buckle: In a way, that is just a microcosm of a certain type of conservatism. I forget where, but the philosopher Robert Nozick defines conservatism as a nostalgia for a past that never existed. And I think that’s probably one more iteration of that. We’ve always had it in different forms, but the reality is that the past is very variable and there’s all sorts of different societies and cultures that are as radically different from each other as they are from us.
Powell: Nozick’s correct. The philosopher Roland Barthes had his idea of myth as a way that we take facts about the world that are contingent and changing and non-universal and we then tell ourselves stories that solidify them and make them permanent, fixed, universal, natural ... such that you can then buffer them against criticism. Because if you are rejecting something that is a natural fact of the world, then that’s incoherent—your argument is self-defeating. So we construct what is natural out of what is contingent, typically for political reasons.
Buckle: Yes, so the language I use to describe that—but I think we’re talking about very much the same thing—is from the theorist of ideology Michael Freeden, who says that the core claim of conservatism is that there is an extra human origin of the social order. So, whereas the liberal believes in charting new ground and using human reason and ingenuity to construct a social design that has not yet existed, for conservatism, progress is about structural reversion to an underlying mean; conservatives maintain that there are laws by which society runs—these can be the laws of God, intrinsic gender roles, a class or racial caste system, all sorts of things—that we did not create, that we can deviate from, but only to our detriment, but that are predictable and preservable, that we can know what they are and we can return to them.
“While feminist egalitarian norms are quite new, there have been all sorts of different models of masculinity and the family throughout history. I’ve been spending a bit of time recently with how the Bible came to be written and a lot of that is in a transitional moment between Ancient Near-Eastern norms of the family and Greco-Roman norms of the family. Now neither of those are liberal or feminist but they’re very different from each other and so those people felt very conflicted and torn between two sets of norms and torn between two different identities.” — Toby Buckle
And this helps make sense of the fact that, with Trump or Brexit, conservatives don’t seem very concerned with conserving existing institutions. Conservatism is concerned with conserving, but they believe in an unchangeable social structure, and when they feel that society has gotten away from that structure, they can become very radical in trying to return us to it. And their language speaks to that: “Make America Great Again”; “Take back control.” It’s always the language of: return to a norm.
Powell: It’s palingenetic ultra nationalism as a definition of fascism—the rebirth from the ashes. This also brings up what I said a little while ago about there being three prongs of grievances. You’ve now brought us back to what I think are the other two.
One of those two is ... let’s imagine that you’re a man who wants this particular conception of masculinity that we’ve been characterizing. You want to embody that, live that, form your identity around that. One of the things about contemporary liberal society is that the incentives don’t push in that direction.
So, if you want to be successful in the economy, embodying that version of masculinity is not how you achieve it, because the highest paying jobs, the highest prestige jobs, don’t reward that (except maybe being a professional athlete, which sometimes and in some forms goes in that direction). So there’s an objection that the incentives in society encourage people to not live that way.
Buckle: I might push back a little on this, actually, but finish the point.
Powell: But then the third prong, which I think is related, is that it’s not even that society disincentivizes this model of masculinity. The incentives within society might be entirely neutral on this matter. Because we are social beings, we like to be around people who like the same things we like. This is why communities form around punk rock or metal—a group of people get together on the basis of liking the same kind of music, and then that spins out into yet further social and cultural connections.
If the conception that you have of yourself and your interests is not sufficiently shared, then it can feel like you can’t fully embody it because you don’t have comrades in this identity. So even if society’s not saying, “We’re going to make it more challenging for you to do this,” it can still feel that way because you just don’t have that many people who agree with you on it.
Buckle: I see what you’re saying. I’m just not sure that society doesn’t emphasize, reward, incentivize, this sort of traditional masculine norm. It depends how extreme you are with it. Like, if you want to cosplay as an interwar fascist, yeah, society tends not to like that. But at the same time ... there are different forms of incentive other than just the monetary kind. There’s social standing and respect and that, I think, still heavily favors the traditionally masculine.
Again, sometimes these incentives can conflict. So, I would say, as a man, backing down if challenged to a physical fight ... there’s a social incentive to not do that. I think it’s just ingrained in us that we would feel a certain sense of shame there, even if we know that’s the sensible thing to do. And yet at the same time the guy who goes out and gets in fights all the time is probably unlikely to succeed in today’s society.
So there’s a conflict there. It’s not always coherent. But I would say that professions like firefighter, serving in the army, police (even despite the fact that they’ve not covered themselves in glory recently) are still ones that are held in very high social standing. People still say, “Thank you for your service.” If you ask what the most respected and trusted professions are in opinion polls, it’s these traditionally masculine ones that still get the super majorities of the public saying that they respect and trust these people. So looking at other incentives, beyond the purely monetary, there are probably still quite a lot of incentives to be traditionally masculine.
When I was in uni, I was going to a party with a friend and for whatever reason he thought it would be fun to go in drag, wearing a dress. I don’t believe he was trans or gender nonconforming—he just thought it’d be fun to do. And this was in a liberal, affluent city and the hostility was incredible. Like people like yelling at him, “I’m gonna kill you.” I’m actually toning it down. This was a bit ago now, but, my friend was a big guy, like 6’5, played rugby, and still other men were having this explosively violent reaction to seeing him in gender nonconforming garb. And, again, he’s this masculine guy, he’s got a beard.
This is the thing that I think sometimes people forget. What people on the right (who think men have this intrinsically masculine nature) and people on the left (who ask, “Why are men like that? Why are they such ...”) both miss is that men kill other men who they feel are performing masculinity correctly. When I was in high school, to be gender nonconforming in even the mildest sense, never mind being gay, would be to put yourself in real physical danger. When feminists can be like, “Ugh, why are men like that?”—and I understand that they’re venting—the answer is because we get killed when we’re not. So there are both positive expectations and very negative incentives about men’s behavior here. And I’m not at all sure that it’s the case that our society is incentivizing us to be “metrosexuals.”
Powell: Maybe a way to square that is: potential vs. action. I think this gets back to your initial point that men can choose to put themselves in warrior scenarios, but most don’t seek out combat situations. Most aren’t running off to the front lines of Ukraine—even though you could easily do that, if that was your jam. What they actually want is the potential to behave this way.
“All I’m doing here is translating Mill into modern words. I don’t think all men are the same. I think, for some men, it is good for them to be a firefighter. I think that’s what’s going to make them happiest. I think, for other men, to be a stay-at-home dad might be what makes them happiest. And I think they’ll be better at those because they’ve chosen them. I think their lives will be more meaningful because they will be self-directed. I think that’s good for people. And it’s more complicated and it’s messier and people make mistakes but no society anywhere ever has ever imposed a hegemonic archetype on people as a gender role and had it meet everyone and make everyone happy and no one ever rebel against it, even the ones that have really brutally tried.” — Toby Buckle
I lived through the ’80s karate boom, when karate and ninjas were the coolest thing ever. And everybody was signing up for karate classes. In retrospect, it looks kind of cringe. It was an odd time.
Buckle: That was just dying out as I became a teenager, but yeah.
Powell: But it wasn’t that those of us signing up for karate actually wanted to go out and pick fights. We didn’t actually want to punch each other in the face. But we wanted to feel like the kind of person who could do it. And I think we also wanted to look like the kind of person that other people thought could do it. You felt like a badass in your karate uniform. And I think there’s a prestige that can attach to the kind of guy who looks like he could do this stuff. But as you said, the kind of person who’s actually out getting into a lot of fights, the status drops pretty quickly.
Or the cops, they love their surplus military equipment, their bulletproof vests—all this stuff that makes them look like badasses. But outside of the weird subculture of police themselves, which is this incredibly isolated community, the status of actually violent cops declines pretty quickly in the public’s eye. So I think we essentially hold that someone who could do all this stuff has higher status than the person who looks like they couldn’t, the nerdy, scrawny guy who doesn’t work out and so on. But the moment you take that potentiality and make it an actuality, that’s when the status tends to drop away.
Buckle: Yeah, I think that’s all right. This is sort of what the ancients and early moderns meant when they talked about honor. We can have this idea of the honorable gentleman, like a sort of foppy type. But I think as Hobbes saw quite clearly: honor is power. Honor is the perception. If you mess with this person, they have the capacity to respond and potentially respond violently. That’s what dueling’s about. If someone insults you, you have to reestablish your social standing as someone who can respond with violence. I think all of that’s still with us. We just don’t have the language of honor and restoring it anymore—but that impulse is still there.
Powell: A lot of what gets caught up in that are admirable traits that society has not actually devalued. Being the strong, honorable, stoic man who you might look at and say, “That guy could defend himself in a fight” and “that guy can stand up for those who need standing up for” ... society has not devalued these things. Those are accessible to you—you can choose to behave that way. Not all of us can achieve the physique of the professional bodybuilder, but all of us can at least go and get stronger if we wanted to. All of that is accessible.
But then, to get back to the right-wing conception, you look at someone like Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who imagines himself as embodying all of that ... he wants the military to get rid of all these “feminizing” questions of logistics and intelligence gathering and replace them with, “Just do a lot of push-ups.” “And,” he’ll say, “that’s how you win wars.”
And here’s the thing: it’s always coupled with being a jerk. They marry some admirable traits to behavior that then doesn’t make them admirable. And then, as with teenage boys who say misogynistic things to the girls in their classes, when people don’t like them and don’t find them admirable, when people don’t want to have anything to do with them, which is the natural response to a jerk—none of us like to hang out with jerks—they treat it as society rejecting masculinity versus society rejecting being a jerk.
Buckle: Yeah, but, first of all, what has actually been taken away from them here? Because anyone can go work out and learn MMA, right? Almost anyone can join the army. What’s been taken away from them is women as automatic social inferiors. And this is—again, like the idea of honor, like the idea of humiliation—something we don’t have a very good language for. Liberalism hasn’t developed a very good language for it. But at its core—and the ancients recognize this very clearly—freedom is both about not having someone above you and about having someone beneath you. It runs both ways.
Whereas what we might call the republican (small “r”) tradition—which is also the type of freedom that social justice people might talk about—is the not having someone above you part. What the modern right is concerned with is the having someone below you part. Having someone you can always behave badly to, always have a degree of control over, always humiliate. That’s what they’ve lost, right? That’s what they’re in fear of losing. It’s not just gender, you can talk about that with respect to any number of other variables. But that’s what’s actually the animus here.
I think the other part—and someone like Pete Hegseth seems like quite a clear example of this to me—is how much people are just frying their brains online and how much these just dogshit beliefs are part of it. And we analyze it as philosophers and try to think through the reasons and ... a lot of these people are just going on and sitting for hours a day downloading misogynistic memes and rants and conspiracy theories into their heads, and in their monologues they now unironically use the words like “femoid” and so on. At a certain level, it’s a grift—some people are becoming very rich off people buying into it. But on another level, real leaders of the movement have clearly rotted their own brains on this stuff. They clearly buy into it themselves.
And, I agree, they’ve gotten to the point where any ability for self-reflection, much like self-criticism, has been vaporized and everything is a conspiracy against them. True masculinity? There’s no great story to that. These are just really dumb beliefs—and they will destroy your life as a man if you let them. At a certain level, it’s not more complicated than people who’ve just downloaded too much of this stuff into their heads.
Powell: That introduces the hope for a self-correcting mechanism, then. If you’re watching these Manosphere influencers, they’re telling you that your unhappiness right now, or your sense of a lack of place in the universe, is the result of women or minorities, or, as you put it, that there aren’t people below you anymore, and that that’s what’s causing this. And, they’re saying, what you need to do is behave in all these awful ways and internalize all these awful beliefs and then make them central to who you are.
So they’re selling you an ethical program—”ethics” in the sense of the beliefs and values and actions that lead to a flourishing life. It’s a failed ethical program. As you said, it doesn’t actually make you happier. It makes you miserable and isolated and so on. Does that mean then that at some point this project is less marketable—that there’s enough people who have tried it and failed that newer people become skeptical of it? And we move on to teenage boys chasing something else?
Buckle: I mean, you’d hope, right? I think what we can do is point out, as clearly and sensibly and level-headedly as we can—and this is all I’m really trying to do at my articles—is stress that this stuff is gonna mess with you. It’s gonna destroy your life if you let it. This will not make you happy or successful. Look, I’m not even talking about what’s right or fair to women. Obviously that’s very important. I’m just talking about what’s good for us as guys. Clearly the people who really buy into this are not happy. If you think about the people who lead the modern political right or the people who are influencers in the Manosphere, almost to a man, I’d say they’re clearly not happy or even capable of happiness.
So I think we can use them as a cautionary tale. And we should. And I have been. As for whether people will get to the point where they think their own way out of it—as in, “This thing doesn’t seem to be making me happy”—I don’t know, maybe. But a lot of people just seem to stay there, you know?
“I think the other part—and someone like Pete Hegseth seems like quite a clear example of this to me—is how much people are just frying their brains online and how much these just dogshit beliefs are part of it. And we analyze it as philosophers and try to think through the reasons and ... a lot of these people are just going on and sitting for hours a day downloading misogynistic memes and rants and conspiracy theories into their heads, and in their monologues they now unironically use the words like ‘femoid’ and so on. At a certain level, it’s a grift—some people are becoming very rich off people buying into it. But on another level, real leaders of the movement have clearly rotted their own brains on this stuff. They clearly buy into it themselves.” — Toby Buckle
I don’t have a brilliant solution for that. I think with individual people you might be able to pull them out of it. But is there going to be some mass awakening where everyone just kind of goes, “This is all just bullshit, isn’t it?” I don’t think we can count on that happening. It certainly hasn’t happened yet.
Powell: Then what do we do about that as liberals? I recently published an article on my newsletter about how liberals, and particularly philosophical liberals, have really gone all in on liberal neutrality. And that what we talk about is abstract concepts like rights and autonomy and dignity of the individual and self-authorship, and then we talk about neutral institutions that are built for protecting those concepts and establishing pluralism, but not themselves playing any role.
We’re very anti-Aristotelian in the sense that we don’t think the state should be setting out what the good life is and then helping you achieve it or directing you towards it. It is neutrality. And as a result of that, liberals don’t tend to talk in the language of, “These are the virtues. This is what it means to be good. This is what it means to lead a good life. This is how you find it, how you achieve it, what practices are constituent of it, what perspectives and values are necessary to it.” We don’t talk that way because it would violate these norms of neutrality and pluralism.
But as a result, first, I think there are real problems with that, because the virtues and values and perspectives that lead to political liberalism have consequences in the world. There’s something that it means to be a liberal in your life. And to be a liberal is to be better than an anti-liberal in the way you approach the world and see it. So I don’t think that neutrality is coherent, even if we say the state should not be enforcing it, which I think is the correct answer.
But, bracketing that, what it means is that if you are, say, a young man, looking to figure yourself out and figure out your place in the world and figure out how to be happy and how to lead a good life, which is something that basically every young man at some point is looking for, that then the liberals aren’t speaking to you. They’re basically ignoring these questions. And so, instead, you go to the people who are talking about this stuff. And, increasingly, that is the right. It’s the Manosphere influencers, it’s the Gamer-Gaters, it’s the Jordan Petersons who are telling you, “Here’s an ethics you can live by.” And it’s an anti-liberal one. And, as you’ve said, and I totally agree, it’s not one that leads to flourishing.
But liberals need to provide an alternative. We can’t just point out that these guys are leading you astray. We have to say, “If you’re actually looking for this stuff, it’s found in liberalism, it’s found in liberal values, it’s found in their application in the world, it’s found in this way of relating towards people who are different from you and thinking about your place in the great chain of being.” What does it look like to talk about ethics and finding your place and these kinds of concerns from that liberal perspective?
Buckle: So, let me walk through this with you, because in many ways the answer to what do I think that looks like is my hero article. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do there.
To maybe rewind a little to some of the philosophical ground you covered, I think you’re exactly right: broadly speaking, there are at least two ways that you could justify liberal pluralism. One is you could take a neutrality approach, and this would probably be most associated with the philosopher John Rawls. You could see the governing liberal state as something like a referee between various different groups, making sure they all play nicely together. And while there’ll be a thin vision of what the state should do, it—and perhaps liberalism more broadly, at least in Theory of Justice—is not here to provide a comprehensive life plan for people. Now, as you say, there are all sorts of philosophical concerns with that project. I think you can’t put a neat dividing line between thin and thick conceptions of the good and the very terms themselves are more evocative of a continuum than a dichotomy.
But then there’s also persuasion and efficacy concerns. There’s another way which you might call comprehensive liberalism. Someone like John Stuart Mill—a moral philosopher but very consequentialist—might be a good representative. He was concerned with what is good for people and what’s going to make people happy. And instead of saying, “We’re not going to try and say what’s good for people, we’ll just try and enforce this neutrality between them,” you start the opposite way. You say, “We know what’s good for people and what’s good for people is making choices for themselves, is learning, is growing and developing as people. What’s good for people is living in a pluralist society.”
As you say, it’s all very well to say you have the freedom to lead a particular lifestyle, that you have the freedom to be gay, for example. But if no one else in my society is gay, then that’s a pretty thin form of freedom. I need to see people living that lifestyle so I can model it myself, so that I can be in community with them. And it’s good for people to have multiple different models that they can think and choose between. All of that is good for people and by having that we create a society that will overall be happier and healthier. That’s the comprehensive liberal vision.
There’s all sorts of concerns about that, such as, “Doesn’t that mean that you’re telling people what to do? What’s the limiting principle here?” The limiting principle on that is the liberty principle, which I think is a pretty good one. It’s about: you pursue your life, in your own way, and the limit is the ability of other people to do the same. That’s the limiting principle. It’s not some abstract neutrality.
Now, within that model vision of saying, “We believe in pluralism and development and progress because we think they’re good for people,” you will want to carve out certain pockets of neutrality. You will want to say, “Because we think pluralism is good for people, we generally want free speech.” Neutrality is justified on its own terms. Carving out these pockets of neutrality can be a useful tool for the types of goods that we think lead to people having valuable and flourishing lives. So that’s the philosophical ground.
To get it into the practical case, where do you go with that? I think the argument at its simplest is: Do people need to be locked into a single archetype of how to live? And will that make them happiest? Or is providing people a range of archetypes and letting them choose going to make them happier? I think that’s the core conflict.
So I think our side of the case has to be: We, as men today, it is perfectly available to us to be the traditional masculine man, to be a soldier or firefighter. That is an archetype that is still on the table and that we can choose. We can also choose to be—let’s just go to the other extreme and say—less traditionally masculine. We can choose to have a more traditionally female presentation. We can choose to date either men or women. Perhaps we have a role as a caregiver, as a parent or caring for an elderly relative. That’s something most societies perhaps wouldn’t have allowed men to do or be. Or something most societies would’ve at least discouraged.
We can choose between any of these archetypes and make them their own. All I’m doing here is translating Mill into modern words. I think that’s better. I think it’s better because people are different. I don’t think all men are the same. I think, for some men, it is good for them to be a firefighter. I think that’s what’s going to make them happiest. I think, for other men, to be a stay-at-home dad might be what makes them happiest. And I think they’ll be better at those because they’ve chosen them. I think their lives will be more meaningful because they will be self-directed. I think that’s good for people. And it’s more complicated and it’s messier and people make mistakes but no society anywhere ever has ever imposed a hegemonic archetype on people as a gender role and had it meet everyone and make everyone happy and no one ever rebel against it, even the ones that have really brutally tried.
That is just my hero article. All I’m saying in it is that I think choice is good. I think it’s good for us to have options. That’s it. That’s the bottom line. And you living your life—as Mill says, pursuing your own good in your own way—you will fuck that up sometimes, but you will be happier in the long run for it. And that’s it. That’s the case.
Powell: Listeners of this show are by definition podcast listeners and so would potentially be interested in your show. So tell us about the Political Philosophy Podcast.
Buckle: So I’ve been doing the Political Philosophy Podcast for about seven or eight years now—since the early days of the Trump era. I interview a lot of people, political philosophers, but also journalists, academics, other podcasters. And I also do some solo episodes. So I actually did awhile back what I was channeling there at the end: a whole audio essay called “Mill vs. Rawls.” I’m on Bluesky these days as well, so there’s a huge back catalogue there on pretty much anything broadly within political philosophy.
An earlier version of this conversation first ran on Aaron Ross Powell’s ReImagining Liberty podcast.
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