Manliness Is Next To Godliness?

Complicating Damon Linker's assessment of conservative moral decline

My friend and fellow Substacker Damon Linker has a post up, apropos of a tweet about Pete Hegseth and his multiple wives and infidelities, bemoaning how the Trump movement has brought about the end of traditional, moralistic conservatism, lamenting that even liberals are going to miss the bluenoses now that they’re mostly gone. He’s written things like this before, and while obviously he’s pointing to something real, I feel like there’s something deeper and more important going on below the surface that has to be acknowledged if we’re not to be stuck in lamentation mode. So I’m going to try to write about that more in the spirit of “let’s go down a level and see if we agree or disagree” than in the spirit of actual disagreement.

One of the puzzles of the Trump era has been the enthusiasm with which Evangelical Christians have embraced such an obviously irreligious and (by their own historic lights) morally-reprehensible figure. A variety of explanations have been mooted for this fact, the most common being that the relationship is transactional. At an elite level, Trump promised the Christian Right judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade; at a popular level, Trump promised to protect and champion them against their cultural enemies. I made the argument back in 2018 that this behavior not only wasn’t hypocritical, it had plausible biblical sanction.

Those arguments, though, are outdated at this point, or so I am inclined to think. The Trump movement may have begun as a transaction, but Linker is right that a more fundamental transformation has been effected since then. I’m not sure he’s right though that this transformation is as simple as a rejection of all moral standards. Rather, I think it’s a transvaluation of those standards, the elevation of one (asserted) central and grounding virtue resulting in an inversion of many others.

I think the word “virtue” is the right one to use in this context, because etymologically it means “manliness.” Before it meant moral excellence, it meant valor—which, in turn, before it meant courage meant strength. All the other moral meanings of these terms, including their application to women as well as men (or even more so than men; to the Victorians “virtue” presumptively meant female chastity and modesty), are layered on top of those deeper meanings. A manly man should be strong; a strong man will demonstrate that strength through courage; the greatest courage is moral courage; therefore a moral man is a manly man. But dig all the way down, and before you can be moral, you have to be a man.

When I look at the enthusiasm for figures like Hegseth or Trump—when I look at that tweet of Linker’s that he shared—what I see first and foremost is the enthusiasm that these guys are men. Maybe they don’t always behave with the greatest propriety, maybe they break the rules, but that’s what men do sometimes, right? Sometimes because they have to, but sometimes just because they want to—don’t they? Their masculinity is best demonstrated, in this framing, through their sheer self-assertion.

Now, characterizing manliness as self-assertion would seem to be in direct conflict with any higher conception of manliness—one that prizes moral courage above all. But that presumes we all agree on how to assess moral courage, how to assess virtue. But do we? I don’t mean “do we, liberals and conservatives, agree on all values.” I mean: do we still agree that we can even tell what constitutes virtue in our time?

Let’s take a man like Mitt Romney. He would seem to fit all the requirements of virtue as traditionally and conservatively construed. He married young, had a bunch of kids and passed his values on to the next generation such that he has piles of grandkids. He earned a substantial income, and husbanded that income thriftily, such that his large family will be well provided for generations to come. He devoted himself to charitable activities and to public service both monetarily and with his time. And in a key moment, he broke with his party to convict a felonious and potentially tyrannical leader, dooming his future career for the sake of the commonwealth. Is this not manliness? Is this not virtue? Is this not moral courage?

But now consider an alternative narrative. Yes, Romney married young and had a bunch of kids—but that was what his church expected of him, and he was dutifully following their instruction in so doing. Does the fact that he did so demonstrate virtue, or mere submission? Yes, he made a lot of money, which surely required hard work and discipline. But he did so as a cog in a lucrative but at best amorally extractive machine, following the easy, conformist path to wealth—one that did not require any particular genius, talent or insight. Is this a demonstration of strength, to say nothing of greatness? Yes, he devoted himself to public service, but in office he was a chameleon, taking whatever positions he needed to win the next election, running as a moderate (and pro-abortion-rights) Republican to win in Massachusetts, then calling himself an “extreme conservative” in an effort to win a Republican primary. In each time and place, meanwhile, he surrounded himself with conformist elites and never threatened their points of view. Is this a man of conviction? As for his supposed great moment of moral courage: when he already knew he had no future in politics, he assured his place in history by making the one move guaranteed to be lauded by a corrupt and partisan press, even though he didn’t have the votes to make any real difference to the outcome. How could this man in an admittedly well-tailored gray flannel suit ever be held up as the embodiment of manliness?

I’m not laying out this alternative narrative to endorse it, but to make a point: that if you think that most men are not their own men, are not behaving in a heroically manly fashion, and that this country desperately needs to be led by men who aren’t socialized into conformity and submission, then you are unlikely to look for men who are conventionally moral as paragons of manliness. On the contrary: you’re going to look upon their bourgeois respectability with suspicion.

That’s doubly true if you think that those rules themselves have been corrupted to the point that they are promoting the opposite of virtue. Linker received a lot of criticism for his tweet from MAGA-land types saying “well, what about Bill Clinton?” or “well, what about JFK?” and he makes short work of the argument from hypocrisy. The fact that I am a hypocrite in violating rules we both believe in cannot justify your own violation of those rules, much less your determination to flaunt your violations. But I’m not sure hypocrisy is the charge actually being leveled. I think the MAGA view of the liberal establishment isn’t merely that it is hypocritical, its members surreptitiously violating rules that they believe in and hiding those violations because they feel guilty and ashamed. I think they think the liberal establishment is full of it, that its members don’t believe in the rules they themselves promulgate, but are just interested in controlling people (or in appeasing people who do believe in those rules).

What liberals really believe in, according to this view, is power and status, and they’ll readily sacrifice anything they tell you they believe in to get those things. That’s why, someone who believes this would argue, Harvey Weinstein was able to get away with his predations for so long, and so many others like him: because he was a powerful man and liberals kowtowed to him and protected him. Indeed, even when there’s nothing at stake, these folks flaunt their ability to flout the rules the impose on others. Think of Gavin Newsom partying with donors in the midst of Covid lockdowns that he had ordered. Was that hypocrisy, Newsom doing something he believed was wrong because he succumbed to illicit desire? Or was it a way of saying that he believed he was above the rules that bind lesser mortals? Liberal violations of liberal moralism, from this perspective, aren’t examples of hypocrisy, but expressions of contempt.

And the JFK and Clinton examples suggest that this contempt has been around for a long time. Did those men hide their womanizing (to the extent that they even did so) because they felt guilty? Or is it more accurate to say that they were proud of their conquests, and that many of those who protected them felt similarly proud and impressed, but that they knew a great many small-minded respectable types would clutch their pearls if the truth got out, and therefore this masculine prowess had to be hidden and softened. Those veils were not the tribute vice pays to virtue but a pragmatic politics married to contempt: we can behave this way because we are superior men, but we can’t let the regular folks know we do so, lest they reject us out of a jealousy that they mask as morality.

Before anyone objects: obviously the same dynamics are at play in the MAGA movement. Many Republicans simply don’t believe that Trump has done the kinds of things we all know he’s done, and Hegseth himself paid off an accuser not to talk about an alleged sexual assault. These dynamics are not all or nothing. Nonetheless: if you believe the negative picture I painted of the liberal establishment, how could you look to conformity to its rules—to any rules—as a sign of virtue? You’d have to do the opposite: look to rejection of conformity, the resolution to be oneself the only arbiter of right and wrong, as the first indicator of manliness, and therefore the predicate to any other possible virtue. Therefore, the more they flaunt their contempt for said rules, the more they are showing that they will stand up to those who made those rules, but who violate them themselves out of contempt for those who obey.

Go all the way with this attitude and I don’t see how you could be a faithful Christian (or a faithful Jew or Muslim) of any kind. But I can understand self-professed Christians who have come to believe this story telling themselves that that’s a debate for another time. Once manliness has been reestablished, we can discuss whether a real man is someone with the courage to follow Jesus of Nazareth in all things, or whether Christianity is ultimately a religion for slaves and women that a real man would have nothing to do with. (Alternatively, Christianity could be deformed into something almost entirely unrecognizable, a process that some would argue is well underway.) For now, such a Christian might say, the important thing is to recognize manliness, support it, and never be cowed by moralizers into backing down from that support.

I said at the top that I thought we needed to see a little deeper to get out of lamentation mode, but I’m not sure I can deliver on that implicit promise. This moral transformation has been in process for a long time, longer than the Trump phenomenon itself. I doubt people on the outside of it can do very much to influence it.

So I’ll just end by referencing a partial defense of Hegseth by former New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer. Steinhauer begins by saying that Hegseth, because of his personal qualities and views, is a bad choice, but that his lack of traditional experience might actually be an asset. Trump wasn't wrong to look outside the normal circles for his Secretary of Defense because that normal circle had comprehensively discredited itself. She concludes: “We should oppose Mr. Hegseth as undeserving of the post he seeks. But we should not kid ourselves that another defense secretary ‘experienced’ in the ways of modern warfare is the military leader America wants today.”

If I’m right, though, Hegseth’s objectionable personal qualities and views are precisely what Trump’s movement is looking for, because they see them as signifiers of someone who is his own man who will not be cowed by anyone’s disapproval. And they value that more than any other quality, because without it they see no other virtue as possible.