Woe! It’s an indictment of our age that David Hogg is, as Hannah Horvath once claimed, the voice of his generation. Or, rather, thanks to the TikTokization of popular culture, he’s a slightly louder voice who jostles for attention in his teeming peer phylum of social media addicts.
Hogg is also a tragic character: failed by the institutions charged with his moral formation. Left unprotected as a disturbed school shooter murdered his classmates thanks to the cowardly tarried response of the Broward County police department, elevated to political influencer by the exploitive viral left, gifted ticket to Harvard University while being woefully unprepared, employed to funnel money to Democratic candidates via his own sympathy-drawing trauma—Hogg’s gone through a gauntlet of direct and sudden exposure, even as the proximate cause of his fame fizzles from public memory.
The blooming, then slow desiccation, of David Hogg has been a case study in America’s storied celebrity seedbed, in which that secret longing we harbor to be admired, respected, and emulated is watered by moneyed publicity farmers. “Modern celebrity is the screen on which mass daydreams are projected,” wrote Theodore Dalrymple. Off his brief star touch, Hogg’s Twitter has become the ethereal wall in which he projects and prolongs his aquamarine dreams, in the kludgiest, most searching way possible.
From this desperate reach for affirmation, Hogg has stumbled upon one of those stubborn things John Adams called “facts.” He tweeted: “I hope I’m wrong but if we lose in November I think the main reason why will be the number of young men of all races that are no longer Democrats.”
Rare Gen-Z praise moment: bully for David for even addressing what many of his cerulean stripe regard as a non-issue—the opinion of smelly, hairy, no-good, leering, dimwitted men. Who needs ‘em when with our destined-to-be Commander-in-Brat!
Hogg continues his concern, reflexively hedging with a misandric excuse: “There’s been a taboo about talking about this because we understandably are hesitant to make men a main point of conversation (given we have been for thousands of years) but we have a real problem to deal with.”
A “real problem to deal with” is too banal a phrase for an Ivy Leaguer like Hogg. It reeks of vague airport giftshop idiolect. Such vacuous wording is a stunt on his maturation, but comports nicely with the overall progressive dispensation that dictates, as one writer articulated, “it is impolite to speak one’s mind until given permission.”
Still, that “real problem,” despite the protestation of howling feminist cliques, is not a figment of Hogg’s Instagrammed imagination. The gender gap in candidate polling continues to yawn, similar to the splitting diploma divide. And it isn’t just made in America. Sex and education have become the biggest partisan determinants. The correlation is, as psephologists happily declare, statistically significant, but in one direction: women back Kamala Harris by 13 points over the thrice-married, twice-divorced, noted New York City cad Donald Trump. Meanwhile, men prefer Dominating Donald by just five points. Is it a sexist jibe to point out the fairer sex is more impassioned about their distaff designate and less politically even-keeled than their y-chromosomed counterparts? Mum’s the word, if I don’t want locked in the longhouse.
There are few things Beltway pundits enjoy more than yammering on the same well-trod topics, such as institutional distrust, working-class realignment, and, a perennial favorite for both sides, “go woke, go broke”-ism. (Yours truly is guilty of first-degree in all three.) The sex schism is fast becoming commentary fodder if only because men and women love discussing the ins, outs, and lurid in-betweens of men and women. Yet the question of why Republicans are the default macho party and Democrats resemble the Radcliffe quad is only superficially easy to answer.
Yes, there’s abortion and the feminine hue and cry for uterine autonomy. But the repeal of Roe v. Wade by the conservative-majority Supreme Court was not so much a pointed testosterone dart in red Dumbo’s hide than a surge of effeminacy within the blue burro. What explains the former, and what source makes it acute enough to raise Hogg’s hackles?
There are the “vitalist” influencers like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Jordan Peterson, who verbally champion a steely independence unencumbered by our societal scold’s bridle. (Such nervy back-kicks are double-edged, bleeding easily into entertaining perverse “history” and harem homemaking. And quitting all that guff you give Momma while finally Fantastiking your room.) Their “conservatism” is less electoral, more barstool, less modern, more Roman, less orthodox, more contrarian, even malignant. Neither is rah-rahing Republicans let alone leafleting swing districts for bland, clean-cut, Mitch McConnell clones.
That rebel—even felonious—spirit gives some answer to the Democrats’ drifting dude dilemma. So-called “traditional masculinity” is frowned upon, even ostracized and numbed by drugging in extreme instances, by influential cultural and epidemiological institutions. As Allan Bloom once argued, “[t]he souls of men—their ambitious, warlike, protective, possessive character—must be dismantled in order to liberate women from their domination.” The #MeToo moral panic took off in 2017, with its attendant lecher lists. Two years later, the American Psychological Association produced male pathology guidelines, warning that men often resort to “aggression and violence as a means to resolve interpersonal conflict.”
That it took America’s brightest psychoanalytical minds decades to discover that guys get physical over trivialities is yet another sign of our medical authorities’ blinkered outlook. Then again, it’s that kind of obvious insight—hirsute savages biffing one another from the Cro-Magnon age to the Anschluss—denied and derided by our “great and good” society determiners that invokes an inchoate desire to agitate, subvert, upend, and offend bluenose dogma. St. Aquinas said girls were capable of lying at 12, whereas it took boys to the age of 14 to learn proper deceit etiquette. (Obviously he never sired any children himself, monkish ascetics and all.) But striplings are far more adept at knocking down block buildings, tearing apart then eating Play-Doh figures, and kicking up a dust-dirt storm. A boy naturally challenges stringent instruction, mostly laid down by his mom or female kindergarten teacher.
On a more Marxist note, material dispossession can’t be ignored. Women outpace men in attainting college diplomas, which, in turn, are remunerated nicely in the knowledge economy. Lads lag in the new success sequence, with the chance for gainful employment in non-laptop jobs diminishing. LendingTree estimates that single ladies best men in homeownership. The female advantage in the commodity tug-o-war isn’t unique to the material. Younger men report having fewer friends than older gents—so fewer fellas for a fella to guy around with. “What life have you if you have not life together,” said T.S. Eliot, waxing on the indispensability of social relations to happiness. No surprise then that the “deaths of despair” haunting Rust Belt towns are prominent among males.
As Hannah Arendt observed, loneliness is a catalyst for authoritarianism. Republicans, it may come as a shock to New York Times subscribers, aren’t a party of despots. (Can you even maintain a straight face picturing Chuck Grassley don Schutzstaffel fatigues? Or Rand Paul drowning in a Khmer Rouge night-dark uniform?) But, despite their blue-jacket-khaki, comb-over appearance, the GOP represents a break from the corporate-media-political “nicety” norms, if only because the party leader is notorious for poking propriety in the eye.
If Hogg wants his side to be a welcome home to ungelded men, he better start partying with more Chads, and fewer Pajama Boys.
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