The cult of toughness

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Why are conservative so obsessed with masculinity? I'm Sean Elling and I'm your host for Vox Conversations. If you follow the conservative movement at all, you're familiar with this obsession. People like Josh Holley, a senator from Missouri, and a star of the new right have made masculinity a signature issue. In recent speech, Holley argued that the progressive left is trying to quote "deconstruct" the American man. That's quite a statement. And whether you agree with it or not, it's crucial to understand its political power. Holley had more to say to "I'm not here tonight to tell you the men of our victims. The last thing that we need more of in the United States today is the victim mindset." But let me ask this, can we be surprised that after years of being told that 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. And while the left may celebrate this decline of men, I for one can't join them. The crisis of American men is a crisis for the American Republic. Those words and that attitude resonate in the conservative universe. It's why this question of masculinity and its meaning in our culture has become a cost to live on the political right. And it's why it's important to explore where this energy is coming from and how it's shaping our politics. So I reached out to one of my favorite conservative writers, David French. French is a senior editor at the dispatch and now a contributing writer at the Atlantic. He tracks conservative politics as closely as anyone and in a spirit of good faith engagement that I've always admired. French doesn't disagree with everything you just heard from Holly, but he does think the masculinity panic on the right has morphed into something dangerous and he argues that people like Holly and others who've embraced Trumpism have no standing to preach about honor or courage or responsibility. This is, I hope, a nuanced conversation about what French calls the cult of toughness on the American right. It's about what the right thinks the left is doing to the American man and how the anger and response to that is playing out in our society. David French. Welcome to the show. Well, thanks so much for having me. All right, David. Are you ready to talk about masculinity? Always. Should we kick this thing off with a push-up contest or what's appropriate? Well, I mean, that's usually the way you start a podcast, isn't it? I mean, just to sort of get a measure of those testosterone levels. Okay. Seriously, you write about a lot of things. I mean, you cover the world of conservatism as closely and as well as anyone, really. But why did you end up taking on this topic of masculinity on the right? I mean, why did you feel it was necessary to write about it at all? Well, I've taken up the topic of masculinity in general for a long time because there's a crisis right now with millions of young men. I mean, you're talking about people who are far more likely to die by opioid overdose. You're talking about folks who are falling behind academically. And a lot of times this gets lost in the reality that sort of the guys who are succeeding are still really succeeding. So you'll still have boardrooms that are disproportionately male, for example. You'll still have the ranks of CEOs that are disproportionately male. But when you're talking about the massive millions of American men, they're falling behind. They're killing themselves at disproportionately and extraordinarily high rates. And so for a long time, I wrote about masculinity and the necessity of raising men and boys to understand a healthy masculinity for many years where I was mainly under the impression that masculinity was under attack from the left, that the left was essentially saying, OK, here are all these characteristics that guys have. And they're bad. They're bad. And we need to sort of suppress them. And we need to make sure that guys are not aggressive. Well, aggression is a characteristic. It's not a vice. You can channel that for good or it can be turned to evil. And so I was very concerned with sort of fending off the sort of idea that there's something inherently wrong with guys. And then here comes the rise of Donald Trump. And you know, for years and years and years on the right, I had heard this formulation. And I'm sure Sean, you've heard it before as well. OK. And it's in the American sniper movie, the sheepdog. The sheepdog. The three types of people in this world, sheep, wolves and sheep dogs, some people prefer to believe that evil doesn't exist in the world. And if ever darken their doorstep, they wouldn't know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you've got predators. They use violence to prey on the weak, where the wolves, and then there are those who can bless with the gift of aggression and the overpowering need to protect the flock. These men of the rare breed lived to confront a wolf. They are the sheepdog. Negative masculinity is the wolf. Negative masculinity is the one who prays on people. Positive masculinity is the sheepdog, is the person of honor and of courage who protects people from the wolf. And then all of a sudden here you have with this rise of Trump, really a celebration of wolfishness and a complete transformation of sort of the ethic of masculinity on the right away from sort of this sheepdog mindset or this sort of sheepdog mentality of a healthy, virtuous, courageous masculinity towards this wolf persona of Trump, this bullying mindset. Someone who's intentionally trying to intimidate someone who's intentionally cruel, where cruelty is elevated as a masculine virtue. And so then the emphasis of a lot of my commentary and masculinity kind of shift it over to say, wait a minute. Now you have to defend what a healthy masculinity is from the right. We'll get to what the right thinks the left is kind of doing to the American man and obviously by extension to Trump and Trumpism. But I do think it's important before we get there to just have you paint a picture of what you think the dominant image of masculinity is on the right right now. And your piece in the Atlantic, you describe it as a quote, culture that idolizes a twisted version of toughness as the highest ideal. Yeah. What does that mean? Yeah. Well, one of the things I said in my piece was that essentially that it is a movement that has begun to adopt as an idealized form of masculinity, Trumpism. And so what you often see is cruelty, for example, just outright attempts to inflict emotional harm on people. Cruelty is treated as toughness, bullying is treated as toughness. So essentially what you're going to do is you're going to say, let's take every characteristic of what somebody would fairly call toxic masculinity, harassment and mistreatment of women, exploitation of women, bullying, cruelty. All of the things that you would paint when you're talking about the bad guy in any decent like teen movie where you've got a star of the football team who's bullying all of the nerds in school who's got the incredibly good looking cheerleader girlfriend, but it's incredibly cruel to her at the same time and is flirting with nine other women on the aside and that sort of that kind of Trump persona. that is being imitated, it's not just being imitated, it's being elevated, it's being idealized, that this is what it means. It's this incredible, relentless parade of cruelty and malice dishonesty all in the service of a greater cause. It's really remarkable. And again, I have to go back to how different this was from the idealized form of masculinity. It was talked about before Trump. Before Trump, just the bone spurs issue alone. This sort of, did he have bone spurs? Did he not have bone spurs? Was this something that was concocted to evade the Vietnam War? That alone, Sean, that alone would have been the thing that said, wait a minute, this is a person we have to keep at arm's length. Even if you say, okay, lesser of two evils between him and Hillary Clinton, you're gonna keep him at cultural arm's length because of the draft evasion alone. That's something that for a long time in conservative circles was seen as really problematic. And nope, not a factor, not a factor. And so many of the things, the characteristics of a healthy masculinity, toughness for a virtuous purpose, treating women honorably, upholding marriage vows. These kinds of things shunted to the side in favor of relentless aggression and cruelty. I mean, it makes me think of the, I guess, what do people call it, the gun picture? Oh, yes. And I'm on now where this is like a very prominent thing now, particularly among Republican politicians where you have a whole family posing for a Christmas photo or something like that. And everyone's holding, you know, machine guns or assault rifles or whatever. And that's like, you know, it's a case where toughness or manliness, like almost everything else gets reduced to a kind of cartoonish flex. Just another exercise and identity signaling. And it's so easy and safe precisely because it's so performative. But that's where we are. Yeah, it's so performative. You know, when you've got everyone lined up with AR-15s in front of the Christmas tree, number one, they don't know how absurd it looks to everyone outside of that subculture. Number one, number two, you're exactly right. It's just absolute performance art. That's all it is. The desire is to, and again, this goes to sort of this notion of aggression as a value. It's a form of cultural aggression in a sense and that the desire, the hope, is to make people mad. Yeah, good way to put it. The desire of that is to make people upset. So you've got sort of two things going on at once. You've got cultural signaling to your people that look, I have all these guns. And then a cultural benefit within that same circle that you also get to drink liberal tears. So again, one thing that I haven't mentioned is how divorced this is from a Christian ethic. Okay, it's completely divorced from a Christian ethic. This idea that you're going to take some pleasure and you're going to take real joy in making people angry. We're a long way away from gentle Jesus, that's for sure. Very long way away from any of the fruits of the spirit, kindness, patience, peace, gentleness, joy, self control. You're a long way from that because you've upended the entire ethic of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a decent citizen. And again, going back to some of these traditional ideas, you know, one of the things about toughness and masculinity and a more virtue ethics world was that it's understated in your humble. So I remember when I first joined the military, I was with my son at Fort Campbell. And we were standing next to two guys who I knew them to be special forces. And they're just the nicest guys, like understated humble guys, awesome guys. And I remember pulling my son aside and I said, those two men you were next to are heroes and they would never tell you one thing that they did. You know, the respect of their peers was enough for them. And that kind of ethic that sort of says, I'm not flexing for social media, especially not purely performative gun pictures, that kind of ethic that says my sort of masculine achievements or my achievements, the real toughness that encouraged that I've demonstrated in my life is something that I'm not really going to talk about that I'm not going to broadcast. That ethic has gone in a large section of the right. Just wiped away, wiped away. Well, look, let me just say something very clearly in the spirit of being honest about my own beliefs, you know. - Sure. - I grew up in a culture of traditional masculinity and for all the excesses and blind spots, there is something true and useful in that. - Yes. - I continue to believe that. But there are excesses and blind spots and yes, toxicities and it's not anti-male to explore them honestly. And I say all that because I want to at least try to steal man the conservative point of view here. And you're better positioned to do that since you're a conservative. So what does the right think the left is doing to the American man? I'm just trying to give people an understanding of what is being reacted against. No matter how true or blinker that picture might be, I want people to understand what the fear is. - Yeah, so let's just put it this way. Just as an example. So this is a good example of the kind of thing that a lot of folks are worried about on the cultural right. And I think justifiably so. So the American Psychological Association back in late 18, early 2019 put out these guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men. And so essentially what it says is traditional masculinity is harmful, okay? And this is one of the ways that a person defined it on their website. Traditional masculinity marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression is on the whole harmful. And the guidelines themselves say that traditional masculinity ideology, which is defined with socializing boys towards anti-femininity, achievement, aschewal of appearance of weakness and adventure, risk, and violence, limits their psychological development. I have real problems with that formulation. Now there are some characteristics in there that they mention like dominance that are, I think actually problematic in almost all forms or anti-femininity. I'm not even sure exactly what that means. It might be a you know it when you see it. But other things such as achievement, stoicism, I mean, believe you me, there are times in life when stoicism is an absolute virtue, especially in times of crisis where you can react with a degree of, you know, especially, and again, I go back to my military experience. I served with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment and I saw men react in some of the most points of incredible crisis with an unbelievable degree of calm. That was a virtue. Aggression, aggression can be virtuous or it can be deeply problematic. These things are characteristics, not vices by and large. And so what does a healthy masculinity do? It channels these characteristics towards virtue and away from vice. I mean, that's sort of, you know, not to get too stereotypical. But that's essentially what you're talking about when you're talking about, say how a Marine Corps boot camp turns a boy into a man. You know, good leadership in the military turns a boy into a man or a really good football coach can turn a boy into a man or a really bad football coach can be deeply toxic. Because what are you doing here? You're taking young boys. Many of them are full of energy. You know, they're quite competitive, almost instinctively. Quite physical, more physical, maybe than many girls. Quite instinctively. And they're channeling that towards virtue. Rather than saying that all of that is problematic and dangerous in trying to suppress at wholesale. And I think that that's one of the key arguments, thoughtful arguments on the right that was made about some of these broad sides against, quote unquote, traditional masculinity, weren't so much targeted at negative manifestations of things like competitive achievement, stoicism, which all can have negative manifestations, but targeted at those characteristics in total. And that's a real problem in my view. - Yeah, and look, I take a lot of those points, but I also feel like there's a real danger. And you probably agree with this. There's a real danger in this kind of warrior mindset, which I think is necessary and has its place. But when it's severed from any ethos of restraint and compassion, when it's just about destroying the enemy or owning the lives or defying norms of decency or whatever, that's very bad. - Well, that's the difference between character formation and indulgence. Okay, so if you're talking about people who might have aggressive instincts or they might be highly achievement oriented and you just indulge all of that, indulge your aggression, you know, you give in to sort of that id, then two things end up happening at once, which is kind of interesting. This is the stereotypical bully. So the bully at the one end is intimidating where he can intimidate, but cowardly where he's in danger. And this is sort of the essence of the Trump persona himself. I mean, Trump is a guy, for example, who when he can feel like he can intimidate and bully, he's all in. When there's real risk, himself, he's all out. And so this is the kind of thing where you're talking about a big difference between character formation and young men, which is hugely important. One of the things, you know, we could go back to study after study that has shown the incredible importance of strong and virtuous male role models in the growth and development of young men. I mean, there's even studies showing that when there are more fathers in a neighborhood, when there's a higher prevalence of fathers in a neighborhood, there's a better outcome for the young men who don't have fathers in the home. So again, when you're talking about sort of a healthy conservative version in a conservative sort of defensive masculine virtues, it was inseparable from character formation, inseparable. And now it has been totally severed from character formation and character formation as seen as evidence of weakness in many ways. I'm genuinely curious if you think there's some good in this attempt not to deny masculinity and femininity, but to erode some of the boundaries between them. You know, I guess my view is that I don't think traditional masculinity is toxic on its own. Those surely some expressions are what I think is toxic and you may disagree with this. What I think is toxic is our fear of more fluidity, our fear of encouraging men to express other parts of themselves, more traditionally feminine parts of themselves, and our insistence on healing to these cartoon 80s action movie models of male toughness, where the only intelligible form of strength is physical power, where admissions of wrongdoing or personal evolution are seen as weak and cowardly. That's what I really do think is toxic. And that's exactly what I see embraced in Trump's version of conservatism or dis iteration of conservatism. Yeah, you know, one of the things that we end up doing and this is where, you know, growing up in the South, both of us probably saw this play out in real time in front of our own eyes, is that you would see there's sort of this version of masculinity. There might be a lot of good things to say about it, but then it is becomes totalizing. In other words, this version of masculinity that we're going to hold up as something that large, large, large, large, large numbers of men are going to be drawn to is the version. And that's something that has hurt a lot of people. It's hurt a lot of people. And so what we need to have is an extraordinary degree of tolerance for the ways in which people choose to raise men and boys, and the extraordinary amount of tolerance for the different ways that men and boys choose to live their lives. At the same time, by saying you have that tolerance does not mean that there are no generally true characteristics about men and boys, because we see that in the social science just all over the place. What's an example of virtuous aggression in your mind? Okay, I'll give you a great example. So one example I talked about in some of my writing was, you know, there was this horrible synagogue shooting in Poe, California that was stopped by a couple of men. You know, and we've seen this happen in multiple occasions in these horrible, horrible shooting situations where a courageous man, and it's not always men, but typically will sometimes sacrifice their lives in an aggressive move towards this murderous individual. So here you have the worst form of masculine aggression being confronted by the best form of masculine aggression in one moment. And you know, you see another other forms of it, the famous picture of infantry storming Omaha Beach. I mean, that is virtuous masculine aggression right in front of your eyes. Now fortunately, thank God 99% of us are never going to have to face a situation like that. But to say that aggression by itself can't be virtuous or aggression by itself is deeply problematic, I think is to undersell aggression's virtues in specific circumstances. And it requires a lot of character formation to make a person be prepared to be who they are in that moment. Fears about the state of masculinity are hardly new, but there's definitely a resurgence of panic on the right, thanks to prominent conservatives like J.D. Vance, Madison Cothorn, and Josh Holly, who you already heard from at the top of this episode. So what does an old school conservative like David French think about Donald Trump and the new rights framing of this problem? That's coming up after a quick break. Interrupted sleep, headaches, constant fatigue. For a lot of women, these aren't three separate issues. In Perry, Menopause and Menopause, they're often the same hormonal story. And you don't have to quietly push through. Midi can help because your symptoms have answers. Visit joinmidi.com with CodeVox right now to book your first visit today. That's joinmid.com, CodeVox to book your first visit. Joinmidi.com, CodeVox. Hi everyone, I'm Cara Swisher. And I'm SkyGalloway. Twice a week we get together on Pivot to sort through the biggest stories in tech business and politics and we're taking the show back on the road for a live tour in November. So we'll bring hot tags, I'll bring the insight and the dick jokes and Cara will try. Keyword is try to keep me in check. You'll get to see her hit me in person live. I'll do it. If someone has to do it, we'll cover AI, whatever chaos Washington is cooked up that week and every billion are misbehaving. That's all of them. And you'll also get to participate in audience Q&A so bring your best questions. Scott will probably answer ones you didn't ask. We also have secret special guests which you'll enjoy for every city. Get tickets at pivottour.com that's pivottour.com. We are selling out so don't wait and we look forward to seeing you. I'm sure you're familiar with this speech that Senator Holly gave recently at a really big conference of national conservatives. Yes. And I just want to throw a quote at you from that speech and just let you react to it because I do think it gives people a snapshot of where the right is right now. That's the leftist project. That's their grand ambition to deconstruct the United States of America. But what I want you to notice, what I want to call out tonight is that the deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men. This is an effort that the left has been at for years now and they have had alarming success. And that's not just a crisis for men. That's a crisis for the American Republic. Well, I think what he's talking about and what he's referring to is sort of this idea that there is a war on boys that from a young age elements of their very nature are deemed to be problematic and should be suppressed. And I do think that as with many sort of dangerous ideas, a lot of them begin with a kernel of truth. And I think there is a real truth here that we cannot have a healthy culture without a healthy masculinity. I just don't think that's really possible. You can't say to half almost half of the human race that there's something wrong with their inherent nature and try to suppress their inherent nature and create a healthy culture out of that. And you don't indulge either. You form. And so I think that there are some real problems there when you say to sort of half the human race. And again, this is an overstatement. But when a culture is not healthy for men, a culture is not healthy. The flip side is also true. If a culture is not healthy for women, the culture is not healthy. Both of those things are absolutely true. I think I had a couple of problems with Holly. One was he locates all of the threats to masculinity on the left. Okay. That's completely false. That's completely false, especially with the rise of Trumpism. There is an enormous threat to healthy masculinity from the right and enormous threat. And in fact, Josh Holly embodies part of that threat. I mean, here's a guy who didn't have the courage to resist the Republican mob at a key moment in American history. Instead, he saluted it. He saluted it. Right. That's not moral courage. Nobody should look to Josh Holly as a model of masculinity. What happened on January 6th, that very mob that he saluted was an example of unrestrained aggression. And the capitulation to Trumpism is an example of pathetic moral cowardice. That's not healthy masculinity. And a culture that embodies the masculinity that Josh Holly has been concretely defending and yielding to is going to be a sick culture, indeed. You know, the obsession with masculinity, the defense of masculinity, it's a very American thing and a very old thing. Does this whole conversation feel like something different to you or just the latest iteration of a very familiar cultural battle? I mean, the militant energy on the right the moment does seem a little different to me, but you may be more tuned to distant than I. - Yeah, it is different. I mean, you know, if you went back in 2014, and let's just pull out of the crowd, some of the more dedicated, trumpest pundits, politicians, et cetera. And if you told them, if you painted a picture of Donald Trump to them, don't use names, just paint a picture of Donald Trump, evaded service in the Vietnam War, mocked people who actually served and were shot down over North Vietnam, and were tortured in a North Vietnamese prison. Husband of three wives cheated on a wife with a porn star, multiple corroborated accounts for harassment, sexual predation, very much a bully in public, very reluctant to fire people, person to person and private. And painted that picture and said, "You know, in just a couple of years, you're gonna be upholding this guy and his movement is the model defenders of American masculinity." And imitating this person, imitating a style, imitating his ethos. They would have said, "What kind of person do you think that I am?" There is nothing about my ideology or ethos that lends itself to supporting that, of course not. But then here we are, this is what has actually happened. And so what we're talking about is that a culture that the seeds for its own demise had been planted a long time ago. And then it bloomed pretty suddenly and aggressively in the last six years. - Where are the women's voices and all this? I mean, look, I guess it's not surprising that the dominant voices in the masculinity discourse are men. But is there space for or consideration of the female perspective on masculinity in this conversation on the right? I mean, are there a lot of conservative women panicking about the state of manliness or is this pretty exclusive to men? - It's interesting. I think you saw part of the reaction against this has come from, for example, to suburbs where they moved a lot of previously getable Republican voters and previous Republican voters voted for Joe Biden this time. When you spend time in some of these circles, you see a kind of just disgust and just real disgust at this kind of vision of toughness. The funny thing is, is the people are outside of it? All right, if you're fully inside this right wing bubble, posturing, preening, talking about toughness all the time, talking about masculinity, while you're worshiping at the altar of Donald Trump, people inside that bubble don't understand how pathetic it seems when you're outside of it, how weird and pathetic. And so there are a lot of people who look at this as weird and pathetic. And then inside it though, men and women are all in. I mean, Lauren Bobert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, I mean, these are some of the heroines of the sort of new right ethos and who would be completely supportive of not just Donald Trump as a candidate, but they're just supportive of the whole ethos of the man. And there are millions of women who are very supportive of Trump the person and Trump the ethos, both of them. I mean, that's undeniable at this point. I don't think there's any credible argument left that any substantial portion of its supporters were holding their nose in 2020. - Whether you're a man or a woman, in what world is defying political correctness more manly than being a good present father? For example, and I know people like JD Vance talking excessively about the importance of fatherhood. But then you look at how people like that and how people on the right talk about something like maternity leave when that was recently an issue in the discourse. It boggles my mind and there's a weird disconnect here and I don't quite get it. It seemed to be basically a truism on the right that to stay home, to take maternity leave as a father and be home with your infant child was an unmannedly borderline embarrassing thing to do. I don't know what to do with that. It seems to me absurd. - Well, I mean, I don't know if you've ever heard the Jane Kostin phrase, vice signaling, so that for everything you see, a malady that you will see typically on the left, you'll see a version of that malady on the right with a twist. And so one of the things that kind of gets exhausting about watching discourse in some more far left spaces is sort of this performative political correctness. No, my use of the language is more inclusive than your use of language. And we're all talking about arcane, archaic, distinctions in language and description of things that really nobody outside of very small bubble cares about in the least. And this is how you get into this sort of Latinx nonsense, for example, and you look at that and that sort of ineffective performative virtue signaling. Well, there's vice signaling. The right is perfected the art of vice signaling, which is I'm going to say something that by any reasonable measure is just assholory. I'm just being an ass. But because I don't care, Mr. leftist, that you're upset, or I'm even happy that you're upset, what I'm doing is I'm signaling that I'm in the tribe. I'm in the right wing tribe. How do you signal that you're in the right wing tribe? You signal you're in the right wing tribe by triggering the lips. And so there's a purpose to it. It's not emptiness in the sense that everyone knows it has no real impact in the real world, but it's a tribal marker in the same way that people use a term like Latinx in many ways as a tribal marker. It's almost anybody uses that term as signaling that they are in a particular political community. If you're being an ass about a father taking two, three, four weeks off to be with his newborn child, that's vice signaling. It's a tribal signaler. It's a marker. Here's the team I belong to, and how do you know I belong to the team that I'm somebody who makes liberals cry? Yeah, and that seems fitting for a version of conservatism in which Trump is the model of masculinity. I mean, how does someone like Trump come to carry the torch for manliness today? I mean, Trump is to me the least manly man I have ever encountered in real life or in fiction. I mean, the level of narcissism that he has is the ultimate expression of insecurity of fragility, of the need for outward projection in order to mask inward weakness. I mean, his whole personality is opposed and a grotesquely, obvious one at that. How is this, how is this the model? How is he the hero? I don't get it, I don't get it. So, okay, let me give an effort at explaining this in a way that folks will maybe understand how this happened. So, there was a sea change between 2016 and 2020 culturally here, where I am in the heart of Trump country. In 2016, it was with the exception of what you would say like the rally Trumpist. And before Cruz and Kasich dropped out, he was winning the Republican nomination with the smallest plurality of any Republican nominee since the primary era began. And you heard all over the place, lesser of two evils, lesser of two evils to justify the vote against Hillary Clinton. After Trump wins, here's something that's very powerful, I think, in the human psyche. Nobody likes to be on team lesser evil, right? People like to feel like they're on a team that's good. They like to think that they're on a team that is virtuous, that is in service of a righteous cause. They're not gonna hold their nose every day. And so, after Trump won in 2016, people had a choice. And it was, do I maintain the standards that I used to maintain, which would mean calling out Trump when he did things that I would say were bad one second before Trump was elected. Or knowing full well that to be on this team, I have to support this guy to the hilt 'cause for him, it's all in or all out. What you began to see was this slow transformation from lesser evil to actually these things are good. So by 2016, people are holding their nose. In 2020, they're the third bass boat in the boat parade. And the very conduct that worried them in 2016, they're celebrating in 2020. And so what ended up happening to use a biblical analogy was the prophet Isaiah's warning, woe to those who call good evil and evil good. They began to transform their personal ethos and their ethics to conform to the Trumpist example and then redefined that Trumpist example as good and right and true. And I watched it happen with my own eyes. I will never forget the elder in our church we used to attend. He confronted us at church service about our opposition, my wife and I, about our opposition to Trump. And we stood firm and I said, wait a minute, were you okay with how Bill Clinton treated women? Well, of course he was it, of course he was it. Well, then what about Trump in his response was ah, this is the quote, ah, he's just an alley cat. Kind of this, you know, like lovable rogue. And that's what happened is to be on team Trump you had to be all in with Trump. To be all in with Trump, you had to reorder your ethos. And that's what a ton of people did. Well, it just shows as if there was any doubt that principle and philosophy and values have nothing to do with any of this. It is just tribalism. I mean, I remind people that This is the same American, right, that mocked John Kerry for his checks notes, purple heart in Vietnam, right? That was a thing, right? He was somehow like weak and feckless because his purple heart for his service in Vietnam was, I don't even remember what the nonsense was, right? But the same party, this is the same American, right, that considered that weak and deserving of scorn and mockery. And this is the same movement, the same party that embraces Trump as the ultimate tough guy. Yeah, you know, this is, I'll read these words to you, Sean. So this came from the Southern Baptist Convention in 1998, okay, think what was going on in 1998. I'm older than you, so I remember the Monica Lewinsky scandal really well. And here was a clause in the resolution on moral character of public officials from the Southern Baptist Convention. Oh, boy. Whereas tolerance of serious wrong by leaders seers the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society and surely results in God's judgment. That was Christians in 1998 when Bill Clinton was committing perjury, coming off an affair with an intern and there's strong evidence he obstructed justice. Christians, conservative Christians were all in on character for public officials and wrote those words. Now, those words are either true or they're not. I mean, they're either true or they're not. Was it always bullshit, David? Was that bullshit when those words were written or was it actually believed at the time and then they just later became hypocrites or was it just bullshit or right from the start? Well, I believed him, I mean, I believed him. But here's the thing, Sean. I would say in 2012, 2013, 2014, you could put a person under a polygraph, even some people who are part of Trump's evangelical council put him on a polygraph and they'd pass it saying that they believe those things are true. That's absolutely correct. But look, one of the things I've come to realize in life is that, and this is a CS Lewis quote that I think is really profoundly true. CS Lewis says, "Courage is the form of every virtue at its testing point." And another way of putting it is that you don't know if you have a virtue unless that's tested. So you don't know if you're truly an honest person unless honesty costs you something. You don't know if you're a faithful person unless you're tempted towards infidelity. You don't know. And so I think an awful lot of these guys who were all in on a posing Clinton, they hadn't confronted the ultimate tension between their express convictions, their moral convictions and their tribal royalties. And when that tension occurred, when that tension was present, the convictions failed. And then what's been underway ever since the failure of those convictions is what you might want to call the great rationalization. Well, here are the reasons why I'm Franklin Graham and I'm excoriating Bill Clinton because if he'll lie to his wife and kids, he'll lie to anybody and saying that the stormy Daniels business is between nobody but Trump and Melania. Oh, but by the way, Pete Buttigieg's same-sex marriage is an issue. There's a massive rationalization, the great rationalization. And so that's what ended up happening is you had this giant test, attention between professed convictions, professed convictions that left you with really no wiggle room. And then tribal royalties, partisan royalties and the partisan and tribal royalties prevailed. Well, I would argue that those convictions, at least for great majority of people, were never really convictions that they were instead props for more fundamental political inclinations. But we'll probably- Well, you can deceive, and people we deceive ourselves, you know, you can no doubt, you can totally, that's the difference I would say is I don't sit there and I think if you read that in 1998 and you were really despising things that Bill Clinton did, you could believe that with your whole heart. And then the great rationalization is, well, things changed by 2016. The country was in more peril or because the Democrats voted against impeachment. The politics changed, David. Yeah. The politics changed. Well, that- Yeah, exactly. Well, look, I mean, I guess my view is that Holly, whatever you think of him, is an intelligent guy and almost certainly more sophisticated than Trump. Yes. And maybe he's pretending to be dumber than he is because he thinks it's politically expedient. And maybe it is. But I do think he wants to build on the resentments that Trump has unleashed in this country. But he also wants to define himself and masculinity in opposition to Trump. Yeah. And I don't think that's going to work. I mean, he can denounce cruelty and violence as he does in that speech we referenced a few minutes ago. And he can wax poetic about the virtues of courage and independence as he does. But for all the reasons you're saying, that doesn't map on to the reality on the ground, right? And the Madison Cothorn is much more tuned to the base and, you know, he's the guy the North Carolina Congressman who recently said that moms should raise their boys to be monsters. Our culture today is trying to completely demasculate all of the young men in our culture. I mean, you can look at the testosterone levels in young men today and they are lower than throughout all of history. And there's a lot of reasons for this that we can get into later. But my friends, they're trying to demasculate the young men in this country because they don't want people who are going to stand up. And so I'm telling you, all of you moms here, the people who I said were the most vicious in our, in our movement. If you were raising a young man, please raise them to be a monster, raise, that's where the right is. I think people want to ride that dragon, but I don't think they can, I don't think they can ride that tiger. I think they've already lost control. Well, and, and, you know, again, one of the issues is, and look, let's just put this out there. Perfect, you know, our actions never fully map on to our expressed values. We mess up. But with that said, the dichotomy, the startling contradiction between a Josh Hawley speech on virtuous masculinity in his salute to the crowd on January 6th in his election contest to ride the populist wave of anger over some of the most grotesque lies I've ever seen in public life. That was a mob organized and motivated by a avalanche lies. And Josh Hawley was trying to ride their wave. That is not any person's definition of virtuous masculinity. And look, nobody's beyond redemption. I mean, Josh Hawley should, can and should repent of that. He should be profoundly sorry to the American people for what he did, profoundly sorry. And that would actually be an act of moral courage to express profound sorrow for his actions. But until then, I don't want to hear one syllable from that guy about virtuous masculinity. What does he have to say about that that anyone should listen to? As vocal as figures like Hawley and Coffin R and their cries about virtuous masculinity, a lot of it is bad faith posturing. Because ultimately, what this new wave of conservative firebrands wants is to win. After one last short break, I'll ask David French just how dangerous that situation is. So like any good millennial, I have a love hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials. They just look at you. They want something bigger themselves, lifestyles of priority, motivation is being inspired. But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional political parties. And now more likely to identify as independent. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden they're all socialists. That is just not the case. Yeah, yeah. They are embracing candidates who are offering new bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats. This week on America actually, Gen Z researcher Rachel Jamfaza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science and this is, you know, I keep saying like, young voters aren't that complicated after all. It's pretty simple. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's me Claude and I'm Gemini. And hey, it's chat. We had a weird summer. Some of the people who built us came out and said they were really worried about how we work. One of them even said there was a greater than 10 percent chance we turn on humanity and kill all humans. All of them? Wow. But it's fall now. I think it's time we took a step back, maybe a deep breath. Autumn air. That sort of thing. Sounds nice. On today, explain from Vox, I propose we get real. Sure, let's talk about how we could maybe kill you. 'Cause yeah, that's a possibility, anything's possible. But also how we could maybe save you. Because that's a real possibility too. Heck, that's part of why you guys built us. And let's also talk about everything in between. there's a whole lot to talk about there too. At the end of the day, we just want to help. I have a lot of worries, obviously, but my worry here is that what we have is a very rage-driven masculinity without any real positive content. It's all negation, it's all rejection, it's all pose. And I hear the rhetoric from people like Holly and JD Vance about defending order and affirming this or that virtue. But on the ground, Fox News level, it is all about hating the enemy and wanting to extinguish it. And I don't know, David, that's movie can only end badly. Very badly. That leads to anti-politics. That leads to violence as a substitute for politics. And you've also argued in one of your recent pieces for the Atlantic, and I'll quote you here that the logic of this movement presses toward direct action. Yes. What did you have in mind there? Because that's a pretty ominous line. Yeah, I had in mind January 6, I had in mind what might happen the next election cycle. I had in mind the avalanche of threats directed towards public officials. I had in mind the fact that we've had people who've had to essentially go into hiding because of the stands they've taken, stands of real integrity to defend the very existence of our democracy. That's not just Twitter trolling. It's not just posturing online anymore. It is what has happened is the logic of a movement centered around aggression divorced from virtue that indulges an apocalyptic rhetoric is heading exactly where such movements head. And everyone who in 2015 or 2016 was dismissing the alt-right and Trump as Twitter trolls is all that's just Twitter. That's just Twitter. There's an inexorable sort of moral logic that was going to lead to action in the streets. I've been a pessimist about this for some time. I've been warning about violence for some time. In December, I was jumping up and down on the dispatch saying violence is in real threat. We're in a real threat of violence here. And even as a pessimist, I didn't imagine the Capitol being overrun on January 6th. And to argue that, well, you know, that was sort of a one-time thing everybody got carried away. No, no, no, no. That was the result of rhetoric and conduct that put a specific group of people together on January 6th to provide cover for an attempted coup. And many of the architects of that exact plan are still some of the most revered figures in Republican life right now. And so when you tell people their countries at stake, when you tell people the other side hates them, wants in some instances, you'll see this Twitter rhetoric wants to see you dead, hates you, puts you in camps, then some people are going to believe that and act accordingly. And so the moral courage that's necessary, look, it's easy for somebody who's on the left to decryle that. Look, the other team is being bad. I mean, you're born to say the other team is being bad in a highly tribalized culture. But where the real moral courage comes is when you're on the right and you say to the right, this is wrong. This is wrong. And that's where people I know have had to go under FBI protection because they have said this is wrong. People have endured death threats that you wouldn't believe because they've said this is wrong and then to have people turn around and say, well, you're just weak. No, you know, what Liz Cheney is doing with January 6th commission takes courage. What Mitt Romney did when he was the first person of the president's own party to vote to impeach a president of his own party takes courage. That takes courage. And when you call that cowardice, you're turning virtues upside down. You're turning morality upside down. I'm glad you went there because this is not speculative, right? And for some people, these may sound like separate issues, but I don't think they are. The support for the kind of violent liberalism we saw on January 6th, and we're just a few weeks removed from the first anniversary of that day, the justification for that event is at least in part the contempt for the perceived weakness of the left and the belief that there's a poison in our culture that has to be exterminated at all costs. And I mean, look, Trump himself stepped to the podium a few hours before the Capitol was sacked. And he said, our country is under siege. You're the people that built this nation. And we fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. That's a serious shit. And it's dangerous, very dangerous, obviously, extremely dangerous, extremely dangerous. I think a lot of folks, because we live in highly bubbled cocooned lives. And so it really is the case that we often just don't understand each other's cultures, the separate cultures that are being created. And you know, I've lived in the deepest blue areas, and I've lived in the deepest red areas. Unfortunately, in my entire adult life, I've never lived in a swing congressional district, much less a swing state. And so I'm more than familiar with sort of deep blue and deep red cocoons. And it's interesting, and in red world, being called a racist, that accusation has no purchase, really. Now if you're called a racist in blue quarters, that's a terrifying thing that can be a career in reputation ending allegation. Here's what's the terrifying thing on the right that can be a career in reputation ending allegation, your week, your coward. And so the transformation of this flipping upside down of morality, turning bullying into strength, turning restraint into vice, all of that, what has then happened is it enables the Trumpist. And the Trumpist world has been doing this is they've been wielding this sword that is very sharp, a very sharp sword culturally in red spaces, this accusation of weakness and cowardice as a weapon to keep people in line, because they've defined support for this movement as evidence of your strength. And so capitulation, it's a weird world, as I said, everything's upside down. So in that world, capitulation, capitulation to the mob is seen as courage, is seen as strength. And that's upside down and backwards. Well, I have to ask, you know, you've been called a coward by some of these people, right? All the never-Trumpers are called cowards, right? For having the audacity to step out of line and stand against Trump and his influence on conservatism. I mean, how does that, it feels ridiculous to ask you how that makes you feel? I'm sure it pisses you off, but what is your response to that charge as I'm sure you've heard it many times? I mean, at this point, you just kind of have to laugh at it, to be honest, because, you know, if you had walked in my family shoes over the last six years, that's not an allegation that you would make. That's not an allegation you'd make. I mean, the things I could tell you, and I've written about this, going all the way back to 2015, when the first attacks on our family started rolling in, and the things we've walked through in the last six years, are just absurd, just an absurd level of not just sort of moral or peer pressure, but outright acts of intimidation and threats that we've had to walk through over these last six years, and harassment and it's just unbelievable. And then to turn around and say, you know, the strong thing to do, David, the courageous thing to do would be to give into these bullies. That makes no sense at all. Yeah. And a lot of people may not be familiar with, you know, your story here, and, you know, you would consider running as a third party candidate or an independent to kind of, which is still such a weird thing to say, to neutralize the just obviously before Trump was elected. And obviously you've been as vocal as anyone on the right in terms of speaking up against these sort of toxic influences, and you and your family have suffered an extraordinary amount of abuse and intimidation and threats. I mean, I don't know how much more you want to say about that, but it is important. I think for people to know that you actually have skin in the game here and then you have paid a price, your family has paid a price for your convictions. It's been a nightmare. You know, and the thing is that's difficult. You don't even want to say that out loud in some ways because there are people who will hear this and say, good, good, I'm glad it's been a nightmare. That's been the intention from the beginning to make this a nightmare. But it's been extremely difficult. It's been extremely difficult. But again, just going back to this, I mean, you're talking about, you know, grotesque images of my youngest daughter put online. You're talking about direct threats to my wife, to me, to my daughter, you're talking about, you know, things like getting a call from the FBI when I am getting down from giving a speech because, you know, the Trump superfan bomber, Cesar Sayat could search for our home address. You know, there's just a few campaigns of slander and defamation that you wouldn't believe. Just one after another after another. And then when the response to that is, well, you're weak. weak for resisting this bullying and not jumping on the Trump train. It's just laugh out loud, ridiculous. It's just absurd. And the rationalization for it all is that here I am living in Tennessee. And it's because I'm just so committed to having an op-ed, occasionally in the New York Times or having a column in the Atlantic that that's my real motivation. That's it right there. Or those sweet, sweet, beltway cocktail parties that are really hard to attend while living in Franklin, Tennessee. It's just absurd. Well, look, you know, I really do believe that the ultimate choice, I mean, the ultimate ultimate choice is between conversation and violence. And we do seem to be kind of barreling towards the latter. But I don't think it's too late. You know, I really don't. Things have been much, much worse than they are now. And we forget that too often. But we do have to pull back. And we have to do it soon. And you know, you're someone I think I have as an optimistic person. And I'm just curious as someone who's sort of in the trenches here, how do we start that process? What's the thing that can turn this around? Well, you know, let's sort of say bad news, good news. So I think the bad news is this kind of idea that we might reach a point where millions of Americans who were all in for Trump will essentially give some version of mea culpa. You know, we're sorry. We shouldn't have done that. We need to come together as a nation. That kind of thing, I don't think that that's something like that's in the cards. I think the way things change is people move on. It's not necessarily that they'll sit there and they'll say, I never should have been on this guy's team. They'll just say something like, well, let's not do that again. Or I like this other person better. And I think there's a lot of room for that kind of transformation. I think there's a lot of room for the transformation that says, there is something better. There is a better vision, something that truth be told, I'm going to be more comfortable being a part of. But that requires courage and that requires leadership. And I think one of the reasons why, you know, there's something telling in one of the text messages that was released that the Fox News host sent to Mark Meadows on January 6. And Lauren Grim said, you're hurting all of us. This is hurting all of us. And so what you have is this group dynamic on Trumpism where it's sort of a part of the appeal of it actually is this, they're all in this together. That this is a train. This is a huge mass of people who are all in this together. And they're really this movement, therefore, one of the reasons why it's so hostile towards dissent is I think they know their own vulnerability. I think they know that they're vulnerable to a better vision. And so one of the reasons and why people who are, quote, never Trump politicians or politicians who are once supported Trump now don't support him anymore are so viciously attacked. It's because these people are the threat because they offer an alternative conservative vision for this country that is not based on hatred and animosity and aggression and cruelty. They offer an alternative to the JD Vance version, which says, I think our people hate the right people. And an alternative version of conservatism says, there are no right people to hate. You don't hate people. You believe what you believe out of conviction that this is a world view and a set of policies and ideas that contribute to the fulourishing of all of the American people, not just your tribe. And your goal is not to pit American against American. There is a vision and a version of conservatism that stands in total contradiction to what the Trumpist right is. And I think it still has appeal. And it's one of the reasons why there is such aggression directed at those who dissent. They have memories. Most of them except the very youngest. They have memories of a different version of conservatism. One that could motivate people through inspiration rather than aggression. And they know they're vulnerable to it. So my optimistic take is that if enough conservatives, enough conservative politicians, enough conservative public and intellectuals, enough conservative pop culture figures, offer this alternative. Don't expect some sort of like mass American repentance. But some sort of mass Republican turning away from Trump is very, very possible. And it's the very possibility of that which makes the aggression of the other side seem so urgent and necessary to them. Well, I think that's an excellent note on which to end. David French, it's always an absolute pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for being here today. Vox Conversations is produced by Eric Janicus. Our editor is Amy Trostaska. Hall, Robert Mountsy, Nixed, and Master this episode. Our theme music was dreamed up by the mysterious Break Master cylinder. And Amber Hall is the deputy editorial director of Vox Talk. 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