November 22, 2005

LIBERALISM AND THE FEMINIZATION OF THE AMERICAN MALE

“…Every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood…”(Horsefeathers bolding)--Gen. George S. Patton in his speech to the troops before D-Day, June 6, 1944

        Horsefeathers has argued that contemporary Liberalism, as embodied by the Democratic left, has devolved into a set of limp-wristed attitudes, a self-flattering pose, rather than a political philosophy. As Paul Hollander trenchantly put it:
“For many “being on the left” has come to mean not specific policies but a diffuse sentimental claim on virtue, hope, and morality—as for example for Richard Rorty who associates the left with the idea of “defending the weak against the strong.” Those still sympathetic to these political ideologies and systems that supposedly embodied these good intentions see themselves as idealists, people of strong and pure feelings, selfless critics of evil and especially greed. Their sense of identity is durably stamped by such increasingly and irrepressibly sentimental self-conceptions. William Sloan Coffin, the venerable “activist” and social critic of the 1960s tellingly entitled his recent “essays on public morality” as “The Heart is a Little to the Left.”
        Among the shared sentimental beliefs of such people is the belief that human beings are naturally good, that aggression is entirely a reaction to frustration, whether in small children forced to submit to adult rules, or in adults forced to live under the cruel imperatives of market driven economies. It is useless to point out that reality contradicts their fantasies, that, for example, the sentimental yearnings for an egalitarian, socialist world always lead to practical disaster. Try telling that to, say, Tom Friedman, as he searches for socialist utopia in China or Israel. The dream lives on because human nature remains unchanged. Adhering to a utopian fantasy of a world free of conflict serves as a defense against the unwelcome awareness of aggression in oneself. Thus the most virulent spewing of hatred towards the President is not regarded as evidence of the haters’ own irrational aggression, but rather is explained as merely reactive to the duplicitous machinations of Mr. Bush. For the same reason, it is useless to cite the lessons of history—that war is a never ending aspect of the human condition, and that appeasement never works. A very bright liberal friend who recently read Michael Shaara’s historical novel, Killer Angels, about the bloody Battle of Gettysburg, told me she finished it with the thought, “I hate war. We should never go to war”. When I pointed out that the civil war was a necessary war---as Shaara himself made clear—she retorted “there is no necessary war, they should have negotiated a settlement.” The natural political home of such utopians, the Democratic party, is dominated by similar self flattering pacifist sentiments, loudly and aggressively amplified by wordsmith elites on campuses, in the media and the entertainment world. It is a feature of the contemporary Liberal mind to be unaware of its own simmering rages, the more intense for being barred from consciousness.
        Why has liberalism, once a muscular political philosophy, become a fuzzy, sentimental and self referential set of politically correct beliefs, incapable of self criticism? We would suggest it is because, with few exceptions, the elite class of wordsmiths (MSM, Ivy league liberal arts faculties, school teachers, the therapeutic professions, Hollywood) were, as children, good little boys and girls, who did well in class (see Robt. Nozick’s essay: Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism) and were especially facile with words. They were the teachers’ pets, eager to please and quick to discern what made teachers smile with delight. They were not the kids who enjoyed learning physical skills in shop or auto mechanics class, nor were they kids who developed persistence and mastery of tough challenges.
        What Nozick omitted to mention is that the future wordsmiths were those children who devalued the masculine virtues they lacked, in favor of feminine ones. As P.C. adults, they happily adopted the utopian fantasy that no real differences exist between male and female. Verbal ingenuity came easily. In gym, they receded into the corner while their less verbally skilled classmates found outlets for their aggression in physical competition and team sports. They scorned shop classes and auto-mechanics in favor of ‘creative writing’. They never learned the lessons of the schoolyard. They were too busy writing poems about peace, love and understanding.
        Horsefeathers is grateful that, despite his family’s academic background, and its high estimate of formal education, he grew up on the tough streets of the East Bronx. There, being one of only a few Jews in a largely Irish and Italian area, he learned to deal with the world as it is, not as one wished it to be. It soon became clear that manhood required demonstrating physical skills, but even more importantly, physical determination. Thus, when teased about wearing eyeglasses, or being a ‘Christ killer’, the alternatives were either submitting, making nice, in the hope that it would stop---but then how would one get to play in the basketball game?—or doing something active to stop it. One day, when a penknife hurtled past Horsefeathers' ear and rattled against the school yard fence, he decided enough was enough and took after his tormenter. After inflicting a bloody nose and wrestling him to the ground and making him admit defeat, Horsefeathers never again had to be concerned about being included in schoolyard games. In fact, the very same tormenter soon tried to befriend him, thus teaching a lesson for life: respect is earned through strength not weakness, and for boys, achieving manhood requires passing such tests, not flinching in the face of scary threats. Further, he slowly realized that human nature doesn’t accord with utopian fantasies: in the schoolyard there was a brutal reality to the hierarchy of talent. No effort was made to cushion the blow of being picked last by insisting that everyone is equally talented. No teacher was murmuring soothing words about how we each have our own unique talent, and no one is better than anyone else. There he also learned that showing courage was a helpful form of adaptation; if you showed you could take it and dish it out too, you gained acceptance into the fraternity of young men. Once established, you had it made, and moreover the pretty girls began to take notice. No guts, no glory. Also, in the schoolyard there was always a peer who stood out, the leader everyone wanted to emulate. He possessed superior natural talent, but was modest and never a ‘show off’. How times have changed!
        Every man, if he is honest with himself, wonders how he would react in situations of extreme danger, situations where words would not help. Would he, like many at Normandy, be paralyzed by fear and never fire a shot? Or would he emulate the boys of Pointe du Hoc? In short, would he ‘cut and run’,a la the metrosexual Democrats, or would he do what Patton expected when he said: “.. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood..."What we’ve seen in America, since Patton's day, is the rise of a wordsmith intellectual class that scorns such quaint notions as “innate manhood”, “honor” and “sense of duty”. Such concepts have been replaced, for contemporary liberals, by a set of beliefs we’ve come to know as political correctness. It is our argument that central to this set of beliefs is the denial of sexual difference. If differences are only “socially constructed”, rather than biologically determined, then we can construct a society in which the tensions arising from such differences will be abolished. All other differences—of talent, looks, intelligence---can then be eliminated by a combination of politically correct education, affirmative action and even surgical procedure. If the price is metrosexual confusion, shouldn’t we all be happy at the prospect of an end to the eternal war between the sexes? And of course, in the utopian pacifist world to come, men will no longer need to fight wars to defend women and family. Undergirding all of liberal utopianism is the denial of the biologically rooted differences between the sexes.
        To return to Patton, he also said in the same speech to the troops before D-Day in Europe: “…Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American…”
        It is now 60+ years since those words were spoken. Horsefeathers wonders, would Patton be able to say the same of today’s America?