In his history of the origins of the great war, Christopher Clark wrote of “brittle masculinity”, a threatened sense of manhood that lurked beneath the spiked helms and elaborate uniforms of central European leaders. Today’s endless celebration of American power by the men who are undoing it is not only tragic but revealing.
Consider Sebastian Gorka, a Hungarian who advises Donald Trump on foreign policy: he brings central European “brittle masculinity” into a new century and a new continent. Awaiting an appointment from his patrons Trump and Steve Bannon, Gorka proclaimed that “the era of the pajama boy is over,” and that the “the alpha males are back”. No alpha male has ever referred to himself as such.
Though Gorka presents himself as an expert on the Arab world and counterterrorism, his credentials are mostly bluster. Let’s not forget that he wore the emblem of a Hungarian group categorized by the state department as Nazi collaborators to Trump’s inaugural ball.
Trump’s Twitter flood of late-night mendacity is an unhindered celebration of fragile manhood, a ceaseless summons to the millions for affirmation, a proclamation to vulnerable men across the land that endless preening and stroking is a normal and imitable way of life. But behind the absurdly overstated concern for strength lurks real weakness.
His daybreak attacks on the press reveal a man who is afraid to read the morning newspapers. The portrayal of (male) presidential spokesman Sean Spicer by (female) actor Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live left the president, uncharacteristically, unable to tweet.
The passionate proclamation of masculinity, though it can seem laughable, is an effective sort of politics. There is nothing at all funny about the confusion and pain of the millions of American men who find themselves battered by globalization: unemployed, underemployed and often supported, in ways that they find demoralizing, by wives or partners.
Many unemployed blue-collar men find service industries less appealing than the vanished jobs in factories and mines. Understandably, they painfully miss the confidence that a union job could allow them to send their children to college.
Americans can accept that the American Dream will not work out for them: what has been heartbreaking for so many is the sense that their children will have it even worse. In this sea of humiliation, brought about by real inequalities, Trump appeals to certain men precisely because he celebrates the fragility of his own masculinity.
As president, Trump continuously seeks the approval that so many men in this country find hard to get, and his open neediness seems to resolve their secret shame. More intoxicatingly still, he seems to have proven that losing can lead to winning. Trump bankrupted six companies, but succeeded on the biggest of stages. He is the champion of failures.
Vice-President Mike Pence expresses and endorses weakness in a different way, by his refusal to have dinner with unchaperoned women. Such a practice discriminates against women. It also constrains men seeking work, or gives them an excuse when they fail to find it. Looking for a job requires contact with women, and holding one requires listening to them.
This isn’t the only time, of course, that masculinity has played an overt role in politics. The rise of fascism was also a result of masculinity in crisis, of economic problems that seemingly could only be resolved in emotional terms.
Everyone knows that the Great Depression permitted the rise of Adolf Hitler and the triumph of his Nazi party. We remember that unemployment drove men to vote for Adolf Hitler and for radical politicians generally. But why, exactly? How was all of this experienced by the men themselves – and by the many women who also voted for Hitler?
From a distance, historians tend to focus on the exhaustion of liberal democracy, the polarization of politics between far-right and far-left, and so on. But this is putting the cart before the horse.
It is not so much that men think one economic system has failed them and that they should vote for another. It is rather that sustained unemployment or underemployment, which are endemic in precisely the parts of the US that won the election for Trump, are humiliating and emasculating. Shortcuts to self-esteem, such as the delegation of self-confidence to a leader, become more tempting.
Certain politicians are lightning rods in the storm of male insecurity. Adolf Hitler was a sexually ambiguous figure, and National Socialism was a sexually ambiguous movement. He was also a kind of patron saint of failures, or of “the little man” as Germans said then: Mein Kampf (just a bit like the Art of the Deal) is a literary effort that overcomes marginality with grandiosity.
By coming to power, Hitler proved that a loser could win. He was a hero of masculine flux. This does not, of course, mean that Trump is just like Hitler or that America is about to become fascist. It does remind us of some deep political currents that must be identified and channeled while there is still time.
Many of Nazi Germany’s killers, as we know from the work of Christopher Browning, murdered because they were intimidated by peer pressure. Brittle masculinity, in the right setting, becomes political atrocity. Strength brings problems; weakness brings others; but weakness posing as strength is the most dangerous of all.
Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of History at Yale University and the author, most recently, of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
