Weak Men Create Hard Times

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.”

This pithy aphorism has captured a popular view of history for as long as we’ve had the concept of history. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus himself wrote, “soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors do not grow from the same soil.”

Modern right-wing populists are enamored with this idea. They’ll bemoan the state of the world, seizing on cultural flashpoints to point out that we live in extraordinarily hard times caused by the weakness of our leaders and our cultural elites.

But in reality, they’ve got it backward. We’ve been living in the good times. And they are weak men leading us back into the hard times.

The gender war origins of MAGA trolling.

If you exist on the political internet, you can’t avoid running into deranged right-wing voices. I’m not referring to your average Trump voter, who probably wanted a combination of lower grocery prices, law and order, and some sort of generalized social conservatism. I’m referring to the vicious trolls that have come to dominate online platforms. They’re everywhere since Trump’s first run for the White House—especially since Elon Musk purchased Twitter—and they’ve spread a particularly poisonous style of engagement. They’re intensely tribal and extremist. They’re determined to teach liberals a lesson. They delight in cruelty for cruelty’s sake. They respond to every post with slurs and vitriol. It’s a sickening new feature of our political discourse, but it may not be immediately obvious why anyone should care what online trolls have to say.

In a better world, nobody would care. But these trolls have real influence. Some of the most important theorists on the postliberal right are semi-anonymous writers with pseudonyms like “Bronze Age Pervert” and “Mencius Moldbug.” It would be hilarious that the most popular and archetypal personality on the online right is named “Catturd”—if he didn’t have an audience of 3.6 million followers just on X. Posters like “Captive Dreamer” (a man with an avatar of the Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and a screenname derived from a French Nazi collaborator) aren’t just harmless sh-tposters: Captive Dreamer is followed by Vice President J.D. Vance and was partly responsible for kicking off the “Haitians eating cats” hoax last year.

These posters matter. And if you want to understand the psychology behind this kind of troll, one of the best places to start is with a video known as Gen Z Boss and a mini.

The video, which went viral in 2024, features young women working for an Australian skincare start-up doing a TikTok dance in their office. There were three main reactions to the video. Some people thought, “That’s fun and cute,” and then kept scrolling. Some people thought, “That seems obnoxious and it makes me cringe,” and then kept scrolling. And some people became so incandescently angry at the video that they decided to burn down the modern economy.

The video (along with its spiritual predecessor, project managers working by the pool) inspired reactions such as “fire them all,” “women should go back to the kitchen,” and “bring back the gender pay gap.” Some commenters compared it to Maoism and cancer, others called it demonic. The clip inspired more deranged rants than you could count, and was generally hated to an absurd degree by the angriest right-wing voices on the internet. If you think incandescent rage is a strange reaction to that video, congratulations on being a normal person.

But the reaction raises an important question: Who does obsess over this stuff? Who actually talks this way? Who goes out of their way to spend hours each day posting slurs on the internet? Who obsesses over harmless cultural artifacts like a silly TikTok dance?

The guy who does this (and it’s almost always a guy) is not someone who is succeeding in his own life. He’s not someone with considerable accomplishments, someone active in making their local community a better place, or someone with a loving family and a rich social life. The people who do this, to state things plainly, are almost always losers. 

It may seem like a stretch to link the rise of extremist MAGA trolls to the gender politics of a TikTok dance. But the two are spiritually linked. MAGA is a movement that valorizes strength and toughness precisely because so many of its most fervent adherents are such weak men. 

The gender war roots of MAGA itself.

This link between gender and MAGA dates back to 2014’s Gamergate controversy, a misogynistic, right-wing backlash against perceived feminism in the video game industry. Steve Bannon was one of the first people to realize that angry young men online could be harnessed as a real political force, saying, per a 2017 book: “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”

But let’s get more specific. Consider the type of guy who logs on to social media specifically to tell women with white-collar jobs that “Your ‘happy life alone’ only exists because the state funnels taxpayer money into your independence LARP.” What on earth does the state have to do with women being independent? To quote Clare Haber-Harris, a popular culture writer:

A lot of men have a perplexingly reverse-SJW attitude toward women in the workplace. They believe women are part of an oppressor class, who have for some reason been granted unfair degrees of privilege in the form of being hired for fun, pretend jobs. In their mind, almost every working woman has an “email job,” specifically one that wasn’t available to men, and provides no value. Something like “Vice President of Pronouns.” They believe if AI replaced these unnecessary jobs, women would be rightfully forced to settle for schlubs to avoid being destitute.

You don’t have to speculate that this is how trolls see the world. They’ll tell you themselves. As one prominent MAGA influencer commented on the Gen Z Boss and a Mini video: “Tariffs or this? Tariffs.” And as another troll said: “It’s going to be hilarious when AI destroys all the cozy email jobs that women work in and come begging men who work in trades for a relationship because they can’t pay their bills.” 

The appeal of Trumpism is that it harkens back to the masculinity of a previous era. Forget the bulls—t jobs held by armies of liberals. What America’s economy really needs is blue-collar men doing masculine labor in places like steel factories, manufacturing plants, and coal mines. If tariffs help accomplish that, we should do tariffs. It’s incel thought as economic ideology.

You see the same dynamic in those cheering on Trump’s immigration plans. One of X’s most prominent anti-immigration accounts is Josiah Lippincott, who spends his time online telling Americans they’re not American and spouting racist nonsense at anyone whose ancestors weren’t on the Mayflower. What’s the source of his animus? He admittedly doesn’t know how to code but believes that Big Tech companies have discriminated against him for being a white male, and that immigrants have stolen jobs that should rightfully be his. This is how men talk when they’re impotent, bitter, and filled with disaffected rage. Nobody successful spends hours each day disparaging women they’ve never met. Nobody who’s made it in life logs on to judge the ethnic background of other online personalities.

(The exception you could easily note is that there are plenty of successful influencers who do these things—but they’re simply catering to already radicalized mobs, feeding culture war chum to weak men who’ve developed an appetite for it.)

These accounts and their bitter worldview have come to dominate the MAGA movement. They’re the id of Trumpism, the core principle which can’t be violated. After all, who’s the one prominent MAGA personality to have been jettisoned from the Trump administration before it began? Vivek Ramaswamy. And what precisely was the final straw that led to Ramaswamy’s defenestration from DOGE? He said that Americans need to work harder and change their culture if they want to outcompete immigrants. The replies from Trump’s online army were furious, accusing him of favoring foreign workers over real Americans. Ramaswamy vanished from public discourse for several weeks, and was out as co-leader of DOGE less than a month later.

Trump’s superfans will defend almost anything—rank incompetence, kooky pseudoscience, sexual assault allegations—but it turns out the one crime that causes instant excommunication is telling MAGA adherents that they’re mediocre compared to immigrants and need to buckle up and work harder.

The hypocrisy of RETVRN.

There’s an entire industry of statue avatar accounts who post endlessly about how depraved and weak modern culture is and how society should “RETVRN” to its roots (spelled in a faux-Roman style to emphasize how “trad” and “based” the poster is). They’ll often discuss how much better life was for Americans in the post-World War II era, when a man could work a blue-collar job and provide for his entire family. Why can’t we go back to that?

That narrative that America is worse off now than we were in generations past is, of course, nonsense. America is a vastly richer country than we were in the 1960s. We have more wealth and larger homes; we drive cars that are simultaneously faster, bigger, and safer; we live longer lives; we experience less violence; we breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water; and we have better technology across every dimension of our daily lives. Median income has dramatically increased. Median income specifically for blue-collar workers has increased. But the relative position of many men has decreased as women have joined the workforce and America has accepted more immigrants.

Life is better across the board, but it got better for other groups faster than it did for white, working-class men. The world shifted as America moved from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, and many men couldn’t keep up. The plain truth is that for most of the 20^th century, it was far better to be born stupid in a rich country than to be born smart in a poor country. But the world has changed.

This change wasn’t a problem for men writ large, the majority of whom handled the evolution in a normal way—going further in education, adjusting their career focus, adapting to new social norms, and generally succeeding. But while plenty of American men navigated this change successfully, many didn’t. Now there’s an entire male cohort who feel cheated that women or immigrants have gained status compared to them. They’re the losers, the depressed, the lumpenproletariat unable to adapt to a changing world. But they can’t outright say what they mean, so they go online to rant about foreigners and feminized workplaces. 

This movement’s supposed intellectuals and leaders are fairly open in acknowledging they want to make the rest of us poorer in order to advantage these weak men. Oren Cass, one of the leading voices on MAGA tariff policy, explicitly said so in an interview with the New York Times: “I think that is a trade-off we should be willing to make.” Last week, Trump said your daughter should have three dolls instead of 30, and that those dolls should cost more. Tucker Carlson admits that people will be “poorer on paper” but says we’ll be better off because we can “make our own food” and “have a daily experience with nature.” Tucker himself won’t be suffering—he went to prestigious boarding schools and was raised as the son of an heiress. He lives in a mansion surrounded by the best conveniences money can buy. But he’ll happily tell his audience of losers that money is just a number and that they’ll be better off working in the toaster factory rather than some fake laptop job. 

The shame of this kind of rhetoric is that it won’t lead to policies that will achieve its stated aims. Donald Trump isn’t going to revive American manufacturing. His tariffs are going to decimate manufacturing in this country—half of all imports are inputs for goods used by domestic manufacturing, and those goods are now going to skyrocket in price. We’re already seeing massive declines in capital spending as manufacturers flee the chaos Trump’s created. The truth is that the decline in manufacturing employment has little to do with international trade, and that tariffs are just going to hurt American consumers without doing anything to benefit the people they supposedly help.

Good times and weak men.

Francis Fukuyama wrote in The End of History and The Last Man:

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

Americans live in the most powerful and most prosperous country during the most prosperous age in human history, and weak men are furious because of their own inability to maintain the top status in this blessed nation. If good times create weak men, they are the weak men—unable to live with success, struggling purely for the sake of struggle. They don’t feel loved or appreciated enough by society, so they’re burning it down just to feel some warmth.

There’s a corollary to the “good times create weak men” saying. Strongmen are empowered by weak men, and it’s that combination that causes hard times. It’s why so many of the prominent MAGA voices are fundamentally sad people—the Hitler-quoting maniac Captive Dreamer, for example, is someone who said a few weeks ago he hasn’t seen a real-life friend in years and whose own father has publicly denounced him. “Catturd” is, according to a Rolling Stone profile, a thrice-divorced man in his early 60s who went through bouts of bankruptcy before striking it big as a MAGA influencer.

This is the core of Trumpism. A strongman rose in America and told weak men that they had been cheated. And they believed him.