The Man Show

One of the cringiest habits in modern journalism is treating fads on social media as evidence of meaningful political trends.

… says a guy who can’t get through a newsletter without sputtering over the latest trollish provocation he stumbled across on Twitter.

I’m a hypocrite, but my hypocrisy doesn’t make the point less valid. Social media (usually) isn’t real life. I’ve been reminded of it as post-election commentary piles up about whether Donald Trump’s victory might jump-start a “4B movement” among women in the United States.

Spoiler: It will not—although it may very well spark one on TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. In fact, it already has.

The “4B movement” is a feminist initiative in South Korea in which young women are protesting sexism by renouncing romantic contact with men. No sex, no dating, no marriage, no babies: The Korean word for each of those practices begins with “B,” hence the name. Search your favorite social media platform for the term and you’ll find numerous examples of progressive American women vowing to punish Trump-supporting men by bringing the movement stateside, punctuated in some cases by threats to shave their heads. You’ll also find many replies mocking them and scoffing that “no man would touch you anyway.”

The mockery is understandable. Lysistrata, like social media, also isn’t real life. And insofar as the nascent U.S. version of “4B” is driven by pro-choice sentiment, it’s weird that the figure who inspired it happens to be the squishiest pro-life Republican president of the last 50 years.

It all reeks of slacktivism, adding a feminist twist to the sort of lame post-election tantrums from the losing side in elections to which we’ve all grown accustomed. I’m giving up on men is part of the same empty-threat genre as I’m moving to Canada. Or the states that voted my way should secede. Or I’m going to break into the Capitol and lynch the vice president if he doesn’t stop counting the other side’s electoral votes.

Actually, scratch that last one.

Having said all that, I find myself more sympathetic to this tantrum than I usually am after an election, and it’s not because I voted for the same candidate that 4B-ers did. Why shouldn’t women in particular respond with unusually powerful disgust upon seeing President Access Hollywood, who was found liable by a jury for sexual abuse only last year, reelected and staffing up with one alleged degenerate after another?

Not wanting to date a man because he disagrees with you about the size of government is silly. Not wanting to date him because he’s indifferent—at best—to evidence of sexual assault, harassment, and statutory rape committed by high-ranking members of the government he supports is not. That’s a matter of personal safety, and a moral outrage worthy of forceful rebuke. One wonders if the theatrical mockery aimed at 4B-ers on TikTok has less to do with the form of protest they’ve chosen than with the anachronism of their consciences being bothered at all.

Why are so many of Trump’s nominees accused sex pests? And why are so many of his voters willing to excuse it?

Excuses, excuses.

A friend made me laugh this morning when he forwarded me something from (ahem) Twitter. Quote: “It’s very funny that every single dude in the new administration has ruined every single woman’s life they’ve ever been involved in: Trump, Musk, RFK, Gaetz, Hegseth. Only Vance comes with clean hands, and that’s [because] he used to be fat.”

Funny, but not entirely correct. For instance, I’d like to think pre-Ozempic J.D. owes his spotless record with women to an innate sense of propriety and respect for the opposite sex rather than to being zaftig, but I suppose we’ll find out. And of course it’s not literally the case that “every single dude” in Trump’s Cabinet has a zipper problem. Marco Rubio, Michael Waltz, Doug Burgum, and John Ratcliffe have no scandals of which I’m aware.

So, no, for the record, not every man who’s set to hold a big job in the new administration has a history of making the women around them miserable. But it is true—and I think more than a coincidence—that the five men named in the tweet I quoted are conspicuously more popular among the GOP’s populist base than Rubio, Waltz, or Ratcliffe is.

You’re no one in MAGA politics, apparently, unless and until you’ve been accused of getting fresh, or more than fresh, with a woman.

Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including the one who successfully sued him for sexual abuse. Hegseth settled financially with a woman who claimed in a police report that he “physically blocked her from leaving a hotel room, took her phone, and then sexually assaulted her even though she ‘remembered saying ‘no’ a lot.’” Kennedy reportedly kept a “sex diary” of his conquests, lamented his “lust demons,” and was described as a “sex addict” by his former wife. A babysitter accused him of groping her when she worked for his family as a nanny. Musk and his company SpaceX have been sued by eight former employees for supposedly turning the workplace into an “Animal House” environment in which, among other things, women were rated based on their bra size.

And Gaetz? You need to be awfully filthy in your personal conduct to be too filthy for a spot in the Trump administration. 

Even so: Four of those five men are heroes of the populist right and Hegseth is a defiant televised Senate confirmation hearing away from becoming the fifth. How can that be?

If we put a Trump voter on the spot by asking them that question, they’d probably say, “Sorry, I don’t believe the women.” (All of the accused have denied wrongdoing.) But only a truly devout cultist would be capable of the degree of willful blindness needed to dismiss all of these accusations, leveled against five very different men, out of hand. The usual argle-bargle about “deep state” hoaxes doesn’t survive contact with reality: If all of these accusations are smears concocted to damage influential populists, it’s hard to explain how Ron DeSantis, for instance, made it through a presidential campaign and two successful gubernatorial campaigns without being similarly impugned.

I suspect that the average Trump voter doesn’t actually believe that every woman who’s accused Trump, Gaetz, and the rest of misconduct is lying. It’s just something they tell others to avoid having to squarely reckon with the moral implications of their vote.

If we pressed them further to justify their support for a Cabinet of alleged sex pests, the next thing they’d likely say is “What about Bill Clinton? Or JFK?” And that’s fair enough. Democrats have a long, ignominious history of defending miscreants in high office. The only time you’re likely to hear a liberal lament that they weren’t harder on one of their own for his sexual misconduct is years after he’s sunken into political irrelevance. On one rare occasion when Democrats did come down hard on a major officeholder, it took barely 18 months before they were voicing their regrets.

What distinguishes the left from the right isn’t that the latter is more inclined to misbehave sexually. What separates them is that the left sees sexual misbehavior as an embarrassment to be excused or overlooked while the right, in its modern populist incarnation, views it as a sort of credential.

It would be too much to say that populist Republicans “celebrate” sex-pest-ery. But it isn’t too much to say that they see something in it worth appreciating.

Sex and ruthlessness.

“Ruthlessness in pursuit of cultural dominance has become the unspoken credo of Trumpist populism.” That’s a line from my first piece for The Dispatch in September 2022, reflecting on how Trump and his movement have “fashioned dishonor into a political virtue in its own right, the acid test of a strong leader’s resolve not to be deterred by conventional expectations of propriety when pursuing his interests.” 

That piece wasn’t about sex, but the overlap is obvious. Because populists detest liberal norms, they’re attracted to figures who are prone to showing contempt for traditional norms in other spheres of life. That leads them to dishonorable people, and dishonorable people tend to behave dishonorably in multiple respects—including in how they navigate sex. The result is a sort of anti-character test: A man willing to flout law, morality, or professional ethics to get what he wants sexually is potential leadership material insofar as his behavior implies he’d do the same with official power to get what the right wants politically.

Republicans have decided that winning the culture war requires appointing ruthless generals. And one thing about sexual transgressors—they are pretty ruthless.

Noah Millman put his own spin on this point earlier this week when he considered why MAGA regards Trump and Pete Hegseth as better exemplars of “manly virtues” than the highly accomplished, service-minded family man Mitt Romney. Like so many establishmentarians, Millman argued, Romney owes his success partly to his willingness to conform to the social norms of a liberal ruling class that pay lip service to virtue while flaunting its status and behaving imperiously toward out-groups. MAGA doesn’t consider that “manly.”

If you think that most men are not their own men, are not behaving in a heroically manly fashion, and that this country desperately needs to be led by men who aren’t socialized into conformity and submission, then you are unlikely to look for men who are conventionally moral as paragons of manliness. On the contrary: you’re going to look upon their bourgeois respectability with suspicion.

…

If you believe the negative picture I painted of the liberal establishment, how could you look to conformity to its rules—to any rules—as a sign of virtue? You’d have to do the opposite: look to rejection of conformity, the resolution to be oneself the only arbiter of right and wrong, as the first indicator of manliness, and therefore the predicate to any other possible virtue. Therefore, the more they flaunt their contempt for said rules, the more they are showing that they will stand up to those who made those rules, but who violate them themselves out of contempt for those who obey.

By definition, postliberalism can’t and won’t succeed in dismantling the liberal order without leadership that displays an unusually high tolerance for transgression. And so it selects for leaders who have demonstrated that tolerance in their private conduct—criminals, perverts, con men, predatory sociopaths of all stripes. When people like me call Trump’s government a “kakistocracy,” it’s not an idle insult. It’s an acknowledgment of Millman’s point that populists regard conformity to rules of propriety as per se evidence of weak resolve and so they turn instead to the least fit people in society to lead them.

Trump, Hegseth, Kennedy, Musk, and (until yesterday) Gaetz: Say what you will about them but they do what they want and they don’t let The Man’s rules get in their way.

If you find that Nietzschean “will to power” logic remarkably anti-Christian for a movement of right-wingers that loves to trumpet its supposed devotion to Jesus, I think Millman has squared the circle there correctly too. “Once manliness has been reestablished, we can discuss whether a real man is someone with the courage to follow Jesus of Nazareth in all things, or whether Christianity is ultimately a religion for slaves and women that a real man would have nothing to do with,” he imagines a typical Trumpist Christian saying. “For now … the important thing is to recognize manliness, support it, and never be cowed by moralizers into backing down from that support.”

That idea, that traditional pillars of conservatism like Christianity and the Constitution are unsuited to solving the supposed cultural crisis in which we find ourselves, recurs throughout postliberal thinking. When authoritarians talk about “knowing what time it is,” that’s precisely what they mean. Perhaps we’ll come back to separation of powers and the Sermon on the Mount someday when the left is less of a threat, they allow. But for now, at a moment that calls for utmost ruthlessness, we need men.

And you know how men can be with women.

Might makes right.

I won’t go so far as to accuse Donald Trump of choosing his allies because they’re accused sex pests. But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he does.

He likes having people around him who are morally compromised, I suspect. It’s not just a matter of kinship, although it surely is in part. I think it’s a matter of him wanting deputies who owe nothing less than their total moral redemption to his patronage. The cult-iest element of the Trump cult is how it offers absolution for all but the worst conventional sins to anyone willing to pledge unquestioning worship to the leader. Only in MAGA-land could someone like Matt Gaetz—who all but excretes sleaze—be warmly admired by millions of “family values” devotees.

Elon Musk is an obvious exception, but people as allegedly corrupt as Gaetz, Hegseth, and Kennedy plainly had no path to meaningful social influence without Trump. They know it and, more importantly, Trump knows it. And so it’s no accident that he turned to them to staff his administration. If you plan on giving orders that an honorable person would refuse to obey, it helps to make sure when staffing up that your deputies are dishonorable, compromised, and politically homeless without you.

Beyond that, Trump is presumably taking the same encouraging cues about political ruthlessness from his deputies’ personal behavior as his populist supporters are. Jonathan Chait read several of Hegseth’s books and observed that “he considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically,” pointing to examples of the nominee comparing leftists to enemy combatants. Trump isn’t much of a reader, but I trust he’s been cheered from their conversations by how ruthless Hegseth is willing to be. Why wouldn’t he consider the belatedly discovered sexual assault allegations against him further evidence that his pick to lead the Pentagon is “tough” enough to not take no for an answer when imposing his will on the military on Trump’s behalf?

Ultimately, it’s this simple: Sex pests and strongmen share the belief that “might makes right.” Whether you choose to cross a line of propriety should depend only on whether you’re likely to face punishment for doing so, the two groups agree, not whether it’s right or wrong, legal or illegal. Trump’s most impressive and most awful political achievement has been to convert a political party of nominal Christians into adopting that anti-morality in practice. He’s given his most ardent supporters the Cabinet they want, and the one that they deserve.