The Return of The King

The Age of Men Comes Once More

Yesterday I awoke at the dawn of the Trump Vergeltungsreich and now, after a day and part of a night I’m still left pondering the full implications. In many ways it is what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe that sudden turn in a story where the hero dramatically avoids some probable doom. Everything was in place to permanently destroy the US as a country; if Harris had won, the forces puppeteering her would have created a new citizenry out of whole cloth and instituted changes that would utterly collapse the rule of law. That prospect is a fading proposition now, roundly repudiated by a force the enemy thought beaten down and irrelevant.

Much has been made of the political and social significance of Trump’s defeating not one, but two women in non-successive presidential elections. Not enough has been made of the metaphysical implications. Trump has done more than change the course of policy; he has revived and re-energized Western manhood. The inception of his second administration also marks the inception of a new age of masculine vitality, with a corresponding sunsetting of managerialism’s warped feminine ethos.

In the midst of writing this I came across a new article from Compact (yes, I know, but they occasionally have something insightful) that addressed the issue from a slightly different perspective. The piece, by Ashley Frawley, is titled “The Fall of Maternal Liberalism.”

The “fearless girl” might be taken as a symbol of the feminized model of the ideal political subject that has emerged in recent decades. Harris’s election would have marked this subject’s coronation and America’s acceptance of a quiet but profound transformation of what citizens are supposed to be. Trump’s victory suggests that a critical mass of the electorate refuses to be tamed. Inevitably, that refusal is stigmatized as typically masculine. “White men without college degrees are going to ruin this country,” claims a viral X post from a self-described Democratic strategist responding to Trump’s victory.

Much of our political discourse is characterized by raging against the ghosts of things long dead, not least the old ideals of masculinity, reframed as “toxic.” In our public institutional and cultural spheres, women are idealized as body- and health-conscious, empathetic, compliant, accommodating, and deferential to the judgment of experts. Supporters fawned that Harris was just the female leader the world needs.

And it all came crashing down at the hands of the exact sort of people the system of “maternal liberalism” was supposed to confine to the dustbin of history. How that happened will be discussed by a range of commentators from all sorts of angles, but to my mind, the answer is not so much political or sociological, but rather, mythological. The disenchanted world, worn smooth to its lowest reductive level of bare utilitarian shallowness, was ultimately the product of a twisted feminine impulse to stifle enthusiasm in the name of safety. Though female in its contours, it hurt both the women it ostensibly liberated and the men it pushed out of the way in equal measure, destroying their natural longing to come together in the interest of the social atomization demanded from managerial liberalism.

A man wrote this; that’s why it’s only 50 things.

It was always going to come to this. De Tocqueville could see what the very masculine early adopters of liberalism largely missed, that what would come of democratic ideals would not be a nation of proud individualists but a teeming mass of grubby, grey little souls indifferent to everything but the skirt under which they lived:

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

To be fair, de Tocqueville says ‘parent’ rather than specify ‘mother,’ but this is clearly not the hand of a father at work. It’s a nursemaid society, one which rewards obedience, consensus, and comfort. By fostering spiritual immaturity at every level it stifles enterprise and imagination, for who can even conceive of living some other way, as a being of duties and obligations rather than a consumer possessed of rights? The future we were heading toward was not a boot stamping on a human face but a warm, soft blanket, wrapped ever tighter at indiscernible intervals, until it stifled all movement and suffocated the subject in his contented sleep. Some societies are conquered; some collapse from within. We were on our way to death by SIDS.

I want to stress the point that this was an inevitable development on the part of liberalism. An ideology bent on breaking down restraints on human agency and the progressive conquest of nature must always have as its end leveling and homogenization. The clever elites who founded the whole system were quickly and necessarily joined by the next class down whom they originally wished to exclude. Class distinctions collapsed, then racial, then those of sex, until at last all points of identity are held to be valid so long as they reflect a free consumer choice. The leaven of leftism is responsible for such recourses to fixed features of being like being black or Jewish as exist, but these are anomalous.

The femininity of it all is both general to the nature of liberalism and the specific result of the mass enfranchisement of women. As G. K. Chesterton illiberally noted, women (as with all categories of person) bring with them to politics their collective notions of the proper use of power. Regarding women in politics, he notes:

There is a sort of underbred history going about, according to which women in the past have always been in the position of slaves. It is much more to the point to note that women have always been in the position of despots. They have been despotic because they ruled in an area where they had too much common sense to attempt to be constitutional. You cannot grant a constitution to a nursery; nor can babies assemble like barons and extort a Great Charter. Tommy cannot plead a Habeas Corpus against going to bed; and an infant cannot be tried by twelve other infants before he is put in the corner. And as there can be no laws or liberties in a nursery, the extension of feminism means that there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state than there are in a nursery. The woman does not really regard men as citizens but as children. She may, if she is a humanitarian, love all mankind; but she does not respect it. Still less does she respect its votes… She has already been given an almost irresponsible power over a limited region in these things; and if that power is made infinite it will be even more irresponsible. If she adds to her own power in the family all these alien fads external to the family, her power will not only be irresponsible but insane. She will be something which may well be called a nightmare of the nursery; a mad mother. But the point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The results will be interesting; but at least it is certain that under this softening influence government of the people, by the people, for the people, will most assuredly perish from the earth.

Most of the social context of the last election can be understood in light of those insights.

There is a serious movement to canonize G. K. Chesterton as a Catholic saint. If so, his attribute would be a red pill.

Some would here reference the concept of the Longhouse, that feminized system of authority that characterized purported matriarchies. I don’t doubt that such is the general tenor of female rule, but the feminized system under managerial liberalism is quite distinct and more malign. The Longhouse, after all, is an organic development of women’s nature, a system of egalitarianism, consensus, and indirect yet forceful control. Men ought to escape it, but in-and-of itself it is perfectly natural, and indeed acts as a needed balancing agent to male authority. One can, of course, end up with just as perverse a system of post-Enlightenment ideology by going to the other extreme and eliminating or downplaying the female element in power- something like fascism. Such an ideology generally orients around three S’s- sadism, sodomy, and suicide- and while like liberalism it can produce great things, it will inevitably end in flames and blood and farce. See Yukio Mishima.

Yes, he was brilliant. Yes, his literature was profound. Yes, his death was a supreme act of defiance against a decadent age. But his end was also sadomasochistic, gay, and pointless. Don’t ever kill yourself.

What liberalism has given us is a perversion of the Longhouse one might- for lack of a better term- call the Hag Shack. Atomization, consumerism, and exploitation have twisted the Maiden, Mother, and Crone into the Whore, the Spinster, and the eponymous Hag. The loudest screeches about feminism come from those who dwell therein, creatures with only a vestigial and performative grasp of being feminine. They hate and envy men, which is why their ideal man is a mock-woman. These might be trans, but this is primarily the nursery of the bugmen (what the late Oriana Fallaci called the cicadas) hive insects graduating from worms to chirp in unison with their fungible fellow drones.

The future is female, minus the females.

As Morgause raised Mordred, so too does the Hag Shack coven produce the Tim Walzs of the world to undermine what masculine order remains in the West. The news-spinsters told us that this was the new model of manhood, and in the darkest moments it might have seemed plausible. The world was after all changing. Perhaps technology had indeed rendered the old forms extinct. But something was at work they did not foresee.

The same growth liberalism fostered in the hard sciences that obviated (or seemed to obviate) the need for physical prowess in war increased the scope of female participation in all areas of life more generally, while at the same time the manifest efficacy of those sciences lent their weight to a general campaign of demystification of life. This in turn acted as a kind of universal solvent of tradition, where the mores of a thousand generations were dissolved in a bath of self-serving rationalizations about the relationships between men and women (and the children that used to result). Science freed everyone to float weightless in space, unbound to anything, but at the same time unable to move anywhere. The powers that be were consumed by hubris, by the idea beloved of those born from the Reign of Quantity that life was a thing that could be measured, managed, but above all known. They ceased to remember that the well from which tradition flowed was still active, and having no access to it themselves never saw their doom approaching. They forgot about myth.

In retrospect it seems so obvious. It wasn’t a warlord responsible for the great realignment, nor a radical politician, nor some academic. The comeuppance of our managerial elites came at the hands of an entertainer. A man who understood symbols, images, narratives, and who was able to fuse them into a coherent whole that spoke to the longings of millions crying out for meaning. Don’t mistake me; Trump isn’t a prophet and he’s not Homer. He didn’t create the stories. They were already there, preplaced in the hearts of those moved to hear them. He told the stories, enacted them, brought those who took up his message out of the profane and into the sacred spaces where dwell the timeless forms of being of our civilization. In doing so, he quite transcended what he had been and became something more.

Among other things, P. T Barnum was also a politician. He also managed from the grave to convince people he looked like Hugh Jackman. Well played.

Does that sound overwrought? Consider the nature of his three contests. In each he was at war with powerful entrenched interests representing a feminized and despotic mode of power. For the first, he took on the purest representative of the ruling class, a creature of total and ruthless ambition, dedicated to a building a world in which the state would grow to suffocate through its embrace all areas of life, while at the same time engaging in a war against the rest of humanity to advance its values. Not for nothing did she write a book called It Takes a Village (the late P. J. O’Roarke summed it up as, “the government is the village. You’re the child).” His methods in this election were those of callow youth, insults and trolling- taunting his foes with nicknames and memes. He was, in essence, a septuagenarian teenager rebelling against a particularly unpleasant schoolmarm.

His victory drove his opponents into sheer moral insanity. Men of more sober ages will look back on tales of Russian collusion, multiple impeachments, constant Hitler comparisons, and relentless lawfare the way we do with other periods of political hysteria. I use that latter word with specific intent; it was very much a feminized reaction, denunciations of Trump’s rejection of “norms” and “consensus” and “democracy.” He used mean words and cared little for the feelings of others. The race riots and lockdowns sprang from the same impulses, based on a circuitous discourse that valorized the hurt feelings of socially approved feeling and rampant safetyism over truth and sense. But it succeeded in excising Trump from its midst only at the expense of replacing him with another old white man. This one, however, would do as he was told. The Age of Trump ended, everyone believed, with a typically juvenile fiasco on January 6th. The man was finished. They weren’t exactly wrong…

Trump the man was indeed crushed. But something else took his place. Not immediately, as it happened. There was a period where he might have drifted off into bitter retirement, written off by his party as a one-off interruption of their bipartisan grift. But there was something inside him that wouldn’t let go. Pride, certainly, but also his visceral showman’s instinct that the story hadn’t ended right- the narrative wasn’t satisfying. He signaled that he wasn’t going anywhere and the system responded by letting him know that if he challenged them again he would suffer as he’d never suffered before. It meant to kill him. Trump the man might have retreated to the links and the comfort of his millions. The Trump coming into being picked up the gauntlet.

What happened next was an ordeal fit to try any hero. No aspect of his life escaped attack. Legal charges were manufactured across the country. His party was divided as to even help him. Other, younger men waited in the wings for their chance. But he still had friends, allies who never forgot him, and above all the love of a people who remained loyal through years of slander and abuse. And it was in that suffering that he found himself.

The Trump of the 2024 election was not the brash and offensive media mogul from eight years prior. All the compilations of “Trump’s Most Savage Moments” are from 2016; the nicknames are of similar vintage. The energy he attracted to his rallies- his signature events- was different as well. Gone were the raucous attacks on the media, the shirtless goons wearing Trump flags as capes, even the protesters being loudly ejected. On that last point, even the anger of his opponents shifted from violent and confrontational to muted and content to let the system do its work. Sure, everyone was still calling him Hitler, but if Antifa showed up fighting anywhere, I missed it. One could be forgiven for thinking the physical attacks were a thing of the past.

That all changed on July 13th. By pure coincidence, shortly after it became manifestly clear that Joe Biden was unconcealably senile and would obviously lose the general election, a young man with no criminal background, whom despite studying computer science had no social media presence whatsoever, decided for reasons about which law enforcement remains solidly uncurious to assassinate Trump at a rally. His bullet missed by centimeters, leaving one man dead and Trump with a bleeding head wound. Before the whole world he stood and shook his fist at death. He told his supporters to fight.

Everything changed at that moment. I knew then that whatever else happened Trump would win the election. I felt the difference. Rising from what had been certain death and continuing was a demonstration of his total commitment to hazard his life for his people. Trump was no longer running for president. Trump had become a king.

I don’t mean that in the literal sense that he made some claim to monarchy. I mean that in that moment he transcended politics to become a figure beyond party or cause. The Emperor of Austria once told Theodore Roosevelt that his job was to protect his people from their politicians. It was to this ideal, this archetype that Trump ascended. If it can be said of a man in his seventies, he matured, but went far beyond that in becoming a kind of patriarch, possessed of more charisma, gravitas, and personal authority. The Mandate of Heaven settled upon him.

The artists of the Orient capture the deeper meaning.

The creature the Hag Shack sent forth to meet the challenge was the purest counter-archetype it could have possibly produced. Dull and shrill, barren of children or accomplishments, handed various offices as she was cast off by more powerful men, she had equitied her way to the top on the force of checking boxes, the foremost requirement of managerialism. That anyone thought she had a chance is a testament to how far gone, how detached from higher realities, the system had become. Men who should have known better doomed and doomed. But the signs were always there.

I teach young men; they sensed what was coming as well. I never talk about my own politics in class- ever- but the level of interest they began to show in the campaign I took as something that would come to characterize a whole demographic. It was something new, positive, and alien to their previous negative experience. Trump is a Boomer, and for all the 4Chan fandom his appeal and platform in 2016 was overwhelmingly geared toward that cohort- MAGA essentially meant a return to the norms his generation had so casually upended. His choice of running mate, Mike Pence from Boomercon Big Eva central casting, symbolized this. Trump in 2024 was different, and possessed of new and broader appeal, informed in new ways by that fundamental neo-mythogenic space, the internet. Paradoxically, as he grew more staid in his persona his following took on a younger cast. Old archetypes were producing new avatars, the digital and spiritual manifesting in ways that spoke to the young in particular, even when the forms they took were not.

There are a lot of these.

For example, Trump had already chosen the Millennial JD Vance to succeed him at the time he was shot. Vance is the Striver, the neophyte from an unassuming or impoverished background who rises in the world to become a leader and champion in dark times. I’ve written before about fellow Ohioan James Garfield; one could say the same for Sam Houston (look for that to come), Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, or a host of others. The common traits are intelligence, courage-generally in a military setting, industry, and attracting powerful patrons who see promise in what the rest of the world might discount. Vance had the Marines, a literary career, business success, and the support of Peter Thiel, not bad for a man born to poverty and dysfunction. Young men could see themselves in Vance, and know that for all the doom in their lives such a path as his was still possible.

Some Slipknot cover band’s loss is America’s gain.

Alongside the Striver Trump surrounded himself with two other American archetypes. Watching Trump rise in bloody defiance was the final signal needed for Elon Musk to support Trump. Musk is the Visionary. This is a man, usually (though not always) an immigrant, who lives for a future he passionately wills into being. He is Carnegie, Tesla, Werner von Braun. He is not merely or primarily a scientist or inventor, but someone for whom technology is the means through which to better humanity; his is a wholistic approach for which this or that development but a factor. This is not a tame creature, and very much an Enlightenment friendly and destabilizing archetype. Nonetheless, the passionate energy of such a man is essential for a King; Arthur needs a Merlin. Both friend and foe acknowledge that Trump succeeded in no small part due to the sorcery of X.

The Rizz (Rixx?) is irresistible.

The other Archetype was embodied by the surprise endorsement of Robert Kennedy Jr. Kennedy is the Patrician. A kind of counterbalance to the Visionary, the Patrician represents rootedness and tradition, values beyond the material, the things that bind a people to a land. Kennedy is a particularly American variant of this type, the scion of both Greenwich WASPs and Irish parvenus, but to the manner born. His caste for the most part has withered into decadence and irrelevance with the onslaught of managerialism, and Kennedy himself bears the scars of a degenerate youth. But a true Patrician has an inborn sense of public mindedness, a noblesse-oblige, and while others of his type have cashed in and out of public life, Kennedy has pursued controversial and often quixotic crusades against entrenched health and agricultural interests for most of his career. This too has shifted appeal among young men in Trump’s favor. Young men sense they are sick. They connect, perhaps only intuitively, the poison in their food with the toxicity of the discourse around them, an ideology that frames their very manhood as a destructive obstacle to be suppressed and eradicated. They cringe at the Harry Sisson future the left has in store for them. Kennedy, ripped in his old age and displaying the characteristic family vigor, represents a different path, both a connection to an America that stood astride the world and a future of social and personal fitness.

“Ask not what T-ah-T can do for you, ask what you can do on T-ah-T.” Yes, I’ve made that joke before. It’s still funny.

There is perhaps a final archetype at work, one that we yet know little about, but that may soon manifest itself more fully over time. Trump has three sons; two of them are active and effective public surrogates. But behind them stands the enigmatic figure of Barron Trump, a Prince. A Prince is more than just an heir. He is someone who demonstrates worthiness to rule from a young age, combining intellect, instinct, and discretion. He is ambitious enough to work hard to assume his duties, but wise enough not to intrude before his time. Surprisingly often on the campaign trail, Trump alluded to his youngest son as an advisor of canny insight; judging by what the president has said one might fairly attribute the brilliantly successful podcast junkets Trump engaged in to Barron. I would argue this was the most directly important factor in the 30 point shift among young men to Trump. If so, Barron is definitely someone to watch.

Those young men didn’t show up to vote. They showed up, as Trump had urged them, to fight. They came to battle for a future the Hag Shack was prepared to hand over to malleable foreigners, to the mentally and spiritually diseased, to ring-kissers and brown-nosers, to the connected few who bent the knee to DEI, trading their heritage for soup. Of course, it wasn’t just young men. Gen-X, my generation, went overwhelmingly for Trump. It is no coincidence that this is the generation that received the last body of entertainment created by men still in direct contact with the Western myth tradition. Boomers could make Star Wars because they learned about such themes in school; Millennials have no such advantage. Men from various minority groups, sensing at last their own subjugation at the hands of managerialism, made a huge (and almost certainly growing) transition to Trump. I was also particularly happy to see the Plain Folk, the Mennonites, Amish, and such- the people from whom I am descended, arise and probably make the difference in carrying Pennsylvania. All as one, they turned the tide. It’s no wonder there was such a huge amount of Lord of the Rings poasting on X that day.

But it was also a victory for women. The Hag Shack is a miserable place even in normal times. You’ve all seen it; it has been broadcasting its rage on Tik Tok nonstop since the 5th. Despite the noise and fury, it is dawning on women that they don’t really want to be what neoliberalism would make them- fungible economic units who occasionally need abortions. Women want to be women. They want to be pursued, honored, respected, longed-for, led and loved by worthy men. You’ll notice that the women behind the 4B campaign are pledging resistance against all men, not merely the ones who voted R. Deep down, they despise those sad specimens of demi-maledom who pander to them. They don’t want allies. They want warriors, scholars, poets- confident and honorable men. The return of the king represents the advent of a new social order, one which is merely an iteration of a timeless model from the mythic age, sanctioned by tradition, come once more. Let us all be grateful.