The Bestial Politics of Masculine Self-Assertion

Further thoughts on the meaning of Trump’s most egregious Cabinet picks

Pete Hegseth pauses to talk to reporters after a series of meetings with senators in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on November 21, 2024 in Washington, DC. Hegseth was nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to be the next secretary of Defense. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Noah Millman, my friend and fellow Substacker, didn’t much like my last post—the one about the collapse of conservative moralism, and subsequent rise of predatory masculinity, on the right. Or rather, he’s seen me make similar arguments in the past and wonders if “there’s something deeper and more important going on below the surface that has to be acknowledged if we’re not to be stuck in lamentation mode.”

The post Millman has written to go deeper is very good. I hope my subscribers will read it. There’s too much there for me to summarize it adequately or efficiently. I’ll simply say that Millman thinks there’s a substantive moral view behind the Trumpist right’s surface-level sleaziness that we need to contend with. That substantive moral view is one with masculine self-assertion at its core. (Millman brings this out quite powerfully in a couple of paragraphs about contrasting ways of evaluating the career of outgoing Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.)

I definitely agree with Millman about this substantive moral core of Trumpism—but just as he was inspired to write something pushing beyond my original formulations, I feel driven to do the same with Millman’s. Masculine self-assertion is a major theme of the tradition of political philosophy stretching from Plato to Nietzsche—and the reason why it comes up as a topic worthy of philosophical reflection is that it’s an enduring problem for politics. Simply pointing to its renewed presence close to the heart of right-wing populism, as Millman does, is just the first step of a response. What follows in this post is my attempt to suggest why it would be irresponsible to leave it at that.