A few weeks ago, I bought a copy of Thomas Sowell’s 1987 book A Conflict of Visions as a gift for a young man who was struggling with his political views. My intention is, once he’s finished reading that, to give him the second book of that Sowell trilogy, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995), which I consider the best analysis of liberalism as a psychological phenomenon.
You will never understand that Left until you come to grips with how their ultimate motivation is deeply rooted in their self-image, their belief in their own moral superiority to others. They view themselves as enlightened, and consider those who don’t share their politics to be benighted, ignorant, morally inferior. All of us see the stark irrationality of leftists, but Sowell explains the cause of this irrationality with a remarkable clarity — the aspect of “self-congratulation” involved, where liberals continually applaud themselves for their good intentions, without regard for the practical consequences of the policies they advocate.
This solipsistic factor in the liberal worldview — politics as an exercise in the display of one’s moral superiority — is profoundly relevant to Sarah Bernstein’s take on the 2024 election in the New York Times op-ed page. Like so many other Democrats, Bernstein has become fixated on exit-poll data about which demographic blocs voted for Donald Trump, and particularly on the pro-Trump preferences of young men:
Joe Rogan. Elon Musk. Representatives of bro culture are on the ascent, bringing with them an army of disaffected young men. But where did they come from? Many argue that a generation of men are resentful because they have fallen behind women in work and school. I believe this shift would not have been so destabilizing were it not for the fact that our society still has one glass-slippered foot in the world of Cinderella. . . .
Resisting the temptation to fisk the whole thing, I’ll just say that it’s difficult reading, because it’s so obnoxiously stupid. Merely by skimming through it, I’m sure my IQ decreased by a couple of points in the process. If you read the whole thing word-for-word, you’d be completely retarded by the time you finished. What Bernstein has done (and this kind of “analysis” is everywhere among liberal commentators the past few weeks) is to hyperfocus on a few facts as the basis of a syllogism:
- Elon Musk bought Twitter;
- Donald Trump did an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast;
- Trump beat Kamala Harris;
and
- Exit polls showed young men favored Trump.
Ergo, “bro culture” is to blame for Kamala’s defeat.
Because I do not want to “smarten a chump,” I won’t explain in detail why this analysis is so wrong, but if you’re willing to risk retardation, you can read the entirety of Sarah Bernstein’s op-ed column and notice that she never once entertains the possibility that the Biden administration’s policies were unpopular because they were bad policies. Nor does it seem to cross Bernstein’s mind that perhaps Kamala Harris was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign. No, if Democrats lose an election, Bernstein automatically assumes, it’s because the voters are wrong.
But how is “dating culture” to blame? Bernstein explains:
[O]ur cultural narratives still reflect the idea that a woman’s status can be elevated by marrying a more successful man — and a man’s diminished by pairing with a more successful woman. Now that women are pulling ahead, the fairy tale has become increasingly unattainable. This development is causing both men and women to backslide to old gender stereotypes and creating a hostile division between them that provides fuel for the exploding manosphere.
Again, note her assumption that “the exploding manosphere” explains the election result. Would you care to guess what percentage of men under 30 voted for Donald Trump? Forty-nine percent, according to exit polls. However much the “manosphere” may be exploding, in other words, Kamala still got about half of the votes of under-30 men (assuming, that is, that exit polls are reliable). But never mind this, Bernstein is fixated on the idea that hypergamy (the general preference of women for higher-status males as romantic partners) is the ultimate explanation for why “bro culture” elected Donald Trump:
Recently, men’s and women’s fortunes have been trending in opposite directions. Women’s college enrollment first eclipsed men’s around 1980, but in the past two decades or so this gap has become a chasm. In 2022, men made up only 42 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds at four-year schools, and their graduation rates were lower than women’s as well. Since 2019, there have been more college-educated women in the work force than men. . . .
Women’s growing success, coupled with the belief that a male partner must always be more successful, gives the shrinking pool of more successful men tremendous power. . . .
All of this may be true, but how does it explain why Kamala lost the election? This is where Bernstein’s solipsism is starkly displayed. Because she is a 30-something single woman with high-status credentials (BA, Brown University; MFA, Hunter College), whose marital prospects are near-zero because of the relative shortage of high-status men, she engages in psychological projection, assuming that men are similarly motivated — politics is personal, and therefore . . . ?
According to Richard Reeves, whose book “Of Boys and Men” explores the reasons behind the growing gender achievement gap, heterosexual men who fall behind their female peers often experience a hit to both their romantic prospects and their sense of identity, leaving them searching for ways to affirm their manhood.
Enter the manosphere: a space occupied by new media podcasters and their favored politicians who win eyeballs, votes and dollars by selling a retrograde version of masculinity as the fix for men’s woes. In the final month of his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump skipped traditional outlets for a manosphere media blitz, which many credit for his 14-point lead among young men.
This is a non sequitur. The Trump campaign decided to focus on young men, and therefore aimed to reach that audience through podcasters who had large followings among young men. But it does not follow from this bit of campaign strategy that the young men who voted for Trump are more likely than those who voted for Harris to be suffering from a “gender achievement gap” that harms “their romantic prospects.” Are young men who listen to Joe Rogan more or less likely to be in romantic relationships compared to other young men? If Sarah Bernstein doesn’t have data to support such a claim — if she can’t show that Rogan’s young male listeners are low-status losers seeking to “affirm their manhood” — then her argument falls apart. Of course, she doesn’t even consider the possibility that she is the one dealing in “gender stereotypes” here.
Something else that never seems to occur to Sarah Bernstein is the role of government policy in producing the social problems affecting young men. Like most feminists, she takes it for granted that “women’s growing success” is something that just happened, rather than the result of any anti-male bias in government policy. She never even thinks to ask whether the declining percentage of men on college campuses may be due to the fact that college administrators treat men as persona non grata.
Bernstein was a student at Brown University at a time when a male student at Brown was denied due process after being falsely accused of rape. This happened during the same time-frame as the University of Virginia’s rape hoax, when the fictitious “Haven Monahan” was proclaimed to be conclusive proof that men had made university campuses into a hive of “rape culture.” Bernstein wishes us to forget all this, to deny the role that feminists have played in fomenting anti-male prejudice in the educational system, and in particular, making it hazardous for any college boy to seek romantic involvement with his female classmates, who have been empowered — as a matter of policy — to ruin his life in a campus kangaroo court system where he will be denied basic due process. Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with who won this year’s election, or why young men listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast, but if a “gender achievement gap” played some role in any of this, why does Sarah Bernstein automatically assume that male grievances are illegitimate? There are other women (e.g., Christina Hoff Sommers) who don’t make such assumptions, who believe that public policy is implicated in the socioeconomic trends that Bernstein cites, but feminists denounce Sommers as a traitor to “women’s rights,” and she can’t speak on any university campus without provoking a riot.
Intolerance of dissent has become a central tenet of liberalism during the past decade, which is why Sarah Bernstein is able to ramble on about “bro culture” without fear of contradiction, because the New York Times would never publish anyone who disagrees with Bernstein’s point of view. Anyone who doesn’t vote for Democrats is always wrong — they are bad people — according to the New York Times, and thus Bernstein is permitted to rant for 1,300 words about What’s Wrong With Men. And here is the stupid conclusion to her stupid column:
Over the past 60 years, as girls and women have fought their way into classrooms and boardrooms, society has expanded its idea of womanhood accordingly, yet our definition of manhood has failed to evolve alongside it.
Letting go of the male breadwinner norm is not an instant fix for our culture, but we can’t move forward without that step. After all, “breadwinner” is not only a limiting identity; it’s also a relative one. If we don’t release men from the expectation, any plan to help them regain lost ground will have to also ensure that women never catch up.
This zero-sum paradigm has always been a feature of Trumpism, which is all about keeping resources with the right kind of people. But if we are willing to reject the manosphere’s narrow ideas of masculinity, we will find that it is possible for both men and women to thrive at the same time — in work and in love. This future is ours to create. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s a fairy tale.
Whatever truth there may be in any of this, it is utterly useless in terms of explaining why Kamala lost and Trump won. And she engages in some wild projection, claiming that the “zero-sum paradigm” is central to “Trumpism,” ignoring the fact that feminism has always been rooted in such a paradigm, e.g., systematically destroying all-male institutions based on the theory that anything which is good for men is inherently bad for women (and, of course, vice-versa). Feminists like Sarah Bernstein are always oblivious to this element of their ideology, and will deny any malicious intent toward men in the same breath as they advocate anti-male policies, which can only be justified on the basis of an assumption that women will automatically benefit from any policy that harms men — abolish the Boy Scouts and make VMI go coed, because how dare we let men have anything of their own!
Being a liberal means never being called to account for your own hypocrisy, and Sarah Bernstein is confident that she can denounce “the breadwinner norm” as part of “old gender stereotypes” without anyone saying to her, “OK, you go first.” If hypergamy is so problematic, Ms. Bernstein, why don’t you go out there and find yourself a low-income uneducated husband? How about you stop dating college-educated guys with professional careers and instead start hooking up with working-class dudes or low-status nerds living in their mother’s basements?
Of course she’s not going to do any such thing because, in her feminist worldview, women are never the problem. If Donald Trump won the election, it’s because men — who are inherently bad — voted for Trump. And if contemporary dating culture is “messed up,” this can’t be blamed on anything that women are doing; no, men are to blame, because men are always to blame. This is how Sarah Bernstein thinks, and no argument will ever persuade her otherwise, mainly because she would never encounter such an argument, living as she does in a liberal cocoon, an echo chamber of ideology conformity where dissent is not permitted.
Trump’s election has provoked a state of cognitive dissonance among liberals, who are struggling to explain to themselves how something they deemed impossible could have become reality, thus leading to what Mark Halperin accurately predicted as “the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country.” Sarah Bernstein is Patient Zero.
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