Episode Details

 My guest on the show today, our special Fourth of July sesquicentennial episode, is Jacob Siegel. He's a writer and editor at Tablet Magazine, an Iraq and Afghanistan vet, co-host of the Manifesto! podcast, and author of the new book, The Information State, which we don’t discuss on the episode.

Our topic, instead, is the “The Disappearing American Man,” the first installment of a column that Jacob is now writing for Tablet.

To give you a sense of the essay, which is slightly to the left or maybe to the right or just below or above the typical crisis of masculinity polemic, here’s a particularly pungent passage from it:

What I see in many prominent and representative American men today is a dribbling sludge of bitterness. A peacocking display of impotence, debility, worminess, insincerity, lack of competence, lack of confidence, lack of élan, pettiness, selfishness, scheming, and self-pity. Not all men, as the saying goes, but enough to pass a civilizational tipping point. The young men standing up at town hall meetings are almost pompous in their bitterness. The anonymous posters online have turned cattiness and petty sadism into a group erotic ritual. The politicians are embittered, the podcasters are embittered, even the popular comedians are embittered. Probably the comedians are the most bitter of all.

Much of this bitterness seems to stem from an ambient feeling of betrayal. Today’s American man knows that he has been wronged. By globalist elites and international pedophile rings or else by his own toxic masculinity. By immigrants or perhaps by his innate racism. By “woke capital”; diversity, equity, and inclusion; greedy billionaires; and unappreciative modern women. And by the Jews, of course. Always by the Jews.

So that's just a taste. It's a pretty intense, hard-charging essay. I would say there's more or less two overlapping arguments in the essay. One is about this bitterness as it's expressed in the more venomous, less inhibited regions of the right, which Siegel traces to the effects of the failed wars after 9/11, the thesis being something like: when the globe-bestriding American military colossus can't beat a bunch of goat herders, it powerfully undermines the projective identity that so many men, and particularly men on the right, have had with American military power. Its power is our power, is how they felt, and so then when its power is undermined so thoroughly, it strikes right at the core of people's identity, their sense of themselves as men. And what some people did with that searing sense of impotence was to turn it not just against the left, which is traditional right-wing move, but against the American soldier himself, and then behind him against what the American soldier traditionally has represented, which is American power, American might, American manliness.

Attached to that is a historical narrative, a quite conspiratorial one, that the long period that most of us think of as a kind of golden age of American power and manliness, from the end of WW II to the end of the Cold War, was in fact a long, deep con perpetrated by the globalists on the real American men, who were its innocent victims. All that time that we thought we were powerful, by virtue of our affiliation and identification with American power, we were in fact being manipulated and betrayed. (Jacob and I wouldn’t say “we,” of course, since