Liberalism, Virtue, and the Crisis of Young Men

Everyone’s talking about the plight of young men, who have drifted hard to the right in recent years, and whose online influencer spaces, in sports, or video games, or politics, have been taken over figures like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Jonathan Keeperman: men who ultimately place the blame for men’s ills on women or the “feminization” of society.

A lot of smart people have written a lot of smart stuff about this from the gender perspective. (See my conversation with Samantha Hancox-Li on illiberalism as a story of gender, for example.) But I want to point out another aspect that gets less attention, but I’d argue is critical for understanding why so many young men are drawn to these influencers and ideas in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, if you’re a regular reader of my work or listener to my podcast, it’s about ethics.

What illiberalism offers, or at least illiberalism of the kinds we’re talking about, and what liberalism has long given up talking about much itself, is a comprehensive story of the good life, how we fit into it, and how we can achieve it.

Liberalism is, by and large, cold. Liberal philosophy aims a neutrality when it comes to governing institutions. The state shouldn’t tell you how to live, but should instead provide you with the space and the protections needed for you to forge your own vision of how to live. Just as it is wrong for the government to tell you what religion to follow, it is wrong for the government to tell you what life philosophy to follow or what cultural values to hold.

And that’s true. When it comes to government. But liberalism isn’t just about government, and never has been. It’s a system of values, with political institutions downstream of those. Why else then would liberals care about a state that respects autonomy in the first place? Why is autonomy—the freedom of each of us to choose—valuable?

This has led liberals to talk in terms of rights, and neutral institutions, and economic efficiency, and abstract philosophy. And all of those are good, and worth talking about. But those aren’t the things most people care about most of the time in their day-to-day lives. They want to be happy. They want to be fulfilled. They want to feel like they have a place in the world, and that the world supports their place in it.

In short, they want ethics. They want a comprehensiveness that doesn’t limit talk to neutrality, but instead advices how to live. And because (many, most) liberal intellectuals have stepped away from that kind of talk, they’ve ceded the ground to those willing to engage in it. Who, often, aren’t liberals. And so the answer they offer (the answers Tate offers, or Peterson, or Keeperman) aren’t grounded in liberal virtues, but illiberal ones.

This is a problem for two reasons. First, the more a society is built on illiberal values, the less likely it is to be liberal in its institutions. The less it will see value in the bedrock liberal principles of dignity and autonomy and peaceful co-existence. The more it will look to hierarchies and domination as the proper way people relate to each other. Liberalism as institutional neutrality cannot persist without a critical mass of liberalism as a system of values.

Second, liberal values are just better than illiberal ones. Illiberal values lead to suffering. (The young men following Andrew Tate are not happier because of it.) Cultivating a liberal perspective on the world—including liberalism in the social sphere—makes your life better.

By downplaying virtue talk, and avoiding conversations about what makes a good life, liberals aren’t just failing to defend liberalism, but they’re also failing the young men looking for advice on how to thrive. There are liberal stories of masculinity, liberal stories of how to relate to others, liberal stories of what it means to be a successful and happy member of the modern world and find fulfillment in it. We should be talking about them.