The misogyny. Used to be so much better quality back in the day.

Uncredited image found at A Daring Adventure.

Did you ever see a laddie go this way and that? David Brooks did:

[The Civil War colonel Robert McAllister] lobbied and preached against profanity, drinking, prostitution and gambling. Some of the line officers in the regiment, from less genteel backgrounds, rebelled. They formed an organization called the Independent Order of Trumps. In sort of a mischievous, laddie way, the Trumps championed boozing and whoring, cursing and card-playing.

But he's unable to communicate what a laddie way is. (One of my first and most splendid views of what an unspeakably awful writer Brooks is when he's making an effort to be a good writer was when he described Shakespeare's Prince Hal as belonging to "a lewd and unsupervised laddie culture".)

The Civil War–era Trumps were apparently quite different from the Trumps of our own decadent time, who have decided to be Republican instead of Independent, and whose whoring, cursing, and card-playing is of a more worrisome, perhaps adult character. But those earlier ones do provide a helpful example of how different "ideals of masculinity" are found in different social classes, the "chivalry and self-restraint" of the colonel as opposed to the vulgar captains' and lieutenants' masculinity "based on physical domination and sexual conquest" (naturally you wouldn't expect the men in the ranks to have any ideals of masculinity or indeed any ideals at all).

And the misogyny. Misogyny back in the time of the Civil War was "moralistic", focused on blaming women for the "lustful, licentious and powerful urges that men sometimes feel in their presence" (not just lustful but licentious too! and not only licentious but powerful!) and for being themselves "powerful" and "disgusting" so that they need to be "surrounded with taboos and purgation rituals". Whereas today's misogyny is "unvarnished" (I don't think Brooks has any idea how deeply anxious Donald Trump actually is about women and the frightening fluids that "come out of their wherever").

Today too we have competing ideals of masculinity, gentlemanly vs. rough, but the gentlemanly one is sort of, ah, feminist:

the ideal man, at least in polite society, gracefully achieves a series of balances. He is steady and strong, but also verbal and vulnerable. He is emotionally open and willing to cry, but also restrained and resilient. He is physical, and also intellectual.

Today’s ideal man honors the women in his life in whatever they want to do. He treats them with respect in the workplace and romance in the bedroom. He is successful in the competitive world of the marketplace but enthusiastic in the kitchen and gentle during kids’ bath time.

How do you fit into this schema? Which word describes you better, "steady" or "verbal"? Which of the following settings calls for you to be successful: workplace, bedroom, or kitchen? Which calls for you to be respectful? Enthusiastic? I personally have to try to be gentler and perhaps less romantic in the kitchen, where the helpmeet complains I'm always chipping the crockery, but nobody ever second-guessed my enthusiasm at bathtime when that was my job (which was forever, i.e. from earliest infancy until they started bathing themselves).

Brooks is full of admiration for this new ideal of masculinity, an "unalloyed improvement on all the earlier" ones and a "great achievement of our culture", but he does have a beef with it, perhaps because his view of it is so confused:

it is demanding and involves reconciling a difficult series of tensions. And it has sparked a bad-boy protest movement and counterculture, currently led by a group we might once again call the Independent Order of Trumps.

Yes, people. Today's candidate in the quest for the perfect explanation of how Trump was created by something other than David Brooks and his friends: Feminism! Feminism, by pushing the gentlemanly style of masculinity so far to the egalitarian left, as it were, has by equal and opposite both-sides reaction pushed the rough style of masculinity to the authoritarian right. You built that, Pajama Boy!

Don't miss Driftglass on "Iron Dave".