Man In Politics

FOR A WHILE, it was the Death of Man that generated the frisson in the text of zeitgeist. It may be Michel Foucault— can’t beat a French philosophe on this—who may have introduced the term to the seminar room, and he was not drawing his inspiration from the headlines, of course not, but from the moral whirl of humanity itself. It was when they came out and cried Me too that the cadaver of manhood began to pop up in popular culture. It took only a series of sexual offences by men in power, intoxicated by the so-called God complex, for the alpha male in pinstripes to become zero male, a metamorphosis made possible by the sheer media moxie. That was then.

And someone is sure to say Adolescence, the hit Netflix show of amazing technical brilliance (each episode a fluid single shot) and sharp psycho profile, is a prequel. The story of toxic boyhood, with the latent violence of mundane domesticity as context and the sexual samizdat of the internet as text, could be seen as a prologue to future predations. The adolescent is a perpetrator as well as a victim, trapped inside a world created for him by others, is a receptacle, his every reaction a statement of isolation. The dominant figure, the father, is the caged masculinity here, transferring to the doting son, already steeped in the insecurities of the incel, his own anxieties. Rejection is inseparable from domination, and looming over the murder-accused adolescent is the tragic figure of father, owning up the sin, with no scope for redemption. The man is dead, again!; only the toxicity of his existence remains.

Man defeated, and eventually deleted by the combined force of law and morality, recurs as a philosophical study or a pop cultural motif or as a journalistic feature. So much for manosphere as an awful subculture. The man is elsewhere, wielding power with the confidence of being God’s own choice— so no accusation of God complex will stick. Man reborn, reclaiming his place in the hierarchy of power, is a familiar political figure: the backslapping bro playing protector, punisher, deliverer and redeemer with equal abrasiveness. This figure, legitimised by democracy, is different from the classical Revolutionary Man, a child of the ideology that always valorised the masculinity of liberation. It could not have been otherwise in the heaven on earth. The first man of Christianity was the fallen man; in the ideology that mimed the ambition of a faith, but without the burden of a cross, the alpha male was the liberator, revolution’s first sloganeer. In the manosphere of communism, domination was destiny.

In the new brotherhood in power, or what Anne Applebaum may call Autocracy, Inc., some candidates are types. Putin once publicised his bare-chested manhood with comic-book relish. In the politics he practises, there are no pauses for comic relief though. Domination is serious business, the transborder adventure of the First Nationalist being the natural extension of power. Putin’s political ancestry stretches back to the overwhelming masculinity of the revolution. Dominate, and be unprepared for demolition. The End of History and the Last Man, a title that would haunt Francis Fukuyama for its perceived presumptuousness, was certainly true for a short while, till the ghosts started to break the trapdoors, but that rhetorical imagery of the Last Man was not out of place in the aftermath of the fall. Putin is there to restore the lost machismo of his political inheritance—a Ukraine provides the backdrop. And if Xi Jinping ever visits Taiwan, we may have to take it as a replay of the emperor’s right. The helmsman’s prerogative.

Is the political manosphere fast becoming a product of populism, what with men larger than the mandate hovering over many democracies? America cannot be made great again without dominating the realm, and any resistance is bound to be seen as subversion. Trump on the stump portrayed himself as a godsend, thereby adding a dash of the cosmic to kitsch. In power, he is the man on a mission who answers only to his instincts, speaks only the language of domination, and vows to protect the homeland. In Elon Musk, he has found a brother worthy of the mission. For the billion-dollar brotherhood, politics is not a chessboard but a balance sheet: profit is popular nirvana. Be a man, get it done. That is the new national redeemer, whether it is a Javier Milei in Argentina or a Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Toxicity, they will argue, is a liberal word for what is essentially their emotional proximity to the people. In the new hierarchy of political species, there is only one adjective that suits the First Man: overpowering.

adolescenceAutocracyDonald TrumpManosphereNetflixVladimir Putin