Trump explains right-wing gender politics in 2006 book

When thinking about the defining voices of the Republican Party in the Trump era, a Harvard political theorist doesn’t usually top the list, but Harvey Mansfield should be an exception.

He is, in some ways, the godfather of the Trump right’s current approach to gender and masculinity, which increasingly openly extolls the virtues of traditional gender norms in what I call “neo-patriarchy.”

Mansfield joined the Harvard faculty in 1962 and remained there until his retirement last year. During his 61-year tenure at America’s most prestigious university, he served as a bridgehead in enemy territory and a mentor to Ivy League conservative leaders. His former graduate students include Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), leading Trump intellectual Charles Kessler, and well-known Never Trump author Bill Kristol.

A learned Tocqueville scholar, Mansfield despises Trump, calling him a demagogue and a vulgarian. But in a recent interview, she said she voted for the vulgarian in 2020 “with a lot of doubts.” (She added that after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, she “crossed him off the list entirely.”)

But Mansfield is surprisingly complimentary of Trump when it comes to gender. In an interview, she said Trump was “the first truly American politician” to win by “an exhibition of masculinity and an attack on political correctness.” According to Mansfield, Trump beat Hillary Clinton because American elections are “a test of masculinity” and “it’s hard for a woman to do it gracefully and remain feminine.”

Masculinity has been a long-standing concern for Mansfield: her 2006 book “Manliness” criticized modern feminist ideals of a “gender-neutral society” and called for a return to a world in which men and women are understood to have different skills and aptitudes.

Mansfield’s book begins with a familiar contradiction: everyone in public office claims to believe that men and women are equal, yet the reality is far from it: men still hold high-status jobs and leadership roles, while women, despite having joined the workforce, still do the majority of the domestic work.

For Mansfield, this inequality reflects the enduring and significant influence of “masculinity.” Masculinity, he explains, is a kind of independent, commanding decisiveness — a willingness to forge risky paths and lead others along those paths. Women can be masculine, too (Mansfield cites Margaret Thatcher as an example), but they are not typically so. For Mansfield, “common sense” stereotypes about men and women are mostly true and supported by evidence.

“Women still do housework, change diapers, and prefer manly men. The abilities and inclinations of men and women are not strictly or universally different, but they do seem to differ,” he writes. “These differences are all the more striking now that they are no longer supported by the dominant mores of society but are instead rejected and opposed.”

The persistence of masculinity among men helps explain in large part why “gender-neutral societies” have failed to achieve gender equality in the workplace and at home: men are men and women are women, and so Mansfield argues that they are bound to fail.

“Men are rejecting and resisting the expectation that they should abandon their masculinity,” he argues. “They’re more comfortable sharing traditional opportunities with those who can exploit them, and they’re showing a new respect for the women who can do this. But they’re drawing the line at doing the things that women have abandoned.”

I previously thought of Mansfield’s writings on masculinity as something idiosyncratic — an older professor’s fierce critique of a changing world. But the Trump era has proven Mansfield’s work to be much more than that. His work expresses with remarkable coherence the deeply rooted values ​​of a modern conservatism that has been gaining voice in recent years.

If you ask conservatives what defines their worldview, one of the first things they say is that they support eternal truths, not passing fads. They believe that liberals have an unfounded faith in the plasticity of human nature; to conservatives, it is fixed and unchanging.

One immutable fact they believe in is the binary of the sexes: men are generally one and women are generally another. To conservatives, this is an eternal truth about humanity that is endangered by liberals’ denial of it.

There are many ways to make this argument, from the science of gender differences to appeals to the Bible. Mansfield herself appeals to history, writing that “the tradition of gender role differences is remarkably long, long enough to encompass all societies except today’s advanced liberal democracies.” Different strains of conservatives may make the argument differently, but the general sentiment remains consistent throughout the movement.

Many modern conservatives are a bit put off by what this means — after all, they don’t want to seem sexist — so while they talk a lot about the differences between men and women, they don’t draw any conclusions about who deserves to hold political power and rule the home.

This is behind the rise of the “neo-patriarchy” movement, with leaders like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley calling on America to rediscover the lost virtues of patriarchal society, without explicitly calling for women to leave the workforce and return to the home.

Mansfield, by contrast, is open about what she’s attacking: the very notion of a “gender-neutral society.”And this openness comes with extreme self-awareness.

“Yes, I am sexist,” Mansfield told the Harvard Crimson in 2022. “I say that out loud.”