Liberal apologizes for making manhood a standard

How’s this for an unprincipled exception? The liberal blogger Joshua Marshall writes:

President Bush isn’t even man enough to answer a straight question about these Swift Boat ads. (You’ll have to pardon my antiquated and gendered language. But I’m not sure English has any more presentable way to convey the same meaning.)

Of course, a thoroughly modern liberal such as Marshall normally and by conviction ignores, denies, or ridicules the very concept of manhood. Manhood suggests a whole order of hierarchical values that violate the egalitarian imperative. It gives manhood a value distinct from and denied to womanhood. It gives manhood a value distinct from and denied to a lack of manhood. It implies the privileging of such stereotypical manly traits as courage, strength, authority, and so on. (Definition of stereotype: something true about some class of human beings that you’re not supposed to say.) And it also implies sources of social order independent of the liberal custodial state that are made possible in part by manhood, namely traditional marriage and family. So, by the lights of liberalism, the very concept of manhood should not exist and should never be referred to. But, despite his liberalism, Joshua Marshall, like the rest of us, lives in the real world, and in the real world the qualities of manhood and courage, along with their respective Aristotelian excesses and deficits, are part of the constitution of being, and they occasionally matter, regardless of liberals’ denial that they matter. So there are times when even a liberal needs to refer to manhood or to a lack thereof (even if, as in the present case, it’s only to question the manhood of a Republican president). But if he does so, he feels he must apologize for having done so, because he has violated his own liberal principles.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 24, 2004 02:16 PM | Send