Steven Crowder asks:

Is liberalism killing the real, masculine male? It seems that way. Keep in mind here, that when I say “man,” I’m not talking about the clichéd embodiment of false machismo who throws back macro-brews, chases skirts and scratches himself in public. By “real” I don’t mean someone who has to be tough, brawny or even rough around the edges. …

In all seriousness, my father (like most fathers) always taught me that a man is someone who stands by his principles, someone who lives with integrity and puts his family before himself. That last one is important, because as a young boy, it’s your pops who provides you with security.

The financial, emotional, even physical security of the son rests squarely on the shoulders of his father. What could possibly be more manly than providing all of the above for your kin? …

Here’s the problem with the modern, liberal man — he can never fully provide that sense of security for his family, because he doesn’t believe that he can provide it for himself.

Liberals don’t believe in the ultimate concept of self-reliance, which is why they look to the government for stability. Extravagant welfare programs, the near impossibility of getting fired on the public dole and an increasingly complicated tax code are all products of the same deeply rooted concept that man cannot provide for himself.

Liberals simply believe that man is not good enough. Indomitable spirits be damned! That’s why most college students are liberal. Living on a diet of Kraft Dinners and Mountain Dew would make anyone yearn for somebody else to step in and take the reins. Instead of looking to a dietician they reach for Uncle Sam (and a keg).

When a child can see this belief in his dad’s world view, it makes him uneasy to the core. Words like “Everything’s going to be okay” ring completely hollow because children understand that daddy doesn’t even believe himself that he can make everything okay. That’s why daddy votes for Democrats.

Every manly icon the West has ever admired has embodied the very spirit of American independence. …

Crowder’s essay required all those ellipses because of his failed attempts to be funny, but his larger point is correct.

There are two ironies in this piece. The first is that we have done this to ourselves to a large extent. Every generation is softer than the previous generation due to advances in technology and creature comforts, but that’s not what Crowder’s talking about. (Fortunately, since unlike the generation before me, I suck at athletics, I neither hunt nor fish, and I will never build an addition to any house.) Every single-parent household represents a failure, usually on the part of the father, to step up to his responsibilities once he made the mother of his children pregnant. The fact that everyone knows some children of single-parent families who turned out OK doesn’t mean that single-parent families generally turn out OK.

One of the comments on Crowder’s piece adds:

The self-absorption and self involvement I see in young people today starts with the parents being generally unavailable emotionally. Mothers walking, with their children asking a question, the mom relentlessly ignoring them and vigorously texting or scrolling on her phone. The young men being unable to show any respect or concern for any female, but still bonding heavily with the male group by verbal abuse of women, hooking up, no emotional content or commitment involved. Unable to become an adult because their role models were insecure, ineffective parents, in conjunction with an overbearing, intrusive government, and the overexposure to a relentless media showing parents as buffoons, plus foul-mouthed, violent, disrespectful videos. I couldn’t agree more…if you grow up insecure, you can’t make anyone else feel secure.

Men of my grandparents’ era were unlikely to have been able to define the term “emotionally unavailable,” and perhaps many of those fathers wouldn’t fit today’s definitions of proper parents. But society isn’t getting better in any meaningful sense, is it?

Here’s the second irony:

By the definition of his non-political life, Theodore Roosevelt unquestionably demonstrated the manly virtues, as an outdoorsman, big game hunter and officer in the Spanish-American War. He was also, according to accounts of the time, a doting father, except for the period when he bugged out for the West after the simultaneous birth of his daughter and death of his wife and mother.

By the definition of his political life, Roosevelt’s progressivism helped started us on the path we’re on now. I’m sure Roosevelt never intended for bigger government to replace families, but he wasn’t smart or foresighted enough to see that once the snowball started rolling, no force on Earth was going to stop government from getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I’m not sure Wisconsin’s own Fighting Bob La Follette, another giant of the Progressive Era, was smart enough to see that either, but apparently Bolshevik Bob was OK with that.

Someone claimed to prove this premise otherwise by claiming that such traditionally blue states as New York and California have higher incomes than now-red states. The fact is that such 1-percent liberals as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates not only came from stable families, but raised stable families themselves. Apparently personal conservatism allows you to be a liberal. As Margaret Thatcher pointed out, the facts of life are conservative.

Happy Thanksgiving? Certainly for nothing outside our own families.