Donald Trump’s inauguration this week was the final symbolic act in the great cultural reset. The long decade of progressive piety has ended as tech billionaires gather in Mar a Lago to supplicate their new lord. The left is owning up to the foibles and overreach of liberal identity politics. And now Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has declared a return to masculine values. I suspect if you tried to raise this as an inevitability in 2020 the ideologue establishment (the media, the academy, the highest echelons of the corporate world) would have branded you at best a fool, at worst a bigot.
Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan, in a typically sprawling and discursive interview, that company culture had been “culturally neutered.”
“Masculine energy is good,” he added, “and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it…I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.” What is behind the epiphany?
There is, as always, a cynical answer. Zuckerberg – once an arch-liberal – is fully transformed, and at a rather convenient time. As Trump enters office Meta has announced it is ditching its traditional fact-checking methods and its commitment to a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy. Trump once lightly threatened to imprison the entrepreneur. Now they seem in perfect social and political harmony. Masculinity is just one piece of the process, begun in the 2020s and fully realised in 2024 when Zuckerberg retreated from the front lines of liberal politics: “The political environment, I think, I didn’t have much sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem,” he said.
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This reads to me as two things: a perfectly honest intellectual evolution and an opportune moment to declare his new allegiances. Like many Zuckerberg was pushed rightward by the pandemic and alleged pressure from the Biden administration to censor Covid-19 content. In private, as reported by the New York Times, he slowly began to tamp down on employee activism too. I think it’s far better to read Trump’s second election as a symptom rather than a cause of the great American vibe shift. But this message about masculinity was always going to come around about now, whether Trump was elected or not.
The statement “history moves in cycles” is both banal and true, and therefore important to remind ourselves of frequently. And in the grand pendulum swing of history it was about time for masculinity to be back in vogue. Speaking in 2013 in a debate entitled “Are Men Obsolete” (the motion was resolved: men are obsolete) the dissident and maverick feminist Camille Paglia said: “a peevish, grudging rancour against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second and third-wave feminism… men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment”.
All of this four years before the MeToo movement gripped society and – for all its good – turbo-charged a culture-wide suspicion of men and their motivations. It struck me as rather unfair at the time and even more unfair now that masculinity was wholesale written up as something to abhor; that young men should be scolded over and over again about an inherent part of their nature; that we should just pretend that masculinity was not a crucial architect of the society that we live in. A society that enjoyed the denigration of men was always going to face a reckoning. And I would rather it was heralded by the slightly weird Zuckerbergs of the world than those with nastier and more violent inclinations.
All of this, by the way, is why the classical world is enjoying a cultural resurgence, especially for the online right. Christopher Nolan is adapting the Odyssey, classical historian Tom Holland has good claim to be one of Britain’s best exports at the moment. The world is turning to the ancient past with a renewed fervour, a place that represents a total cultural inversion to today: where virility was celebrated and heroism was possible. There was no DEI in Sparta.
I wonder what Camille Paglia thinks of it all now and whether Zuckerberg will really mount a true renaissance for masculine virtue. I am not sure, but I am sure of one thing: the retreat from the excesses and decadence of the 2010s was inevitable. And a cultural revolution that celebrates instead of belittles masculinity will probably lead us to a far healthier world than we are currently in, locked in a kind of gendered forever-war that can’t really make anyone happy.
I hardly think Zuckerberg is encouraging his employees to bring their most boorish and laddish selves to the floors of Meta, but instead suggesting that maybe we lose something quite important if we neuter the culture altogether.
