How a 2006 book by a Harvard professor explains the Trumpist right’s gender politics

When you think about the defining voices of the Trump-era Republican party, Harvard political theorists aren’t typically at the top of the list. But Harvey Mansfield should be an exception. 

He is, in some ways, the godfather of the Trumpist right’s current approach to gender and masculinity — an increasingly open celebration of the virtues of traditional gender norms that I’ve termed “neopatriarchy.”

Mansfield began teaching at Harvard in 1962 and stayed there until his retirement last year. During that 61-year tenure at America’s most famous college, he became a conservative institution unto himself: a beachhead in enemy-occupied territory, an Ivy Leaguer who has been mentor to some of the movement’s leading lights. His former graduate students include Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), leading pro-Trump intellectual Charles Kesler, and the famous Never Trump writer Bill Kristol.

Mansfield, an erudite Tocqueville scholar, disdains Trump — describing him as a demagogue and a vulgarian. Yet in a recent interview, Mansfield said he voted for said vulgarian in 2020 “with many misgivings” (Mansfield adds that he “crossed [Trump] off my list entirely” after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot).

But he has offered striking praise of Trump in one area: gender. Trump, he said in one interview, was “really the first American politician” to win office via “a display of manliness and an attack on political correctness.” He beat Hillary Clinton, per Mansfield, because American elections are “tests of manliness” — and “it’s difficult for a woman to do that in a graceful way, and to maintain her femininity.”

Manliness, explained

Masculinity is one of Mansfield’s enduring interests. In 2006, he published a book — titled Manliness — that attacked modern feminism’s ideal of a “gender-neutral society,” calling for a return to a world where men and women were understood to have different skills and aptitudes.

Mansfield’s book begins with a well-known contradiction: While everyone in public life claims to believe that men and women are equal, reality is anything but. Men continue to dominate in high-status professions and leadership roles; women continue to do the lion’s share of home labor despite their entry into the workforce.

For Mansfield, this inequality reflects the enduring and vital influence of “manliness.” Manliness, in his account, is a kind of self-reliant commanding decisiveness — a willingness to blaze a risky path and lead others along it. While women can be manly — Mansfield cites Margaret Thatcher as an example — they generally are not. For Mansfield, “common sense” stereotypes about men and women are mostly true and validated by the evidence.

“Women still rather like housework, changing diapers, and manly men. The capacities and inclinations of the sexes do not differ exactly or universally, but they do seem to differ,” he writes. “These differences are, one could say, all the more impressive now that they are no longer supported, indeed now that they are denied or opposed, by society’s ruling conventions.”

The persistence of manliness among men helps explain, in large part, why the “gender-neutral society” is failing to produce equality in the workplace or at home. Given that men are men and women are women, Mansfield argues, it cannot help but fail.

“Men reject and resist the expectation that they should abandon their manliness,” he argues. “They do not so much mind sharing their traditional opportunities with whoever can exploit them, and they have shown newfound respect for women who can. But they draw the line at doing what women have left behind.”

Mansfield and the Trumpian moment

I used to think that Mansfield’s writing on manliness was idiosyncratic: an older professor’s way of lashing out at a changing world. But the Trump era has proved Mansfield’s work to be far more than that. His writings represent an unusually coherent formulation of a value system deeply embedded in modern conservatism, one that has found its voice in the past several years.

Ask any conservative about what defines their worldview, and one of the first things they’ll tell you is that they stand for eternal truths against passing fads. Liberals, they believe, have an unjustified faith in the plasticity of human nature — which for conservatives is a fixed and unchangeable thing.

One of those enduring facts, they believe, is binary gender difference. Men are generally one way and women are generally another; this, for conservatives, is an eternal truth about humanity that liberals deny at their peril. 

There are many different ways of making this argument, ranging from the science of sex difference to an appeal to scripture. Mansfield himself appeals to history, writing that “the tradition of different roles for the two sexes is impressively long — long enough to comprise all societies except advanced liberal democracies today.” Different kinds of conservatives may make the argument differently, but the general sentiment remains consistent across the movement.

Many modern conservatives can be a bit squeamish about the implications of these views. They don’t want to come across as sexist, after all. So they talk quite a bit about the differences between men and women without drawing conclusions about the implications of these ideas for who deserves to wield political power and rule households. 

This is what’s behind the rise of the “neopatriarchy” movement: the call from leaders like JD Vance and Josh Hawley for America to rediscover the lost virtues of a patriarchal society without explicitly calling for women to depart the workforce and return to the home.

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

“Certainly I am sexist,”  Mansfield told the Harvard Crimson in 2022. “I say that plainly.”