The Soldierly Man (Q1 2025)

The Soldierly Man and the Aestheticization of the PoliticalThe electoral disaster of 2024 in the United States has been widely attributed to the failure to reach young men. Governors Gavin Newsom and Tim Walz, prominent figures within the Democratic Party, recently asked publicly how the young man can still be reached. Their question reveals the assumption that the young man is a rational actor, accessible through policy, economic proposals, or the classic instruments of democratic representation. But young men who have flocked to MAGA, the manosphere, and the new Alt-Right have long since moved beyond the reach of such means.
They operate within an ecology of mind, where resentment, cruelty, and masculine desire have fused into a psychosocial network. Here, reason does not rule, but violence is experienced as the restoration of a violated order. Politics in the 21st century, in the U.S. but also in Europe, is no longer about taxes and healthcare, but about the male body. And that body, as Klaus Theweleit described in ‘Mannerphantasien’, has become armor: closed, hardened, cut off from inner life or vulnerability. This body is no longer the subject of politics—it has become politics. The right-wing media ecology, with figures like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, and their European counterparts, forms a cultural infrastructure in which the soldierly subject, as Theweleit described it, is updated, reinforced, and distributed. No longer via paramilitary diaries of Freikorps soldiers, but through podcasts, shorts, memes, and 'motivational content.'The Soldierly Man Returns
Theweleit, writing in the 1970s, analyzed how the soldierly men of the Freikorps—returning from Germany's defeat in World War I—defended their physical and psychic integrity against the threat of the feminine, the fluid, the uncontrollable. They refused to lay down their soldier identity. They did not return to civilian life but created a new, violent existence in which masculinity could only be affirmed through control and killing. We now see the same structure in young men identifying with MAGA, losing themselves in manosphere memes, waging war on 4chan with symbols, hating women, and seeing themselves as the last defenders of civilization. Not because they are committed to a political program, but because they yearn for a world in which man is once again the measure of all things. They feel betrayed by the history of emancipation, just as their Freikorps predecessors felt betrayed by the 1918 defeat. Today, too, that resentment is projected onto women, minorities, migration, and everything experienced as fluid, porous, and uncontrollable. Donald Trump is not a politician to them, but a messiah, a mythical figure who heals their wounded identity. His imagery carries unmistakable messianic traits: The Chosen One, "Only I Can Fix It." The proclamation of absolute power over life and death, truth and lies, fits seamlessly with the soldierly fantasy of total control. The dismantling of 'wokeness' – a politics of identity that has in turn incited a counter-politics of identity – is offered by Trump as a trophy and scalp to young men. It serves the interests of the patrimonial regime to keep the young man locked in this hopeless present – through mental and social technology and through environmental degradation, which stagnates his future. A lack of regulation and political inaction has become a cunning, perverse instrument of power.The Aestheticization of the Political
Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin chose suicide after the Nazis invaded his final refuge, France. He coined fascism as the aestheticization of politics. That is exactly what we are seeing again in MAGA and the Alt-Right. But this aesthetic is no longer confined to mass rallies, monuments, or parades. It has shifted to memes, violent video clips, and a digital stream of images in which enemies are demonized and heroes glorified. The war against women, against the foreigner, against the progressive has become an aesthetic war, in which the male armored body once again takes center stage. The aestheticization of the political is now an aesthetic of memes and slogans, in which violence is celebrated as catharsis. What appears as a joke ("it's just a meme") is deadly serious: the line between play and seriousness, between actuality and potentiality, has dissolved. The MAGA-man lives in a world where his digital identity and physical existence have merged into a performative fantasy of power. The homoerotic image of Putin on horseback, Musk’s Nazi salute, our own W.’s call for “fewer, fewer,” or the chainsaw are all paranoid expressions of soldierly violence. The sadism, the expressionless camp outfit, and the 1930s haircut of Minister Faber – "I am policy" – demonstrate that the aesthetic of the soldierly man is also, crosswise, produced by women.Fascist Desire and the Male Psyche
Wilhelm Reich already noted in 1933, in his ‘Mass Psychology of Fascism’, that fascism is not driven by ignorance but by desire. People choose against their own interests because they long to submit. Reich described how sexuality was suppressed, how drives were not liberated but internalized as fear of chaos. Deleuze and Guattari radicalized this analysis in 1972: the desire for fascism is not pathological, they wrote in ‘Anti-Oedipus’ but socially produced. Fascism is not a deviation but a result of how desire is organized within the social machine. The soldierly man does not long for freedom but for order. He wants to submit to the machine that guarantees he no longer has to be human, only a function within a steel collective. He fears anything that might open him up: love, sexuality, softness. That is why he hates women, foreigners, and soft men. The enemy is always the one who threatens to break the boundaries of the body. Theweleit shows how Freikorps men projected their fear of the feminine as fear of fluidity, of flowing, of wetness. Their texts are drenched with images of mud, water, slime. Woman is associated with the swamp that might swallow them whole. The armored body of the soldier is the only defense against this threat. Today we see the same fear in the hysterical reactions to feminism, gender diversity, migration, and asylum policy. The man feels overrun; his boundaries are being crossed. The feminine is again feared as the force that will castrate him—not just sexually, but politically, economically, culturally, and existentially.Cruelty Reigns
Fascism has always been rooted in cruelty. But today's fascism turns cruelty into an aesthetic norm. The meme calling for rape, the vision of Gaza-as-Riviera, videos glorifying bullying and violence, the troll campaign driving someone to suicide – these are forms of practical cruelty no longer hidden, but celebrated. It’s unbearable to witness (brace yourself), but recently deceased well-known women are actively searched on porn sites. Nothing is too far for the soldierly mind to seek comfort.
Klaus Theweleit wrote that the soldierly man must always remain at war to affirm himself. War is his ground of being. He survives only by destroying others. This is the core of the new reactionary masculinity: it has no inner life, no transcendence. It exists solely in the violence it enacts. This widespread cruelty has also reached Dutch politics. The indifference and sickening disregard for profound injustice, the sadistic violence, the statelessness, and the murder of Palestinians – it is political pornography. This pornography functions like a cancer, from which a flower of atrocity can grow. The raids on U.S. university records for the names of pro-Palestinian demonstrators show how close the madness really is.What Now?
What can politicians do with this analysis? The soldierly man cannot be convinced by a jobs program or a tax cut. If they want to reach young men, they must fight a battle that goes far deeper than policy. They must rethink and reshape the ecology of mind. That begins with naming the fundamental division at the heart of the Western image of humanity: the split between valuable people and worthless bodies. The stateless Palestinians—without rights, protection, or recognized bodies – represent the extreme boundary of that division. As long as their lives and bodies do not count, every call for democratic equality remains perverse – especially when uttered by Democratic governors or the Dutch government. Frans Timmermans, freshly in his sneakers according to ‘NRC’, must therefore reconsider himself, his new party, and the political constellation in this new light, to begin building a just politics for young men and women.
The soldierly man must relearn what it means to be human. But he needs practical support to do so. The numbing and poisoning through mental and social technology should, for instance, begin only after the age of eighteen – just like voting or driving rights. That would give young people in their formative years the space to focus on their own bodies, emotional worlds, and communication. For years we have advocated redesigning classroom conversation in primary schools, centering the expressive, creative child and their diverse needs. To bring the expressive individual and collective safety in a meta-stability. But confronting a politics supported by the soldierly man also demands that the Left introduce its own aesthetic—an answer to the soldierly culture of the Right. An aesthetic of the street, radically diverse, not identity-driven, rooted in love, softness, and embodiment. “Make Love, Not War” is, in that sense, a potent political strategy: a restoration of the body, of touch, of mutual recognition—as an alternative to the fascist death machine.Johannes Bongers, Gendringen, March 26, 2025

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