Send this article to a friend:

April
07
2023

The Destruction of the American Male
Paul Craig Roberts

The backbone and principal resource of every country is the male heterosexual population.  Without them there is no country, no births to take the place of deaths.  Men have the temperament and strength to fight and to lead. They protect women and children, property, borders.  They lead families, communities, businesses, and governments.  That has always been their role throughout history.  When men become effete, the society collapses.  In America this indispensable resource is being destroyed.

It begins with boys, which means they never become men. I remember when boys were trained for leadership.  They received more discipline and were given more independence than girls, who were trained for nurture and motherhood. The roles of the sexes were as distinct as the sexes.  There was no such thing as a girl who wanted to be a boy or a boy who wanted to be a girl. Transgenderism is an invention of a sick and dying society. 

Everything related to becoming a man has been banned.  School playground fights, today an excuse to call police and arrest children, were part of growing up.  Sports were where you developed confidence as you learned to catch a high fly, field a grounder, throw a strike, hit a single or a home run.  Boys were encouraged. They had their own space, sandlot teams, Little League, Boy Scouts.  They had after school jobs–newspaper routes, bagging groceries, cutting lawns, washing cars.  Girls developed cooking skills, sewing skills, artistic skills, chaste demeanor.  None of this meant that women were barred from professional lives.  They were authors, Registered Nurses, accountants, para-legals, teachers, scientists, scholars.

The destruction of the male began with feminism.  The feminists were the first transgender advocates. They insisted on no difference in the role of men and women.  It was the feminists’ insistence that the male role was better than the female’s and that women assume male roles and male sexual promiscuity, combined with their attacks on men as misogynists, that destroyed the role of men in society.  All of a sudden it was not alright for boys to have their spaces.  Boy Scouts had to have girls.  Little league teams had to have girls.  Think about this for a minute.  Parents felt they had to support the girl players.  Effusive praise would follow a girl catching a high fly, fielding a grounder, getting a hit.  But as these are things the boys were expected to successfully do, they didn’t get the praise, and it went on from there. As “diversity” and “multiculturalism” progressed in America, it was less safe for girls to be as independent from home as boys.  The equality on which feminists insisted meant that the independence of boys had to be curtailed. Today American parents who allow their male children the independence my generation had are arrested for child endangerment.

The feminist desire to turn women into men meant a diminution of male leadership roles in society as women entered politics and corporations were pressured to create “gender balance” in executive roles and in academia.  Just as white people are sidelined by the accusation that they hold back blacks, men are sidelined by the assertion that they held back women. 

Years ago Christina Hoff Sommers addressed the destruction of the male role in family and society.  But nothing came of her warning.  No lesson was learned.  Today behavioral problems of boys, declining academic performance, depression and suicides arising from the loss of their role is falsely explained as girls having better self-control, as boys’ slower development, and attributed to alleged hormonal and neurological causes.  No one notices that these blamed causes are new as are the conditions.  Neither cause nor conditions were present when boys had leadership roles.  

The facts are bald-faced.  Normal young white heterosexual males grow up in a non-merit-based society.  They witness preferences for females, preferences for blacks, preferences for sexual perverts.  What do the normal white men get out of it? The theft of their leadership role and blame for holding back others.

Recently I heard men of the passing generation comparing women of their time with those of today.  The adoption of young women of the stripper’s G-string as beach attire, the female use of four-letter words, and so on.  They all agreed that the emotional support a wife gave a husband is a thing of the past.  They wondered what this means for the marriages of the younger generations.  Divorce which once implied failure now has no negative connotation. Are marriages becoming commitment-free?  Has marriage become a temporary sexual and economic contract that once a better one is found becomes void?

In my day boys were forbidden to bully girls.  Today men are bullied by women.  The role of men today is to get out of the way of women and preferred racial minorities. This is not a picture of a society that is succeeding.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

Please Donate

I listen to my readers. In March 2010, I terminated my syndicated column. Thousands of you protested. So persuasive were your emails asking me to reconsider and to continue writing that, two months later, I began writing again.

In order to create a coherent uncensored and unedited archive of my writings, The Institute For Political Economy, a non-profit organization that supports research, writing and books, has established this site, thus gratifying readers' demands that I continue to provide analyses of events in our time.

In order to stay up, this site needs to pay for itself.

www.paulcraigroberts.org