The leftist excesses that rightly worry Andrews are borne of a widespread rejection of these basic tenets of political and cultural maturity. There is also an abdication of personal responsibility for one’s own failures and successes. When everything is “systemic,” nothing is really up to anyone. There is no authority. So it should come as no surprise that performative helplessness, the defining characteristic of toddlerhood, is arguably today’s most potent political and cultural currency, on left and right alike.
In the remainder of this essay, I will make two arguments. First, I will illustrate why Andrews’ feminization thesis is such a seductive red herring—but a red herring all the same—for the real problem of endemic, unisex American immaturity. Second, I will make the case for recognizing anew, and actively elevating, the incomparable societal value of grown-up women.
Not All Women
In the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was killed, Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book, White Fragility, topped the bestseller lists. DiAngelo’s thesis is that white people should treat Black people not as fellow human beings and presumptive equals but as endemic “others” meriting sycophantic devotion. She can be fairly considered the founding mother of what New York Times columnist and Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter calls “woke racism,” or the creepy condescension of the racial equity initiatives that dominated mainstream academic and corporate spaces from 2020 to 2022: The Smithsonian calling “being on time” a tenet of “white supremacy”; discussion circles in schools and elsewhere segregating participants by race; and politicians allowing crime to spike, watching while schools instituted so-called “restorative justice,” and echoing activists’ calls to “defund the police.”
These patronizing affronts against the dignity of Black Americans (which managed at the same time to introduce various kinds of discrimination against white males ) were not perpetuated equally by Americans of all races, creeds, and colors. Indeed, as I wrote in 2020, progressive, college-educated white women bear a disproportionate share of the blame for the mainstreaming and institutionalizing of the worst “woke” excesses of 2020 and beyond. Without thousands of shrill “mini-mes” embedded everywhere across the nation, DiAngelo would easily have been dismissed as an incoherent, self-aggrandizing fool.