[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

In case you were thinking naively that Democrats would allow the upcoming presidential election to be a referendum on border policy, inflation, abortion, gender ideology, or war with Russia – issues, in other words – it’s actually going to be about which party’s vision of masculinity will prevail.

The state media are coordinating a push to hype vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz and “Second Gentleman” Doug Emhoff as role models for a new and improved, non-threatening, Democrat masculinity that happily defers to feminist leadership.

Here is a sampling of print media headlines in the last couple of weeks, all promoting Walz and Emhoff as pioneers on the political stage of a more evolved masculinity than that represented by GOP candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance:

Axios: “Two versions of masculinity are on the 2024 ballot”

MSN: “Are the men of the Dem ticket helping redefine masculinity?”

New York Magazine: “Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and the Nice Men of the Left”

Fast Company: “How Tim Walz redefines masculinity for modern America”

Time Magazine: “The Doug Emhoff Model of Masculinity”

Mona Charen writes at The Bulwark, “Unlike JD Vance, Tim Walz offers a healthy masculinity” and “may be the father figure the Democratic party—and the country—needs.” The Washington Post went so far as to lead off with this headline: “Doug Emhoff is the modern woman’s dream man,” which is either hilarious or terrifying depending on what you think it says about modern women.

Right in lockstep, CNN’s Dana Bash, reporting a few days ago from the Democratic National Convention, stated that she found it interesting how Walz and Emhoff presented a counter-model to “the testosterone-laden, you know, gun-totin’ kind of guy” at last month’s Republican National Convention. The two Democrat men, Bash argued, gave off the vibe “that it’s okay in 2024 to be a man comfortable in his own skin” – i.e., playing second fiddle to a woman in a position of power.

Similarly, after Walz’s speech at the DNC, MSNBC’s resident race-monger Joy Reid gushed, “[W]hat’s really been fascinating is to watch the men of the Democratic Party model a kind of masculinity that is simply 21^st century masculinity.”

What is 21^st century masculinity, you might wonder? It’s being sold as a refreshing, more civilized upgrade from that outdated, sexist, patriarchal, pre-21^st century masculinity, which was about men serving as protectors, providers, and civilization-builders and -defenders. This new and improved, Democrat masculinity is all about successful men deferring to successful women. Left-wing pastor John Pavlovitch praised it as “the rise of non-toxic masculinity.”

On last Thursday’s The Megyn Kelly Show, the eponymous hostess and Tucker Carlson discussed this phenomenon. “They’ve spent 50 years trying to convince us that masculinity is dangerous and so we live in a world with very little of it,” Tucker stated. “And society has become much more violent, and much more unhappy, and much more chaotic.”

Kelly chimed in about Tim “America’s Dad” Walz: “This guy cheated on his first wife by banging the nanny, impregnating her, and there was either an abortion or an abandoned child and they actually want us to swallow him as our dad. Why are they looking at these men as their new daddy figures?”

The answer is partly because the anti-family, neo-Marxist Left believe the State should serve as society’s father figure. But there is another aspect to this: the Left is trying to co-opt masculinity, which they know is the domain of the Right, and to redefine it in order to demonize the Right-wing version as toxic and boost the Left-wing version as enlightened, modern, and pro-feminist.

Ross Douthat observed in The New York Times (“Masculinity is on the Ballot”) that progressives – champions of the likes of Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and Harvey Weinstein – should think twice about promoting “the special personal virtues of the male feminist.” He also warns that the “cool progressive dad” model of parenting is “rooted in a misguided belief that kids are supposed to be more enlightened than their parents, that a good dad just listens and learns from his wise progressive teenager.” This is “a good way,” he concludes, “to set your kids adrift”:

If you look at the data on the teenage mental-health crisis of the past decade, the indicators are conspicuously worse for liberal kids, who are seemingly more anxious and depressed than their conservative peers.

Sociologist and Of Boys and Men author Richard Reeves chimed in too. Reeves, who runs a think tank to address the problems of the American male, wrote in The Wall Street Journal recently, “Even by Trumpian standards, the Republican campaign has adopted a boldly chauvinist tone.” He criticized last month’s RNC for featuring “a parade of manly men” like retired pro wrestler Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White. Reeves complains that the Republican party “is now promoting a hypermasculine ideal that alienates female voters”; he cites Vance’s “childless cat ladies” jab as an example of the Trump campaign seeming to “denigrate women.”

On the contrary, the conservative masculine ideal is not a turnoff to female voters – only to feminist voters. And by “feminist” I don’t mean a supporter of equal rights for women or equality of women before the law – those aims were achieved decades ago. By “feminist” I mean the far Left activist whose most cherished sacrament is the right to murder her own unborn child, and whose vision for the future is an emasculated civilization led by careerist girlbosses. Remember Hillary Clinton’s slogan, “The future is female”? That’s not equality – that’s male replacement misandry.

Reeves goes on to acknowledge that male struggles are real, but he dismisses as “misogynistic” and “pernicious” the view that “the advances of women have come at the expense of men.” As for Reeves’ take on Walz, he claims Harris’ VP choice “opens up new possibilities for presenting masculine virtues in a way that isn’t demeaning to women.”

Actually, Walz’s “virtues” are demeaning to men and women alike. He was Governor, you will recall, behind a bill requiring tampons be made available to “all menstruating students” in school bathrooms – as if boys can menstruate (they can’t, but Walz believes in erasing the lines between male and female even when biological reality precludes it). Is it “21^st century masculinity” to believe that men can be women and should be allowed to utterly dominate women’s sports and infiltrate women’s private spaces like gym locker rooms? Do Democrats defend that as manly? Isn’t that the real “misogynistic” and “pernicious” view?

Democrat women like Dana Bash can pretend all they want to be overheated about Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff, but the reality is this: Leftists are the ideological enemy of traditional masculinity because it is the warrior spirit of the nuclear family, which Marx openly called to abolish. The independent, competitive, aggressive, freedom-seeking spirit of traditional masculinity is the greatest threat to the collectivist agenda which the totalitarian Left seeks to impose on society. What Bash diminished as a “testosterone-driven, gun-totin’” brand of masculinity is a threat the Left cannot hope to beat head-on, so she and her fellow progressives must subvert masculinity by holding up, as role models, de-clawed and deferential beta males like Walz and Emhoff.

The Left likes to smear conservatives as feeling threatened by powerful women, but it is actually the Left that is threatened by manly men.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior