The Sudden Rise Of The Republican “Alpha Male”
Tucker Carlson, not long ago, was about as urban as a guy can get. Brought up in comfort in La Hoya, California, he worked for The Weekly Standard, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, The Daily Caller, and Fox News. But now he's shed the suit and tie for baggy pants, boots, and flannel shirts and is living the country life in rural Maine, hunting and fishing, as high-testosterone, high-sperm-count men will do.
Wall Street Journal reporter Bojan Pancevski, who interviewed him there, wrote that Carlson went out of his way to show him his Glock pistol, saying, “Everyone’s got one around here, that’s how we Americans are.” Those who don't own guns must be beta males. Pancevski also reported that Carlson ate steak (like Trump) for dinner every night. Leave sushi to the girly men—AKA Democrats. The chameleon-like Carlson now fashions himself as a pickup-truck-driving alpha male, unlike Tim Walz, who he's called a “beta male.” Whenever a conservative says this about their political opponent, the inference is that they’re an alpha. Sometimes, as in this case, they work too hard to prove it.
The “beta male” slur’s commonplace now that the Republican Party’s become the self-described home of the American alpha male. An obsession with “manhood” has become central to the modern conservative worldview. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley wrote a book titled Manhood, and Tucker Carlson released a documentary called The End Of Men. Hawley couches his manhood talk in Christianity, while Carlson’s more concerned with sperm count and physical fitness. Carlson has said, “The decline of manhood, of virility, of physical health all together threaten to doom our civilization.”
Former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka's podcast has a regular “manhood hour.” Women are getting in on the act too, like the one who posted a video of herself in a low-cut red dress and six-inch heels expertly shooting her rifle at the range. There's no way she's a Democrat.
Carlson is concerned with what he believes is a “total collapse of testosterone levels in American men,” so his film —The End of Men—promoting a device made by a company called Joovv that purportedly administers red-light therapy when held up to a pair of testicles. The film’s replete with testicle tanning (set to Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra”) and oiled-up, shirtless men doing manly things like turning over a giant tire, wrestling, drinking egg yolks, and throwing a javelin. It's a homoerotic wet dream from a man known as a homophobe, but Carlson's beyond any hint of self-awareness at this point.
As bizarre as Carlson's vision of hyper-masculinity is, it pales compared to Trump supporter Nick Adams (580,000 Twitter followers), the author of Alpha Kings who claims he's in negotiations to purchase Infowars along with Roger Stone. Adams' Twitter account—”Nick Adams (Alpha Male)”—is so over the top in the promotion of his alpha-ness that it resembles a parody account. Here's his assessment of Doug Emhoff, who Republicans claim is the epitome of the beta male: “Doug Emhoff has never stepped foot inside a Hooters in his entire life. Doug Emhoff keeps his refrigerator full of almond and soy milk. Doug Emhoff is the epitome of what it means to be a BETA male in 2024.”
Adams, a Trump surrogate since the 2020 campaign also tweeted: “I go to Hooters. I eat rare steaks. I lift extremely heavy weights. I read the Bible every night. I am pursued by copious amounts of women. I am wildly successful. I have the physique of a Greek God. I have an IQ over 180. I am extremely charismatic.” But even if it’s satire, Adams knows that hardly matters to the young men who look to him for guidance on—as Trump put it in the forward to Alpha King—”the importance of faith in God, hard work, sports, ambition, discipline, confidence, manners, and love of country.” Game recognizes game.
Trump can appreciate good schtick when he sees it. It looks to me like Adams was a one-time garden-variety political commentator who found a way to tap into the macho vibes Trump was projecting by assuming a persona that took those vibes to the limit. And the Alpha King persona, like that of the politician he admires, is so outrageous (campy, even) that it's nearly impossible to parody.
Primatologist Frans de Waal, author of Chimpanzee Politics, disputes the notion that the alpha is the tough guy who's on top via his physical dominance. Chimps, he points out, are political animals like humans are, and political skill is often how one of them arrives at the top of the pack. Waal says his book found its way onto former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s reading list prior to “alpha male” becoming a popular concept in the GOP and the business community.
Biologist David Mech introduced the term “alpha male” in the 1970s through his research on the social hierarchies of wolves, which involved how “top” wolves are identified. He’d later reject the term after finding that there was no particular trait that identifies the top wolf. Rather, the “alpha” reflects the group’s values, so if the group values cruelty and aggression, they’ll follow a bully. If the group values fairness and rejects bullies, they’ll choose a similar leader. Projecting this theorem upon the GOP, what does that party’s devotion to an unscrupulous grifter like Trump say about Republicans?
Country music star John Rich, who has 1.2 million Twitter followers and displays an American flag in his profile, tweeted that Tim Walz is “beyond weak" because a video of him having difficulty loading his hunting rifle went viral. Rich said his little sister could beat up the VP candidate. So is the GOP standard for the alpha male now the ability to load a rifle with ease or beat somebody up? The other side of the coin for this story is that the rifle in question was a $2000 Beretta A400—hardly a regular guy’s hunting weapon—that probably didn't even belong to Walz, because if it did he'd have known that it couldn't hold the third shell that he was trying to load into it without making an adjustment. That's what he gets for playing the game like that.
John Rich obviously considers himself an alpha who could load a rifle fast and beat up people. I wonder how he’d rate his fellow musician, Bob Dylan, a scrawny man not known for inspiring physical fear or shooting rifles. But Dylan went to New York City with little more than his acoustic guitar and ended up on top of the music world—way higher than Rich. Dylan is, by any reasonable definition, an alpha male.