I was a little confused this morning when I opened the paper and saw the headline: "The strong man is found on the left."
Not because I don't understand how that side juggles words, categories and values - the whole modern exercise of turning everything upside down and calling it "progressive" - but because I heard an echo in my head of "a strong man" on the left who once actually was real.
An inner image that made me once put my cross there myself.
So I sat down and wrote the following to myself, to clear up these inner images - and understand how it all fits together.
Maybe it's useful for you too. Maybe you know all this - and can simply conclude I DIDN'T pay attention in history class at school, since it has only gradually dawned on me over the last 10 years... (and you'd probably be right) 🤓
Regardless. My picture starts with what we can call "The Left's Masculine Golden Age" (1900-1960)
Or - "The worker with the broad shoulders".
From 1900 up until the early 1960s, there stood a man on the left you would have put your trust in during times of crisis. He was a bricklayer, blacksmith, railway worker, dock worker, postman, smallholder. His hands bore the marks of tools, his back was bent slightly forward from decades of responsibility, and his eyes were clear-sighted - not because he'd taken mindfulness courses or Empathy retreats... but because he knew that today's work repeats itself tomorrow.
He voted Social Democratic, but he said the Lord's Prayer at christenings.
He believed in community, but despised charity.
He was proud to have a wife who looked after the home - not as an oppressed housewife, but as the heart of the household's economy and rhythm. She had control of budget, hygiene and upbringing. There was no "deconstructed gender" - there was man and woman, and they each bore their part of the responsibility.
They were often deeply rooted in their local area and their professional pride. They perhaps didn't read Marx during lunch breaks, but they knew perfectly well what solidarity meant. Mutual help in adversity, not clientelisation.
They built the country. Quite literally. They laid sewers, did factory work, created the public school and secured the welfare state in its first version - before it became a rights machine(!) without demands. They fought for workers' rights, but also for responsibility. For cultivation. For decency.
They read worker literature, went to lectures at the union, sang in choirs and had respect for learning, history and faith - even if they didn't themselves go to church every Sunday. Many were perhaps godless - but NOT rootless.
They voted red - but wore shirts and proper shoes.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the classical left united national sentiment and economic struggle. One sang workers' songs and national anthems in the same breath. Duty, diligence and cultivation went hand in hand with the fight for rights. The school curriculum lifted children from factory rows into the world of books, but NO ONE thought to pull the carpet of reality out from under their feet - with questions about which gender they felt like, whether they might have some particularly exotic sexuality, or with non-stop anxiety-inducing preaching about an imminent climate doomsday or other nonsense. One tried to give them hope and the belief that tomorrow could be better for them. That justice is a real thing.
During this period the working class grew and became conscious. Not only as a class, but also as citizens in a country, especially in resistance to fascism and Nazism. National feeling and solidarity went hand in hand.
The left in this time was often - conservative in culture - and progressive in economics. These were families with stay-at-home mothers and worn fathers who voted Social Democratic.
After 1945 came the culmination. A strong trade union movement, order in the ranks, a welfare state that still demanded something of citizens. This was "the strong left", which was ashamed of neither God, the soldier, nor the family.
...
Then we come to what actually happened quite imperceptibly for me - and which has since made it impossible for me to give my vote to that side.
"The landslide" I call it.
Or "From steel to soy milk" (1960s → now)
Around 1960 a new noise begins in the wings. Academics without splinters in their fingers write manifestos on café napkins. 1968 explodes, and words like "duty", "gender", "fatherland", "family" are now called reactionary.
The left changes its motor oil. From worker struggle to gender struggle, from solidarity to self-realisation, from class community to identity.
We have become too affluent for the old economic class struggle to be used as a lever - and it's visible that everyone, regardless, wants a share in "the good life".
The strong working man - the one with steel jaws and brush in hand - is degraded to a patriarchal relic. Instead "the new man" steps forward.
With spaghetti arms and nervous eyes.
On a diet of tofu, endless bad conscience and cultural self-hatred - over something someone who looks like him once did, and which must now be redistributed.
He's ended up somewhere he's offended if someone says "father and mother" instead of "parental person A and B".
He cries on TikTok, asks for "safe spaces", "trigger warnings" and writes long status updates about his inner wounds, while his woman in the background - if he has one - desperately searches for someone who can make and hold a decision.
He whines about microaggressions, but has never lifted anything heavier than a coffee cup from a queer-inclusive biodynamic vegan café.
He has "read his privilege" - but never changed a tire.
Speaks fluent deconstructivism - but doesn't understand the difference between courage and instinct.
And thinks some "invisible structure" that can only be measured with a calculator turned upside down should be corrected so he needn't take part in today's work tomorrow - but can simply take from others who (through will and creative power) have produced more than him.
In the 2010s comes the next wave.
Climate becomes the new great moral stage. And just as religion in earlier times was about sin and purification - climate consciousness is now about guilt and compensation.
Greta Thunberg stands up and says "How dare you?", and it becomes the (left-oriented) world's new conscience-based gospel. Young men grow up with the message that their gender, consumption, food habits and bodies are a threat to the future. Masculine behaviour and strength don't just become problematic - they become CO₂-burdening.
Climate shame becomes in reality masculinity shame in green disguise....
The result?
A generation of men who are born tired.
The left got the man it asked for -
Fragile, pliable, malleable, dependent - and thereby easy to lead. In return, one lost men who could bear - families, businesses, faith, tradition and society's heavy beams.
....
This leads me to my reasoning - about what a vote for the left means today?
When you today put a cross next to the red bloc, you're not voting for your grandparents' workers' movement.
You're voting for a project where -
- Words are more important than reality. One overwrites gender, family, biology and history if the narrative demands it.
- Feelings replace duty. Victim status is capital, not shame.
- The state is no longer a protection for the weakest - it has become the strongest. A technocratic mother-state disguised as care, but driven by control. A digitally surveilling moral authority that regulates your thoughts, your expressions, your consumption and your CO₂ budget. If you don't think the right thing, you're first shamed, then risk prosecution.
- Masculinity is met with suspicion - unless it's dismantled, castrated, apologetic and certified as "non-threatening".
In short. You're voting for a movement that only shares a name with the old left, but has nothing of its backbone.
The time when the trade union chairman had dirt under his nails and could quote Grundtvig is over. Today the "spokesperson" is a communications consultant with their pronoun in bio, virtue signalling climate and gender icons and an external collaboration agreement with a ministry.
....
So. Where did the strong man from the left actually go?
Some did - but he didn't go right, to begin with - he went home. He found a small firm, started a workshop, or became silent and forgot why he should engage. He still knows the value of getting up early, but since no one would listen to his silent experience anyway. He stopped.
But reality has a way of striking back.
The day society suddenly lacks men who can do something with their hands and hold a decision with their back straight, and a body made hard by physical work, then one will look around - and discover that one has eradicated the ideal that created them. Torn it down - and left it in a fire of media storms against men and everything wrong with them.
Conclusion
To vote red was once to stand shoulder to shoulder with the blacksmith who bore family and fatherland without complaint. Today it's to stand behind a megaphone that shouts about "structural violence", while asking for more taxes for feelings-based projects and gender-neutral pedagogy.
If you miss the old left - the one with the toolbox, the broad shoulders and the community - then consider whether the cross still belongs in the same place as the romantic image many still carry around.
For the "strong man" on the left is no longer the blacksmith. It's rather the academised softy with soy milk and specialist knowledge in gender studies, who thinks strength is an expression of oppression, and expects society to consider his feelings before facts - and demands "safety" and interprets contradiction as assault.
Reality's weights are still equally heavy, though, regardless of which pronoun lifts them.
And the sun still rises in the east, even if your morning papers claim otherwise.
Have a good week, friends ☀️
