Something is happening to young men in America, though it isn’t quite what the common debates suggest. We often reach for economic data, health charts, or political commentary to explain what is happening, but beneath all of the data lies a confusion about what it means to be strong. This is not a confusion about strength in the perfunctory, chest-thumping sense, nor merely in skill or achievement. It is a confusion about strength in the older, moral, interior sense—strength that steadies rather than overwhelms, that protects rather than performs.
In the absence of better models, men today encounter a parade of counterfeits. Our culture constantly elevates figures who embody an aesthetic of strength divorced from formation—confidence without restraint, dominance without obligation, conviction without humility—and treats these outward signs as sufficient proof of manhood. The problem is not that power, ambition, or boldness are prized; these are real goods. Instead, the illusion replaces the real thing, substituting aesthetic displays for strength rightly formed, and rendering the patient work of becoming a whole person appear unnecessary. Young men are thus offered images of manhood shaped by immediacy and spectacle rather than by the formative means that make power worthy of the ends it achieves.
In the spring of my junior year at Cedarville University in Southwest Ohio, I took a class called Politics and Film, co-taught by two of my favorite professors, Mark Caleb Smith and Justin Lyons. One of the films we watched was John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—a movie famous for its meditation on mythmaking. But what stayed with me were not the film’s iconic lines, but rather something hidden beneath the gun smoke and moral spectacle: a portrait of strength that refused to be one-dimensional.
The film gives us two men who stand in stark contrast: Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) and Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). They could easily be flattened into stereotypes: the timid idealist and the swaggering cowboy. Yet the story only resolves because each man supplies what the other lacks. Stoddard possesses decency, humility, and an instinct for justice; Doniphon possesses courage, resolve, and the willingness to act when action becomes necessary. Neither alone is sufficient to defeat their common foe. Real strength in the film is not located in a single one of these figures but in the unlikely union of the two.
That is, admittedly, an ironic takeaway from a film centered around the way stories distort reality. It is a film that deconstructs the Western even as it celebrates it. But maybe the irony is the point. We live in a cultural moment where young men are handed legends—caricatures of confidence and dominance—drawn from familiar myths of the cowboy, the fighter, and the unapologetic strongman, reinforced by film, sports culture, and the online attention economy, and told to model themselves after these exaggerated silhouettes. These stories prize bravado, visibility, and winning, and they invite imitation precisely because they are dramatic and easily admired. Yet the true substance of strength lies outside of the spotlight. What I took from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance wasn’t about who fired the shot; it was that strength worth aspiring to is rarely the strength that gets the credit. It is the kind that steadies rather than shines.
There is another modern story that brings this theme to life with surprising depth. In Captain America: The First Avenger, before Steve Rogers becomes a super soldier, he is simply a young man who has been told his entire life that he is too weak to be of use. The military dismisses him, but Dr. Abraham Erskine, the scientist overseeing the program, sees what others miss. He recognizes that Rogers desires strength not to elevate himself but to serve. When asked why he bypassed the stronger candidates, Erskine offers the clearest articulation of the film’s moral center: “A strong man who has known power all his life may lose respect for that power. But a weak man knows the value of strength—and knows compassion.”
History gives us ample proof of what happens when strength is unmoored from this compassion. The names alone tell the story: Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Cromwell, Mao, Caesar, Pol Pot—men who bent the weak to their will because they believed power justified itself. Yet alongside them stand figures who confronted such force with a very different kind of strength: Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and, ultimately, Jesus—individuals who met coercion with courage and violence with a steadfast conviction that the means by which one pursues the good are themselves moral commitments.
Edmund Burke, the British parliamentarian and political philosopher, captured this distinction clearly when he wrote that “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” All too often we have seen that change secured through domination, or through the illusion that strength can substitute for the slow work of moral formation, can endure. But ordered liberty is built not by force but by character patiently formed over time, and by a refusal to sever moral ends from the means that give them their worth. This distinction is not learned by accident. It is not often desired. But it must be taught.
How do we teach this distinction? In middle school, I attended a small classical Christian school called Veritas Academy, where I had a class called History and Heritage. The headmaster, Charles Zaffini, often assigned poems to accompany our readings of Russell Kirk and other conservative authors in our studies of Western civilization. One such poem was titled “Of Magnanimity” by the late poet David Middleton:
To rule men well there first must be
This virtue, magnanimity:
Greatness of soul whose depths forget
Each slight and hurt without regret;
In public and in private life
The servant-head of kingdom, wife;
The foe included with the friend
In council for a common end;
Due credit given to those few
Whoʼve earned it but to others too
Who did much less, yet when words praise,
Example, exhortations raise;
The man subsumed within the role
That self, through selflessness, makes whole,
Free subject of a subject Liege,
His shed blood his noblesse oblige.
Magnanimity names a form of strength that has little use for display. It is the capacity to absorb injury without resentment, to exercise authority without humiliation, and to carry responsibility without demanding recognition. Such strength does not hurry. It is patient with time, willing to bear cost, and content to let good speak for itself rather than forcing its proof. But the modern age trains us otherwise. Our public life increasingly rewards what can be seen, counted, and instantly affirmed. Instant views, post likes, and ratings teach us to treat approval as legitimacy and success as a moral verdict. In such an incentive structure, magnanimity is crowded out by thinner, unserious imitations of strength: loudness mistaken for conviction, dominance for leadership, and victory for virtue.
Yet only the quieter discipline of magnanimity can sustain authority without corrupting it, and power without severing it from the good it claims to serve. In the absence of such models, some men never learn what it means for strength to be ordered toward the good; others recognize it but find the modern incentives easier to follow; and still others are content with the illusion alone, having learned how to claim the rewards of strength without first submitting themselves to the discipline that makes it worthy.
There has always been a paradox at the heart of manhood: Strength is at its best when it is quiet. This is not weakness. It is the disciplined strength of a man who does not need to advertise himself. The type of strength that protects without spectacle and builds without applause. The liberal arts tradition once aimed to form men who understood this—to teach the good, the true, and the beautiful not as decorative ideals but as the architecture of a well-lived life. These virtues require time. They require a community of practice. They require elders who model what magnanimity looks like under pressure.
What young men need is not nostalgia for an idealized past, nor a new mythology of dominance, but a renewed imagination for patient strength. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this during his travels through the young United States. What made America remarkable was not the exceptional nature of its citizens but their habit of forming associations—voluntary institutions that taught patience, cooperation, and virtue. These mediating structures shaped men capable of balancing ambition with restraint, not because every man desired such discipline, but because authority and respect were bound to it. For nearly two and a half centuries of American life, these institutions were tangible places like churches and schools, or real people, like mentors, bosses and family members, who imposed limits, demanded responsibility, corrected excess, and taught men how to exercise power in relation to others, rather than in isolation.
What is needed, then, is not a rejection of strength, but its renewal—ordered by magnanimity and directed toward the good it is meant to serve. Ordered liberty has always required the chaining of appetites: the willingness to place moral limits on one’s own desires in exchange for the trust of others. Magnanimity matters because it restores this moral grammar to power, binding ambition to responsibility rather than to performative display. This renewal does not depend on universal agreement. There will always be those content with the appearance of strength, willing to accept its rewards without submitting to the slower work of formation. A healthy culture does not eliminate such temptations; it simply refuses to mistake them for authority.
Where power is entrusted only to those who have learned restraint, patience, and responsibility, illusion loses its claim to seriousness. Appetite no longer masquerades as confidence, nor dominance as leadership. Strength becomes something more than performance—it becomes a public trust. And in that ordering, young men are not diminished but formed. They are no longer left unmoored by a culture that rewards power without responsibility, but invited into a vision of strength that demands character in exchange for authority. In this way, the fortunes of both men and the communities they inhabit are renewed together.
