Aidan Grogan
Saturday, December 13, 2025
Few contemporary writers announce their worldview with
the force of Charles Cornish-Dale, the British provocateur better known by his
online persona, “Raw Egg Nationalist.”
With more than 300,000 followers on X—including J.D.
Vance—an appearance in Tucker Carlson’s viral documentary The
End of Men, and coverage spanning The
New Yorker, The
Atlantic, and The
New York Times, he has emerged as a kind of hard-right cultural icon.
His latest book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity,
his first published under his legal name, opens with a strong indictment:
Liberalism is sapping men of their vitality.
This is not the Straussian lament that liberal democracy
suppresses the masculine virtues of thymos—the “spirited” impulse that
drives men to seek honor and distinction. Variations of that thesis animate
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness,
and, most famously, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man,
to which Cornish-Dale’s title alludes.
For Bloom, Mansfield, and Fukuyama, liberalism’s unease
with thymos is a philosophical and cultural problem: A liberal polity
built on formal equality blunts the pursuit of honor, and a consumerist society
values comfort over greatness. Cornish-Dale, however, insists the harm runs
deeper: Liberalism erodes masculinity not just at its cultural foundations, but
at its biological foundations.
The question animating The Last Men is whether it
is “possible to be men fully in a liberal democracy? If not, and we want
to be, what then?” That framing suggests a stark dilemma: The fate of manhood
hangs in the balance, and the reader is asked to contemplate a choice between
liberalism and his own virility.
If the premise seems overwrought, Cornish-Dale, who has a
Ph.D in history from Oxford, offers little clarification over the course of the
book. His thesis rests on a single, sweeping claim: The contemporary liberal
order has precipitated a global decline in testosterone, the hormonal
analogue—on his account—of man’s thymotic drive. He seeks to establish a
“hormonal basis” for political systems and to demonstrate that liberalism is,
in essence, a low-T regime.
There is no disputing the empirical backdrop.
Cornish-Dale amasses a formidable catalog of studies demonstrating that
testosterone levels and sperm counts are declining worldwide, though the scale
and causes remain debated. One major meta-analysis
he cites shows that over the last 40 years, sperm counts have fallen by half
among healthy Western men. Testosterone levels have not fared much better,
dropping about 20 percent
in American men in less than a generation.
The causal story he proposes to explain why liberalism is
to blame, however, is far less persuasive. The specific culprits he
identifies—endocrine-disrupting chemicals, processed foods, and a culture
increasingly hostile to traditional masculinity—are real enough, but the first
two are neither distinctive to liberal societies nor, it should go without
saying, intrinsic to liberal political theory. Microplastics containing
endocrine-disrupting chemicals saturate authoritarian and illiberal states as
much as Western democracies; they are detectable even in Antarctica,
as Cornish-Dale himself notes. What, precisely, does this have to do with John
Locke or constitutional liberalism?
The global distribution of male decline compounds the
issues with his argument. If these trends were confined to the liberal West,
Cornish-Dale might have a leg to stand on. Instead, he cites evidence of
falling T-levels and sperm counts everywhere from Denmark to South America—hardly a map
of ideological uniformity. One could attempt to salvage the thesis by arguing
that globalization, championed by Western liberals, has diffused these
environmental harms worldwide. That claim would at least gesture toward
coherence, though it remains highly contestable. Yet Cornish-Dale never even
articulates it.
As the book proceeds, it becomes increasingly consumed by
lengthy digressions into medical studies and ominous projections about future
fertility. At times, The Last Men reads less like a political treatise
than like an uncurated literature review, assembled without the conceptual
discipline that such a review demands. The more engrossed Cornish-Dale becomes
in the minutiae of endocrinology, the more obscure his argument grows.
A deeper problem is definitional. Cornish-Dale never
clarifies what he means by “liberalism,” nor “manhood.” Defining these terms is
necessary to answer whether it is possible to be fully a man in a liberal
society, and the author’s failure to even attempt a definition feels lazy.
Moreover, his identification of thymos with testosterone, a key
assumption upon which much of the book rests, is never satisfyingly explained.
The book also suffers from tonal instability. It is never
quite clear whether Cornish-Dale intends to write a practical guide for anxious
men or a philosophical indictment of liberal modernity. At points, the argument
shades into paranoia—most memorably when he speculatively claims that even the
air we breathe exerts “feminizing effects” due to estrogenic microplastics.
While the existence of airborne microplastics is well-documented,
if every breath is a step toward emasculation, the reader might reasonably ask
what hope remains.
These anxieties crescendo into sweeping predictions of
demographic collapse. Against such apocalyptic rhetoric, Cornish-Dale’s closing
recommendations—avoid plastic bottles, eat better, lose weight—feel strangely
perfunctory. If the crisis is civilizational, lifestyle tweaks don’t seem like
they’ll help all that much.
This gap between grand diagnosis and thin prescription is
characteristic of the hyper-online far-right milieu from which Cornish-Dale
emerged, a world in which thinkers are quick to issue sweeping indictments of
modernity but far less adept at articulating workable paths forward. For
readers unacquainted with the murkier corners of the internet, some context
helps: Cornish-Dale’s Raw Egg Nationalist moniker is a product of the
dissident-right ecosystem synonymous with names like Bronze
Age Pervert, Curtis
Yarvin, and Jonathan
Keeperman (also known as “Lomez”). In this world, having the most radical
take is rewarded with clicks and retweets, which helps explain why critique so
often outpaces construction.
Yet Cornish-Dale’s work cannot be dismissed merely
because some of his claims verge on the outlandish. As the right increasingly
asks what might follow Donald Trump—and what, if anything, “postliberalism”
stands for—figures like Cornish-Dale play a role in shaping the vocabulary of
discontent. His influence is more benign than that of the outright race-baiters
and antisemites who compete for young conservatives’ attention; whatever his
excesses, he is not trafficking in the overt hatreds that animate some of his
peers. His book gives voice, however unevenly, to anxieties that animate a
significant swath of young men: the sense that modern life is physically and
spiritually weakening, that liberalism is exhausted, and that some new ethic of
vigor must replace it.
A more disciplined treatment of the topic—one that
defined its terms, tested its claims, and resisted the allure of
melodrama—might have yielded a genuinely intriguing contribution. Instead, The
Last Men offers a thesis too sweeping for the evidence marshaled on its
behalf. It aspires to diagnose a crisis of masculinity; it ends, instead, as a
disappointingly flaccid read.
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