A good deal of public head-scratching has been taking place since Sunday, when Angela Merkel’s CDU, together with its future coalition partner the FDP, handed the German socialists their worst electoral defeat since 1945.

Some journalists and public intellectuals are openly fretting about the demise of European socialism, ironically coming at a time when the capitalist system itself appears to be under direct attack from every angle. Some bloggers have noted that Europe appears to be moving away from socialism just as the United States seems to be veering toward it, but this would not be the first time that major political events in Europe and the United States have moved in different directions at the same time, rather than in lock step.

In a similar vein, David Brooks, in his latest effort to both scurry away from actually being a conservative while working doubletime to retain some changed version of that label, worries that America remains mired in:

the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally. If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

Brooks argues that financial conservatism is a moral issue, because America’s Calvinist founders and their WASP heirs saw it as a moral issue. I personally doubt it can be recast as an issue of national morality, or that the current “culture wars”, which are in fact waning in any case, will be replaced by some kind of war against fiscal profligacy from the moral perspective.

Nevertheless, all of these articles about the current swirl of change in the West do underscore one important point for men to consider carefully.  We stand currently at something of a historical crossroads.  The old regime — socially, culturally, politically — is being replaced by something else throughout the West.  Men sometimes spend a lot of time fretting about this, but in my view these changes are inevitable and can’t be helped.  What men can do, however, is react to them personally in a creative and useful way, for themselves.

In a sense this relates to what Zed wrote recently in these pages, to wit:

Well, fast forward 50 years and we find that men have far more freedom and flexibility than any group of men has ever had in the history of the world. They can now choose to be husbands, and/or fathers, or anything else, and the social pressure and stigma which used to force the vast majority of men into early marriage (and often early graves) and the role of a specialized beast of burden bred for the specific purpose of dragging around an emotionally and financially dependent wife and family is simply no longer there.

Certainly, some men might wish to continue to choose those roles for their lives. And the social Luddites, who fear and resist change, may want to try to keep men trapped in those old roles. But, as women’s roles have changed, the system which gave men only one set of choices has changed whether people wanted it to or not.

Men may choose to be husbands and fathers. Or not. They can choose to be travelers, or explorers, or scholars, or X-box players. Or not. They can be househusbands, assuming they can find a breadwinning wife and are willing to deal with the residual social stigma toward a man who does not live up to the traditional roles. But, women have blazed the way in breaking down those old roles and in their place have left men a world of opportunities limited only by their own imaginations.

The real challenges confronting men these days are the topics Novaseeker and Prime have recently written about – defining core masculine values by which men define
themselves. For too long men have been allowing women to define us – either in the negative, by giving a us a list of things they don’t like about us, or by demanding that we become more like them. Some men are comfortable with becoming more like women, and we will see how women really end up liking them once they do.

But, for the rest of us, who have never had any desire to be women, we now have the opportunity to completely define for ourselves what sort of masculinity will serve us, and those we love, best in the coming years.

Very much so. These changing times — and it does appear that change is once again accelerating — offer us a great opportunity to recast ourselves as men in whatever mold we wish to. Clinging to the past is not going to be fruitful for most of us, because the past is not going to come back to life. Rather, a new way forward is the most viable path for us, as men, in reaction to all of the swirling change around us. We have the freedom, today, to do this, and as men it’s our responsibility to ourselves and future generations of men as well to take up the reins of that freedom and run with it, in the process broadening the scope of what masculinity means in the 21st Century, rather than having it redefined for us by women, academics, elites and others.

This is a time of great change and dislocation, to be sure. But it is also our time, the time of our freedom, if we choose to recognize that and embrace it in our lives.  We can be our future now, if we only have the courage to grasp that destiny with both hands and mold it as we wish.