Jordan Peterson and I Had a Chat

Last week, I sat down for an extended interview with Jordan Peterson about the plight of young men in America. He’d read my recent newsletter about the Democratic Party’s struggles in reaching male voters — in which I began with a story about how Peterson had positively influenced a young man I’d met — and decided to invite me to chat on his podcast.

The entire conversation was interesting, but there was one moment that I thought crystallized not just how and why so many Americans see the world differently from one another, but also how and why our political disputes become so vicious.

Peterson and I were in broad agreement on a number of fronts, including on the urgent need to address the problems afflicting millions of young men. Simply put, they are flailing and falling behind. While men still do very well at the apex of American society (the chief executives of Fortune 500 companies are still overwhelmingly male, to give one example), men are lagging women in educational attainment, struggling disproportionately with their mental health, and dying by suicide at rates much greater than women.

But why? At this point, the evidence of men’s tribulations is so overwhelming that very few seriously dispute the problem. But understanding the reasons behind the crisis is indispensable to finding a solution.

Early in the podcast, Peterson, a clinical psychologist, made the case for what I’ll call the ideological explanation: Men are suffering because of what’s been done to them by malign actors, by people who either hate men or see men as fundamentally flawed. Peterson was telling a story about how his son came home from school and told Peterson that he believed he was “doing really well for a boy.”

Peterson’s explanation for the struggles of young men in schools was rooted in the culture war. “The vast majority of teachers are not only female, but infantilizing female and radically left,” he said. Boys, Peterson argued, are “required to sit for hours at a time, which is not in keeping with their nature — especially if they’re active, in which case they get diagnosed with A.D.H.D. and get put on methylphenidate.”