A lot has already been written about the Hamilton Society, a fast-growing, right-leaning, parliamentary-style debate society in San Francisco, including an adulatory Pirate Wires profile and many thousands of tweets. My value-add in taking up this topic is simply that, unlike most people writing about it online, 100% of the society members, and, to a first approximation, 85% of the attendees, I am a woman. You see: The Hamilton Society seems to me to be, more than anything else, an essentially male artifact. I say this in a morally neutral sense. I don’t think it’s bad that the Hamilton Society is of, by and for dudes; in fact, I think it’s really good. Let me explain.
It’s by now pretty well established in the sociological literature that men, more so than women, require structure in order to thrive. They derive more benefit from formal institutions like marriage, organized religion, labor unions and the military, and they suffer more when those institutions decline. Boys get more than girls out of rigidly managed classrooms; unmarried and/or unemployed men are more prone to drug addiction, homelessness and suicide than their unmarried/unemployed counterparts; and so on. The crisis of men, or whatever we’re calling it, is basically a side effect of the collapse of old norms and institutions.
It seemed obvious to me as soon as I stepped into my first Hamilton Society meeting several months ago that the whole enterprise was—consciously or not—a reaction to this collapse. For the most prominent feature of the Hamilton Society, at least from where I’m sitting in the anything-goes Mission District, is the proliferation of formal constraints: jackets and ties are strictly required (“equivalent” for women); debaters must refer to one another in the third person (“the gentleman from Hayes Valley”); photography is forbidden; chatting during the debate risks a firm shush from the House Whip; and allegiance is pledged to the flag at the start of each meeting. There was also a firmly established hierarchy. Society members in matching boutonnières read out their titles, while a small army of college-aged-looking and presumably untitled gophers fetched drinks for anyone who raised three fingers in summons.
A poignant bid for order in a crumbling society, or goofy conservative LARPing? What if it’s both? The Society founders, all of whom are Very Online, strike me as being sufficiently postmodern to know that they are doing theater. Yet in debate proceedings, and in conversations I’ve had with some of the members, they are all quite sincere, if not solemn about what they are up to. Maybe there’s a dialectic here. The people most saturated in the End of History, most awash in the flab and decadence of post-scarcity post-virtue post-everything America, are naturally those most likely to crave the restoration of some kind of order. I’ve always figured that this channel alone is enough to explain the growing popularity of Catholicism, with its well-defined hierarchy and rites, its decided lack of acoustic guitars and LBGTQIA+ flags, in certain edgy circles in New York and San Francisco. Indeed, I do not think it is a coincidence that the Hamilton Society founders are all observant Catholics, and apparently met one another via Mass. Without accusing anyone of LARPing their faith, let me just posit that when old norms and institutions have crumbled, some degree of LARPing is inevitable in seeking to re-establish them. Put another way: Maybe the only way out is through.
I should say now that the re-imposition of formal constraints is not the stated aim of the Hamilton Society. The goal of the Hamilton Society, according to Will O’Brien as quoted in the Pirate Wires article, is to provide a real-life, high-quality alternative to Twitter where Silicon Valley’s “best ideas [can] compete.” This is a noble and worthy goal. Does the Hamilton Society succeed in accomplishing it? Yes and no. In Does America Need More High Skilled Immigration to Succeed?, the debate I saw in February, there was genuine disagreement between the two debaters, who had tangled earlier in the year on Twitter, and their exchange was tense but respectful. I was less impressed with June’s debate, Does American Need a Caesar? ft. Curtis Yarvin, at which there did not seem to be much daylight between the opposing sides, the disagreement centering not on whether liberal democracy was worthwhile, but whether a Caesar would be sufficient to eliminate the evils of the deep state, mass immigration and the national debt. The debate quickly devolved into a rather free-ranging discourse about what exactly constitutes a Caesar, and who among past Presidents might be considered a Caesar, and related matters requiring much pedantry and tedium—which, to be fair, are things men have a lot more tolerance for than women. The bright spot of the debate for me was undoubtedly when one of the debaters (negation side) uttered the remarkable phrase “We all want Daddy to come riding in on a horse,” singlehandedly confirming the thesis of this article.
At its worst, the Hamilton Society might be accused of playing in too narrow a sandbox. Does America Need More High Skilled Immigration? brought together genuinely opposing views, but it elided the much more controversial and also more interesting question of whether America needs more low skilled immigration (high skilled immigration is quite popular). I also don’t care for the HamSoc’s cherry-picking of journalists—they allowed in a sympathetic Pirate Wires reporter to Does America Need More High Skilled Immigration?, but barred potentially less sympathetic ones—which seems to me to go a little bit against the spirit of open debate. (Am I going to get in trouble for writing this? Probably.) To their credit, they allowed in leftist writer and Yarvin enemy Sam Kriss to Does America Need a Caesar?, although—and Sam will hate this explanation—this could just be because the guy in charge of registration didn’t know who Sam was.1
None of these critiques really matter, though, if you buy my argument that with the Hamilton Society, the form is the substance. To have produced a hierarchically clear, highly structured and rigorously managed venue for guys to engage in friendly intellectual competition—a safe space, if you will—is accomplishment enough. It remains to be seen if it will become something more; I’m actually quite bullish that it will. But even if what it ultimately becomes is a fraternal association for young right-leaning intellectuals, that’s fine. The Masons, the Elks and the Mooses are all dead—long live the Hamilton Society.
Sam claims that he and Yarvin had an amiable smoke together outside the auditorium pre-debate. The healing power of IRL!
LARPing is what we used to call training in virtue. You do the actions that the virtuous man would do until you too are virtuous. LARPing is a shorthand to mock the possibility of moral improvement.
I was a debate coach for several years in a liberal Catholic highschool in Paris, where I taught the kids mostly from the Anglophone section where I worked, the joys of parliamentary-style debate. I had come up on it myself, in my all-boys Catholic school in Ireland (it was, and still mostly is, the norm in Ireland for public schools to be single sex and Catholic, though it's changing slowly). What I found was that actually the debaters who really thrived, and made up the selection for our competitive teams, were mostly girls. They benefited the most from the rigid structure and the rules, as it allowed them to speak and to shine *without the boys talking over them* ... The boys, especially the younger ones (I coached the middle school teams too, though I didn't teach at that level) found it hard not to descend into giggling and fart jokes. The girls were better at being serious, and at seriously tearing their opponents a new one with scathing wit rather than dumb insults and bluster. What I'm saying is, I suppose, that if it's good for young men of the ilk you describe to get into debating, it could be really great, perhaps in other ways, for young women to get in on the act, and take on men, and other women, in a format that guarantees everyone their say, their moment, their time in the spotlight, by the very nature of the rules.