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.
