Fox’s Tucker Carlson, the most important nationalist voice in America, seemed to sympathize with the gender politics of Taliban-supporting Afghans. “They don’t hate their own masculinity,” he said shortly after the fall of Kabul. “They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy. Some of their women like it too. So now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.” (By “neoliberalism” he seems to mean social liberalism, not austerity economics.)

It turns out that when the government deceptively invokes liberal democracy to justify a war, liberal democracy can be discredited by a grueling defeat. In his new book “Reign of Terror,” the national security journalist Spencer Ackerman draws a direct line between our stalemated post-9/11 wars and the rise of Donald Trump. “Trump was able to safely voice the reality of the war by articulating what about it most offended right-wing exceptionalists: humiliation,” he wrote.

Humiliation is a volatile emotion. Many have written about its role in motivating Al Qaeda. Perhaps it’s not surprising that parts of the right would respond to humiliation by identifying with images of brutal masculinity.