Joe Rogan posted an image on instagram depicting the political compass with a cycle that goes like this: hard times -> strong men -> good times -> weak men -> hard times ... . My first reaction to this is that this seems quite obviously over simplistic and wrong. So my question is: Is there a cycle like this throughout history or is this just nonsense?
This is, as you suspect, nonsense.
For this to work, you have to uncover a definition of “strong men” that is not only rational but has a causal relationship to so-called “good times”, which is another ambiguous term. Good in what way? Good for whom?
As such, it’s almost impossible to prove this hypothesis. It’s also difficult to disprove: I could argue that the generation of men that came of age during the American Civil War should probably rank as “strong men”, but as they took the reigns of government and industry the country faced numerous economic setbacks including the Panic of 1873, the resulting Long Depression of 1873-1879, the Panic of 1893 and the resulting depression from 1893-1897. Can we prove that they were “strong men” and whether that was correlated to the “hard times” they lived through? Conclusively?
What is a historical trend is that when countries face economic and social headwinds, people can start looking for moral failings that have triggered the declining fortunes. Failures of “manliness”, for various definitions of manliness, have been repeatedly cited through history as such a cause of social ailments.
To give three examples:
Roman historians such as Cassius Dio reference Augustus Caesar chastising the young men of Rome for not settling down and raising strong, moral, Roman families, and passed laws to encourage marriage, which he believed would stabilize Roman society.
A number of historians have explored how propaganda from Benito Mussolini’s fascist government depicted war and conquest as ways of reclaiming the virility of Italian men.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne explains how the rise of conservative American evangelicalism as a political force was directly tied to its promotion of a “militant masculinity” as a counter for the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s.
This is a common trope, found in right-wing politics, fundamentalist movements and other reactionary ideologies. Rogan just made it a meme.
It's just the usual 'crisis of masculinity' claptrap, as u/Iphikrates explains.