A meme that took off after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton is an image of Betty White with the caption, “The first thing people say when a mass shooting is announced”—the joke being “bet-he-white,” since mass shootings are overwhelmingly the work of white males. These shooters also tend to be paranoid, resentful, or narcissistic, and they view the world through a prism of anger, isolation, and jealousy. If one connects these traits with other trends, such as spikes in violence and misogyny tied to acts of racism, and the politics of white supremacy, a larger pattern emerges that also involves the “coarsening” language and some long-existing moods that have permeated the popular culture. It also ties in with the fact that a significant portion of the public shares these same resentments; has cheered on the ugliness while supporting a political party that has made the suffering of brown people and immigrants one of its selling points; and is now trying to shirk responsibility for what its anger has wrought.
A little over three years ago, I wrote a piece during the 2016 presidential election about how the feelings and attitudes of Donald Trump’s base were similar to themes dominant in pop culture. To be clear, I’m not blaming TV or media for causing anything, just pointing out they reflect and dramatize something which has been there for a long time. Specifically, the past three decades of television, which have been lauded as a “golden age” in terms of quality, usually featured white male protagonists (e.g., Breaking Bad’s Walter White, Mad Men’s Don Draper, Tony Soprano of The Sopranos) frustrated by their circumstances. And honestly, the themes go back farther, to works such as All in the Family and Death of a Salesman, where there’s anger and resentment over feeling deprived of something you’re owed, a certain status for your hard work as a part of the defense of the civilization we claim as our own. It can basically be argued as a modern update on the ideas central to Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” but used as a justification for exclusion instead of conquest.
In most of these works, the action is centered in a world where things aren’t working the way the protagonists think it should. They’re not the rock star, football hero, billionaire playboy, or even husband or father they believed they would be. And thus the stories become power fantasies in which angry white men attempt to break free in the worst possible ways from a paradigm they believe has been forced upon them by others, even if those ways include murder and destruction. Trump’s rise as a candidate and president has been built upon support from people who are often white, male, and without college degrees, who bask in a power fantasy about how life could be made “great again” and things could be the way they should be, if only we’d do some things in the worst possible ways. Most of this ties into larger questions about what it means to be a man. What defines manhood? What does it mean to be a provider, or a husband, or a father? And what happens when the privileges and fantasies of being a man meet the realities of the modern world?
For a lot of people, these ideas and emotions express themselves through everyday misogyny, prejudice, greed, and being a general asshole to one’s fellow man and woman. For others, it becomes the basis for white supremacist policies that result in concentration camps. And for another slice, it is arguably the bedrock on which the idea of murdering people stands.
From Michael Kruse’s profile of Trump voters in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, for Politico:
“You’re not a fan of equality?” I asked.
“For people who deserve it and earn it,” he said. “All my ancestors, Italian, 100 percent Italian, the Irish, Germans, Polish, whatever—they all came over here, settled in places like this, they worked hard and they earned the respect. They earned the success that they got. Some people don’t want to do that. They just want it handed to them.”
“Like NFL players?” I said.
“Well,” Del Signore responded, “I hate to say what the majority of them are …” He stopped himself short of what I thought he was about to say.
Schilling and her husband, however, did not restrain themselves.
“The thing that irritates me to no end is this NFL shit,” Schilling told me in her living room. “I’m about ready to go over the top with this shit. We do not watch no NFL now.” They’re Dallas Cowboys fans. “We banned ’em. We don’t watch it.”
Schilling looked at her husband, Dave McCabe, who’s 67 and a retired high school basketball coach. She nodded at me. “Tell him,” she said to McCabe, “what you said the NFL is …”
McCabe looked momentarily wary. He laughed a little. “I don’t remember saying that,” he said unconvincingly.
Schilling was having none of it. “You’re the one that told me, liar,” she said.
She looked at me.
The NFL?
“Niggers for life,” Schilling said.
“For life,” McCabe added.
During and after the 2016 campaign, there were many analyses of the Trump voter that argued the situation was one of economics, and not connecting with white voter’s economic anxieties. The picture of poor Appalachian coal miners with no choice but to vote for idiocy out of fear was a popular one. Whether or not the narrative was true, and it isn’t, I always thought it was the deepest, darkest pit of cynicism to accept it as a reasonable view of politics. It positions white voters as victims of circumstance with no other choice but to support racist policies in hopes of a better life through tax cuts for rich people.
Others will explain this strange phenomenon through the propaganda machine that parrots lies and stupidity, mainly that den of sexual harassment and white supremacy that claims to be a news organization, Fox News. But it is also aided and abetted by the “cowardice” of traditional news organizations that give a platform to things they know are not true, slant their coverage for access, inevitably devolve everything down into a both-sides rationalization, and take no responsibility for giving free airtime to a fat racist prick who tells people their country is being “invaded” without any concern for the consequences.
Because we know what will happen when this is over and the people who traded favorable coverage for access are confronted with what they wrote and said. The news media will do what they’ve done before when trying to explain away past failures. There’ll be a huge exhaustive think piece written in a passive voice stating “mistakes were made.” How those specific mistakes happened and consequences for those who made them will be absent. And there will be a general but non-apology apology to “do better” in the future.
And it will do the same thing past measured introspection has achieved: nothing. Because the institutional forces (i.e., lack of diversity among management, reporter access prioritized over reporting unvarnished truth, economics of the industry, etc.) won’t allow a change, and the sad truth is the news media has plenty “angry white men” of its own. And that’s true whether it’s Tucker Carlson’s white supremacy hour on cable.
Or the deputy Washington editor for The New York Times, Jonathan Weisman, putting out racist tweets, getting called on it, refuses to apologize, does more stupid shit, and then has a hissy-fit when people call him out on it. And this is why the Times doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt when they write headlines which normalize the president’s bigotry.
From Caleb Ecarma at Mediaite:
The New York Times deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman sent a strongly-worded email to author Roxane Gay demanding that she issue an “enormous” apology for criticizing him on Twitter … The confrontation started after Weisman, who has been consistently slammed on Twitter of late for making numerous controversial comments about race, accused the leftist group Justice Democrats of trying “to unseat an African-American Democrat,” even though the Justice Democrats-backed candidate in question is also black.
“Any time you think you’re unqualified for a job remember that this guy, telling a black woman she isn’t black because he looked at a picture and can’t see, has one of the most prestigious jobs in America,” Gay tweeted in response to Weisman after he defended his tweet attacking the Justice Democrats.
Over the past 50 years, the conservative movement has been predicated on re-purposing white people as the victims of liberal agendas who need to be saved by Jesus and given the freedom to be made great again. The reason manufacturing jobs have disappeared is not mismanagement or corporate greed, but “libtard” regulations that care more about unions and spotted owls than "working people." The problem with public schools or the reason why one’s kid couldn’t get into a good college has nothing to do with shitty parenting or the subjective merits of the academic system, but Title IX taking Junior’s football dreams away to give funds to little girls, and affirmative action and its “reverse racism” against whites, wrongly valuing diversity as a strength. And racism is bad, but liberals are just so “mean” for saying it.
All of these are rationalizations of why it’s okay to be an asshole and not give a shit. This leads to people claiming all the sides suck and are out to fuck everyone, so why should anyone care about anything? And it all becomes a big joke. Because, if there’s anything conservative trash excels at, it’s devaluing people into concepts and things, even when their value is self-evident, because we can rationalize being terrible to “things” with little to no moral consequence.
At the heart of it all is a message which says: You’re better than them.
You’re better than your neighbors. You’re better than the filth coming over the border to take your job, or those people you roll up your windows against when you pass them on the street in bad neighborhoods. You could have so much more if you didn’t care about anyone else but your own.
From Andy Greenwald at the now defunct Grantland:
I think the most horrifying part of Breaking Bad may be that Walt, at his core, didn’t really transform at all. It wasn’t greed or generosity or cancer or fear that fueled this reign of death and destruction. It was resentment. Seething, burning resentment, the kind that forms not due to poor treatment but due to an innate knowledge that you, the aggrieved, are better than said treatment, better than everyone who has somehow gotten the better of you over the years ... Every moment Walt spent in front of a classroom he was thinking about how beneath him it all was. He was a genius; he was meant to be a millionaire, not this castrated cross between stepping stone and doormat.