The Angry White Male Caucus
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
When Matt Damon did his Brett Kavanaugh imitation on “Saturday Night Live,” you could tell that he nailed it before he said a word. It was all about the face — that sneering, rage-filled scowl. Kavanaugh didn’t sound like a judge at his Senate hearing last week, let alone a potential Supreme Court justice; he didn’t even manage to look like one.
But then again, Lindsey Graham, who went through the hearing with pretty much the same expression on his face, didn’t look much like a senator, either.
There have been many studies of the forces driving Trump support, and in particular the rage that is so pervasive a feature of the MAGA movement. What Thursday’s hearing drove home, however, was that white male rage isn’t restricted to blue-collar guys in diners. It’s also present among people who’ve done very well in life’s lottery, whom you would normally consider very much part of the elite.
In other words, hatred can go along with high income, and all too often does.
At this point there’s overwhelming evidence against the “economic anxiety” hypothesis — the notion that people voted for Donald Trump because they had been hurt by globalization. In fact, people who were doing well financially were just as likely to support Trump as people who were doing badly.
What distinguished Trump voters was, instead, racial resentment. Furthermore, this resentment was and is driven not by actual economic losses at the hands of minority groups, but by fear of losing status in a changing country, one in which the privilege of being a white man isn’t what it used to be.
And here’s the thing: It’s perfectly possible for a man to lead a comfortable, indeed enviable life by any objective standard, yet be consumed with bitterness driven by status anxiety.
You might think that this is impossible, that having a good job and a comfortable life would inoculate someone against envy and hatred. That is, you might think that if you knew nothing of human nature and the world.
I’ve spent my whole adult life in rarefied academic circles, where everyone has a good income and excellent working conditions. Yet I know many people in that world who are seething with resentment because they aren’t at Harvard or Yale, or who actually are at Harvard or Yale but are seething all the same because they haven’t received a Nobel Prize.
And this sort of high-end resentment, the anger of highly privileged people who nonetheless feel that they aren’t privileged enough or that their privileges might be eroded by social change, suffuses the modern conservative movement.
It starts, of course, at the top, with that walking, talking, golfing bundle of resentment that is Donald Trump. You might imagine that a man who lives in the White House would no longer feel the need to, for example, make false claims about his college record. But Trump still doesn’t get the respect he obviously craves.
Indeed, it seems apparent that his jihad against Barack Obama was fueled by envy: Obama was a black man who was also a class act, with all the grace and poise Trump lacks. And Trump couldn’t stand it.
Kavanaugh is clearly cut from the same cloth, and not just because he rivals Trump in his propensity for lying about matters great and small.
As a lot of reporting shows, the angry face Kavanaugh presented to the world last week wasn’t something new, brought on by the charges of past abuse. Classmates from his Yale days describe him as a belligerent heavy drinker even then. His memo to Ken Starr as he helped harass Bill Clinton — in which he declared that “it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear” — shows rage as well as cynicism.
And Kavanaugh, like Trump, is still in the habit of embellishing his academic record after all these years, declaring that he got into Yale despite having “no connections.” In fact, he was a legacy student whose grandfather went there.
Indeed, my guess is that his privileged roots are precisely why he’s so angry.
I very much ran with the nerds during my own time at Yale, but I did encounter people like Kavanaugh — hard-partying sons of privilege who counted on their connections to insulate them from any consequences from their actions, up to and including abusive behavior toward women. And that kind of elite privilege still exists.
But it’s privilege under siege. An increasingly diverse society no longer accepts the God-given right of white males from the right families to run things, and a society with many empowered, educated women is finally rejecting the droit de seigneur once granted to powerful men.
And nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially if it comes with the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.
So what we got last week was a view into the soul of Trumpism. It’s not about “populism” — it would be hard to find a judge as anti-worker as Brett Kavanaugh. Instead, it’s about the rage of white men, upper class as well as working class, who perceive a threat to their privileged position. And that rage may destroy America as we know it.
Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @ PaulKrugman
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It can really piss a person off if they are falsely accused of a crime that apparently didn't happen, and then to add insult to injury, the accusers want to deny them due process and the presumption of innocence.
And, concerning college records....I believe that to date Obama's grades are still locked up and hidden from public view.
Do you have anything to say that is pertinent to the seed?
I just did. Since Kavanaugh was brought up, I was giving the reasons why he might have been angry. Trump's College record was brought up, my response concerned the previous president. Go whine to a mod if you can't think of an intelligent and informed response.
What law requires him to release them?
The same law that requires Trump to release his taxes.
Please don't participate in this attempt to derail. This is far off topic.
Thanks.
Oh please, he's published more books than Trump has read. Harvard doesn't offer teaching jobs to idiots. Lol
No problem Bob, plenty of other articles for me to post on.
Nothing ‘Sealed’
The idea that any Obama record is “sealed” is a falsehood, to start. The word “sealed” when applied to documents ordinarily refers to records that would normally be public, but that a judge has ruled cannot be released without the court’s permission. Common examples of truly “sealed” documents include records of crimes committed as a juvenile or records of adoptions . None of the claims in this message refers to records actually “sealed” in that usual sense.
In some cases, the records this screed claims are “sealed” are actually public, and open for anyone to see. Other supposedly “sealed” records are normally private documents that Obama hasn’t released — and that other presidential candidates haven’t released either.
So as with earlier versions, this is little more than an attempt to raise suspicions by asking for records that aren’t ordinarily made public, without any evidence that those records contain anything derogatory. We’ll take the claims and questions in the order they appear.
Well Trump isn't a 'learned' person so that explains it...
I know it is fashionable to say that white people are 'privileged'. However, I am not fully convinced. Sure, our founding father's felt their privilege to rule, because after all, only patrician whites had the time to adequately study the political issues of the time. And they tried to ensure things stayed that way. But it all got away from them.
I believe the anger, of whites, blacks, browns, yellows, purples, greens and unicorns, stems from the fear of a loss of control of their lives. People don't feel safe. Why don't they feel safe? Because the times they are a changin', and change can be a scary thing. They feel their jobs are not safe, losing their job will cause a loss of a house, selfworth, and life in general. Seems to me this is where the homeless have one over on the average individual. They are already there.
So yeah, we see a lot of anger, from all sides. The real issue is that no one wants to voice their fears. Speaking your fear can be a scary thing in and of itself. But once, done, it doesn't seem so bad.
Glad you are back with your race obsessions, Bob. It reminds me how lucky how I am not to view every interaction in my life through the prism of race. It must be exhausting.