White Men Are Not OK
It's like a midlife crisis but it's been going on for years and it's getting worse.
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America has a very well-defined pattern of behavior. Whenever we make progress, there is a backlash. The more significant the progress, the more severe the backlash.
The push to end slavery triggered the Civil War. Giving freed slaves their rights gave us the KKK and a century of blood and murder and terror. The Civil Rights Era gave us the birth of the modern Republican Party as a racist cesspit. Feminism gave rise to the Religious Right.
White men in America have long fought tooth and nail against anything and everything that threatened their dominance. The deep insecurity of a group who tend to believe themselves superior by birth can be seen everywhere.
But the election of Barack Obama was the last straw. White men, already struggling with dwindling relevance and power, found themselves faced with their worst fear: A world where they were no longer in charge. It broke them and they have not been OK since.
Driftglass of the Professional Left Podcast (which you should absolutely be listening to) calls this the right’s “racist primal scream.” It lasted eight long years under Obama. The Tea Party. The proliferation of militias. The election of Donald Trump. All of it was a direct response to white men feeling threatened.
And after Trump was elected? They got even worse because the country reared up in utter disgust and rejected the MAGA movement.
It’s been almost a decade, one economic collapse, and a global pandemic ago, so a lot of people don’t really remember how fucking insane the right went in the wake of Trump’s extremely illegitimate election. MAGAts all over the country mistakenly believed that the days of consequences were over. They could scream racial slurs in public. They could be as mean and nasty on the outside as they’d always been on the inside. This was their (racist white people’s) country and they could do anything they wanted because “President” Donald Trump had told them they could.
That didn’t work out so well. Asshole after asshole proudly went out into the world to fly their inner Confederate flag with no worries. They fucked around and very quickly found out. The internet made them famous and then they found themselves jobless and friendless, their lives destroyed.
Faced with the reality that America did not, in fact, belong to them and they could not, in fact, do whatever they wanted, white people, especially white men, got even uglier.
The racist backlash was turbocharged with an intersectional backlash to feminism as #MeToo caught on and made sexual predators afraid for the first time. Now, white men were not just under attack by Those People, but by women, too!
And this had been a problem brewing for years. More women were attending and graduating college. More women were living successful lives without men. Worst of all, more women were refusing to be mommies to grown-ass man-babies. They wanted partners, not a “fixer-upper.”
The phrases “toxic masculinity” and “white privilege” were fucking everywhere! What choice did white men have but to feel under siege?! Poor, poor, oppressed white men…
Yeah. Something definitely broke in the brains of white men and it’s not getting better. It’s getting distinctly worse.
The American right has been consumed by a fascist movement. Not because they think democracy as a concept has failed but because it’s failed them, as white people. Specifically, it has failed to keep white men at the apex of American society.
I mean, they’re still there but not for long and we all know it. Within a generation, two at most, white men will be just another voice in the crowd. In a country where everyone gets a vote, white men are not special. Therefore, to the minds of white men, not everyone deserves to vote.
Fascism takes care of that pesky pluralistic society problem. By enforcing the will of white men at gunpoint, they can stay on top forever. This is a favored solution of angry racist white men and has been through all of American history. The Civil War. The decades of racial terrorism throughout the South. The race riots that burned entire Black communities to the ground. The “War on Drugs” and the mass incarceration that followed. Generations of police brutality. All designed to keep white men in power.
The same goes for women. Denying women the right to property or the vote. Rape culture.1 The war on reproductive rights. The Manosphere and keeping guns in the hands of abusers. These were and are all ways to keep women in their place through cruelty and violence.
Even with all of their rage and hate and violence directed at everyone else, white men are still losing. And like a wounded and cornered animal, white men are lashing out in increasingly violent ways. January 6th. The Proud Boys. The Neo-Nazis. The incel killing sprees. Events like these will continue to increase in frequency and intensity as the sun sets on white male power in the United States.
I cannot begin to guess how long this part of the primal scream will last. It will not be short and it will not be pretty. There is no place in the world more dangerous than between a white man and what he believes he is owed by right of birth. How many white men have you met who think they are owed something? Money? Status? A woman’s time? Sex? A seat at the table in place of those they consider inferior?
Until white men grow the fuck up and get over themselves, we can look forward to their ongoing temper tantrums and that’s not healthy for anyone. Not for them. Not for their victims. Especially not for the nation.
There are 172 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it.
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These two little words encompass a universe of horror I simply do not have room for in this article. I will, however, get to it in a future piece or as an Ogre Opinion on the podcast.
And so many men wonder why a majority of women chose the bear.
I’ve had bear encounters when hiking and backpacking, all of them with no violence. I’ve never been groped by a bear. I wish I could always say the same about men.
I was also truly shocked by the overt racism that flared up after Obama was elected and especially after Trump took office. I was a complacent white middle class woman who thought we’d gotten better than that. I’ve since seen the power of the backlash in many forms. Thank you for describing this so clearly.
Bsck on Twitter I used to say we could do with an administration without any white men. White men have run America almost 250 years and she is on the brink of death.
Let's let everyone else have a fucking turn, aye?