Veiled sentiments chapter 1 summary

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ANGRY WHITE MEN

AMERICAN

MASC ULINITY

AT

THE

E ND OF

AN ERA

MICHAEL

KIMMEL

ANGRY WHITE MEN M

IC H

A E

L K

IM M

E L

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“[W]e can’t come off as a bunch of angry white men.”

Robert Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party

O ne of the enduring legacies of the 2012 presidential campaign was the demise of the white American male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape. On election night, after Obama was announced the

winner, a distressed Bill O’Reilly lamented that he didn’t live in

“a traditional America anymore.” He was joined by others who

bellowed their grief on the talk radio airwaves, the traditional

redoubt of angry white men. Why were they so angry? Sociologist

Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and

masculinity in the world today, has spent hundreds of hours in

the company of America’s angry white men—from men’s rights

activists to young students to white supremacists—in pursuit of

an answer. Angry White Men presents a comprehensive diagnosis

of their fears, anxieties, and rage.

Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic

economic, social, and political shifts that have so transformed

the American landscape. Downward mobility, increased racial

and gender equality, and a tenacious clinging to an anachronistic

ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and

bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic

privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls

“aggrieved entitlement”: a sense that those benefi ts that white

men believed were their due have been snatched away from them.

Angry White Men discusses, among others, the sons of small

town America, scarred by underemployment and wage stagnation.

When America’s white men feel they’ve lived their lives the “right”

way—worked hard and stayed out of trouble—and still do not get

economic rewards, then they have to blame somebody else. Even

more terrifying is the phenomenon of angry young boys. School

shootings in the United States are not just the work of “misguided

youth” or “troubled teens”—they’re all committed by boys. These

alienated young men are transformed into mass murderers by a

sense that using violence against others is their right.

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CURRENT EVENTS / SOCIOLOGY

ADVANCE P

RAISE FOR

ADVANCE P

RAISE FOR

ANGRY WHITE MEN

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MICHAEL KIMMEL is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook

University in New York. An author or editor of more than twenty

books, including Manhood in America, The Gendered Society,

The History of Men, and Guyland, he lives with his family in

Brooklyn, New York.

The future of America is more inclusive and diverse. The

choice for angry white men is not whether or not they can stem

the tide of history: they cannot. Their choice is whether or not

they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable

future, or whether they will walk honorably alongside those

they’ve spent so long trying to exclude. By explaining their rage,

Kimmel is able to point to a possible future that is healthier,

happier, and much less angry.

“Being white and male has brought unfair power for so long that some think it’s natural, both among those

claiming it and those suffering from it. Michael Kimmel has done us the life-saving favor of naming this delusion

that may endanger us more than any other. From executives for whom no amount of money is enough to white

supremacists for whom no amount of power is enough, from U.S. wars in which men die to U.S. domestic violence

in which even more women die, this illness is lethal for us all. Angry White Men is a brave, sane, compassionate,

and rescuing book.” —G L O R I A S T E I N E M , feminist activist and author

“White men still have most of the power and most of the money, so why do so many of them feel so victimized?

In this fascinating guided tour of the world of angry white men—Glenn Beck fans, white supremacists, school

shooters, men’s rights activists—pioneer sociologist of masculinity Michael Kimmel shows how ‘aggrieved

entitlement’ leads them to blame people of color, immigrants, liberals, intellectuals, the government, and above

all, women, for a society that is changing fast and, they fear, leaving them behind. No dry academic study, Angry

White Men is full of shrewd political analysis, empathy, and humor.” —K A T H A P O L L I T T , columnist for The Nation

“Michael Kimmel has written a comprehensive study of working and middle-class white men and described

their collective grievances with insight and compassion. In regard to those among them who ally with the far

right, he is equally insightful but justifi ably more critical; his analysis of their misdirected rage at minorities

and women is entirely persuasive. I enthusiastically recommend Angry White Men to the wide readership it has

amply earned.” —M A R T I N D U B E R M A N , professor of history emeritus at the Graduate School of the

City University of New York

“Men and women should read Angry White Men. Women will gain insights into the sources of male anger

and men will learn that increasing gender equality does not pose a threat to their masculinity. Rather, in this

rapidly changing society, Kimmel believes that women and men will be able to lead more satisfying lives.”

—M A D E L E I N E K U N I N , former governor of Vermont, author of The New Feminist Agenda: Defi ning the Next

Revolution for Women, Work, and Family and Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead

“In this timely book, Kimmel shows us that in these times, even those who have historically been powerful and

dominant are becoming victims as they fi nd themselves slipping between the cracks and falling behind. Kimmel

has his fi nger on the pulse of their anger and by revealing their fears and growing desperation, he reminds us

that their problems are ours as well.” —P E D R O N O G U E R A , Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education

at New York University

8/12

8/12 8/14

ANGRY WHITE

MEN

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Also by Michael Kimmel

The Guy’s Guide to Feminism (with Michael Kaufman)

Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities

Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

The History of Masculinity: Essays

The Gender of Desire: Essays on Masculinity and Sexuality

The Gendered Society

Manhood in America: A Cultural History

The Politics of Manhood

Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the U.S., 1776–1990

Men Confront Pornography

Men’s Lives (with Michael Messner)

Changing Men: New Directions in the Study of Men and Masculinity

Absolutism and Its Discontents: State and Society in 17th Century France and England

Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation

9781568586960-text.indd ii9781568586960-text.indd ii 8/16/13 12:30 PM8/16/13 12:30 PM

ANGRY WHITE

MEN AMERICAN MASCULINITY AT

THE END OF AN ERA

Michael Kimmel

New York

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Copyright © 2013 by Michael Kimmel

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Kimmel, Michael S.

Angry white men : American masculinity at the end of an era /

by Michael Kimmel.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-56858-696-0 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-56858-964-0

(e-book) 1. Men—United States—Attitudes. 2. Whites—

United States — Attitudes. 3. Masculinity—United

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For Amy and Zachary,

always

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vii

C O N T E N T S

Preface: American Masculinity at the End of an Era ix

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: America, the Angry 1

1 Manufacturing Rage: The Cultural Construction of Aggrieved Entitlement 31

2 Angry White Boys 69

3 White Men as Victims: The Men’s Rights Movement 99

4 Angry White Dads 135

5 Targeting Women 169

6 Mad Men: The Rage(s) of the American Working Man 199

7 The White Wing 227

Epilogue 279

Notes 287 Index 301

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ix

P R E F A C E

American Masculinity at the End of an Era

That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,

And still revolt when truth would set them free.

License they mean when they cry liberty . . .

—JOHN MILTON, SONNET XII (1645)

Whenever people have asked me about the subject of my new book, I’ve barely managed to tell them the three words of the title before they’ve regaled me with stories of blind rage being directed at them, daily incivility witnessed or experienced, outrage they’ve felt, heard, or expressed. I’ve heard so many recountings of the shouting across the aisles of Congress, the TV talking heads, or the radio rag- ers. They’ve talked of being enraged at demonstrations, confronted by equally enraged counterdemonstrators. I’ve heard of people behaving murderously on freeways, of my friends being frightened to sit in the stands at their children’s hockey games or on the sidelines of their soc- cer matches. And nearly everyone has complained about Internet trolls who lurk on news websites and blogs ready to pounce viciously on anyone with whom they might disagree.

And they’ve told me that they’ve found themselves angrier than they’d been. Some were concerned that they’re far angrier than they

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remember their parents being. Others have tried to maintain a bound- ary between political anger and raging against their families, though even there the boundary seems, to some, elusive. “The national blood pressure is elevated,” said my friend Dan, a doctor given toward phys- iological metaphors. “It’s at a frighteningly high level. Cultural beta blockers are in order.”

This rise in American anger has been widely—and angrily!—noticed. Pundits lay the blame on greedy corporations, gridlocked legislatures, cruel and angry local and state governments, demographic shifts that infuriate the native born, and special interest groups promoting their special interest agendas. Mostly, they blame “them”—some group, organization, or institution that has acted so egregiously that outrage feels justified, righteous. The groups or individuals change; the scape- goating has become a national pastime.

And I admit, I’ve been angry too. I’m outraged by the arrogant religious sanctimoniousness of churches shielding pedophiles. I get impatient waiting on the telephone talking to yet another “menu of options,” righteously indignant when crazed drivers swerve across three lanes of traffic to gain one car length, and aggravated by political gridlock and smarmy politicians. I’m easily ired when receptionists in offices or hosts in restaurants sigh loudly at my innocent request that they actually do their jobs and call the person I’m meeting or find me a table at which to eat. I’m generally not a grumpy person, but some- times it feels that every other person is either smug, arrogant, infuri- ating, incompetent, or politically inane—sometimes all of the above.

Often I get angry about politics. How can I not? I’m incensed by intransigent, obstructionist Republicans in Congress who won’t admit the mandate that the president received in his trouncing of Mitt Rom- ney and irritated by a feckless and spineless Democratic majority that can’t seem to seize that mandate. I fume about the inordinate influ- ence a bunch of highly organized gun advocates have over public pol- icy, even when popular opinion swings the other way.

There are other emotions besides anger, of course: anguish when I read of young black boys shot by the police; heartsick for gays and les- bians still targeted for violence by hateful neighbors for loving whom they love; torn apart at stories of women raped, beaten, and murdered, often by the very men who say they love them; horrified when people

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are blown up simply for running in a race or children are massacred simply for being at school.

On the other hand, I’m also aware that despite all, it’s probably never been better to be a person of color, a woman, or LGBT in the United States. Yes, old habits die hard, and assumptions may die harder. But it’s a pretty easy case to make that whether by race, gen- der, or sexuality, America has never been more equal. (Class is another story—and one I will tell in this book.) So I’m also thrilled that I’ve lived long enough to see a black man in the White House, women heading national governments and major corporations, lesbians and gay men proclaiming their love for the world to see.

Let me be clear: I am in no way saying we have “arrived” at some postracial, postfeminist, post–civil rights utopia; and even less am I saying that some switch has been thrown and now men or white people or straight people are the new victims of some topsy-turvy “agenda.” I’m simply saying that women are safer today than they have ever been in our society, that LGBT are more accepted and freer to love whom they love, and that racial and ethnic minorities confront fewer obstacles in their efforts to fully integrate into American society.

To be sure, I’m temperamentally an optimist. As both an academic and an activist, I often think of optimism as part of my job descrip- tion. As an activist, I believe that through constant struggle, our society can, and will, be shaped into a society that better lives up to its prom- ise of liberty and justice for all. And as an academic, I believe that if I can inspire my students to engage more critically with their world, and help them develop the tools with which they can do that, their lives, however they choose to live them, and with whatever political and ethical orientations they may have, will be better as a result.

Surely, the arc of history points toward greater equality. Slowly, yes, and fitfully. But definitely.

And that comment leads me to a discussion not of the book’s title, but of the book’s subtitle. If this is a book that is about American mas- culinity “at the end of an era,” what era, exactly, is it that is ending? And why is it ending? And is ending a good thing or a bad thing?

In a sense, these latter questions are too late. I am not chronicling a change that is coming. I’m describing a change that has, in most re- spects, already happened. It’s a done deal. The era of unquestioned

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xii Preface

and unchallenged male entitlement is over. This is a book about those men who either don’t yet know it or sense the change in the wind and are determined to stem the tide.

The end of that era leaves those of us who have benefited from the dramatic social inequality that has characterized American society for so many years—we straight white men—with a choice to make. We know what the future will look like twenty years from now: same- sex marriage will be a national policy (and neither heterosexual mar- riage nor the traditional nuclear family will have evaporated), at least one-quarter of all corporate board members will be women, universi- ties and even the military will have figured out how to adjudicate sex- ual assault, formerly illegal immigrants will have a path to citizenship, and all racial and ethnic minorities (except perhaps Muslims, who will still, sadly, be subject to vitriolic hatred) will be more fully integrated.

So our choice is simple: we can either be dragged kicking and screaming into that future of greater equality and therefore greater freedom for all, or go with the tide, finding out, along the way, that the future is actually brighter for us as well. (Data here are plentiful that the greater the level of gender equality in a society—whether in a relationship or marriage—the lower the rates of depression and the higher the rates of happiness.)

This is a book about those men who refuse to even be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future. They are white men who aren’t at all happy about the way the tides have turned. They see a small set of swells as one gigantic tsunami about to wash over them.

It’s about how feeling entitled by race or gender distorts one’s vision. Racial and gender entitlement knows no class system: working-class

white men may experience that sense of entitlement differently from upper-class white men, but there are also many commonalities, many points of contact. White men of all classes benefit from a system based on racial and gender inequality. Whether we are working-class plumbers or corporate financiers, we’re raised to expect the world to be fair— that hard honest work and discipline will bring about prosperity and stability. It’s hard for us to realize that we’ve actually been benefiting from dramatic inequality.

Think of it as if you were running in a race. You’d expect that every- one plays by the same rules—start at the starting line, and run as best you can, and that the fastest runners win the race. You’d bristle if some

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Preface xiii

groups had a different starting point, were allowed to enter where they pleased, or were allowed to tie others’ feet together—or if some people ran in one direction with the wind at their backs, while the rest of us had to run into a strong headwind.

It may be hard for white men to realize that, irrespective of other factors, we have been running with the wind at our backs all these years and that what we think of as “fairness” to us has been built on the backs of others, who don’t harbor such illusions as “meritocracy” and “fairness,” who have known since birth that the system is stacked against them. The level playing field has been anything but level—and we’ve been the ones running downhill, with the wind, in both directions.

Efforts to level the playing field may feel like water is rushing up- hill, like it’s reverse discrimination against us. Meritocracy sucks when you are suddenly one of the losers and not one of the winners. In fact, it doesn’t feel like a meritocracy at all.

We didn’t just inherit privilege as an unexamined birthright. It’s less about the “having” and more about a posture, a relationship to it. Even if we didn’t think of ourselves as privileged, we thought of ourselves as entitled to privilege, entitled to occupy the leadership positions.

Just because those in power are straight and white and male doesn’t mean that every straight white man feels powerful. That’s a logical fal- lacy as well as politically inaccurate. (The compositional fallacy holds that if all As are Bs, it is not necessarily the case that all Bs are As. The classic example: all members of the Mafia are Italian; all Italians are not members of the Mafia.) But just because straight white men don’t feel powerful doesn’t make it any less true that compared to other groups, they benefit from inequality and are, indeed, privileged.

That is the era that is coming to an end, the “end of an era” to which the subtitle of this book refers. It’s not the end of the era of “men”—as in the misframed debate recently over “the end of men.” It’s the end of the era of men’s entitlement, the era in which a young man could assume, without question, it was not only “a man’s world” but a straight white man’s world. It is less of a man’s world, today, that’s true—white men have to share some space with others. But it is no longer a world of unquestioned male privilege. Men may still be “in power,” and many men may not feel powerful, but it is the sense of entitlement—that sense that although I may not be in power at the moment, I deserve to be, and if I’m not, something is definitely

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xiv Preface

wrong—that is coming to an end. It is a world of diminished expecta- tions for all white men, who have benefited from an unequal system for so long.

There are still many in this generation of men who feel cheated by the end of entitlement. They still feel entitled, and thus they iden- tify socially and politically with those above them, even as they have economically joined the ranks of those who have historically been below them.

This is a book about those angry white men, men who experience a sense of what I here call “aggrieved entitlement”—that sense of en- titlement that can no longer be assumed and that is unlikely to be fulfilled. It’s about rear guard actions, of bitterness and rage, about fin- gers shoved in the crumbling dikes, trying, futilely, to hold back the surging tide of greater equality and greater justice.

But if this is the end of one era, the era of men’s sense of unques- tioned entitlement, it is the beginning of another, the beginning of the end of patriarchy, the unquestioned assumption men have felt to access, to positions of power, to corner offices, to women’s bodies, that casual assumption that all positions of power, wealth, and influence are reserved for us and that women’s presence is to be resisted if possi- ble, and tolerated if not.

There is a way out for white men, I believe, a way for us to turn down the volume, redirect our anger at more appropriate targets, and find our way to happier and healthier lives. The data are persuasive that most American men have quietly, and without much ideological fanfare, accommodated themselves to greater gender equality in both their personal and their workplace relationships than any generation before them. And those who have done so are actually happier about it—happier about their lives as fathers, partners, and friends. It turns out that gender and racial equality is not only good for people of color and women, but also good for white people and men—and, most of all, for our children.

Perhaps that’s what the Greenwich Village writer Floyd Dell was thinking as he sat at his desk on the eve of one of the great woman suffrage demonstrations in New York City in 1916. A well-known bo- hemian writer, Dell was also one of the founders of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, who marched with women in support of their right to vote. In an article published in the Masses, called “Feminism

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Preface xv

for Men,” he came up with a line that I think captures my argument. “Feminism will, for the first time, allow men to be free.”

Perhaps today we might qualify it a bit and say “freer”—but we’d also add happier, healthier, and a lot less angry.

Brooklyn, New York May 2013

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xvii

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This book, like all my work, is part of a conversation, among col-leagues, friends, allies, and adversaries who have pushed me to clarify, change, refine, and abandon my arguments. I’m happy to ac- knowledge them here, sure that they’ll know where they fall on the adversary-to-ally continuum: Harry Brod, Richard Collier, Martin Du- berman, Warren Farrell, Debra Gimlin, Donald Huber, Jackson Katz, Mike Messner, Rob Okun, and Sophie Spieler. And I’m grateful to Lil- lian Rubin and Michael Kaufman for arguing with me about every- thing, reading every word, keeping me honest, and pushing me beyond where I often felt like going. None of them will agree with everything I’ve written, but I hope each feels I made my case honestly and honorably.

My agent, Gail Ross, and my editor at Nation Books, Ruth Bald- win, have been amazing to work with, offering just the right amount of support and criticism, knowing when to push and when to back off.

I’m also grateful to Bethany Coston, Randi Fishman, Charles Knight, and Grace Mattingly for their support of the research.

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xviii Acknowledgments

I’m grateful always to my family and friends, who never seem to tire of conversations about neo-Nazis, rampage school shootings, Rush Limbaugh, or antifeminist men’s rights guys. (If they do tire, then I thank them for faking it so well.) Mitchell and Pam, Shanny and Cliff, Marty and Eli, Mary and Larry, thank you for so many years.

What enables me to delve into topics that make me so angry, sad, and frustrated is how stable and grounded I feel in my private life. I often feel like I’m in the center of one of those busy street scenes in a digitized movie, where I move slowly and deliberately while the rest of the world rushes by frantically in a sped-up time-lapse framing. Amy and Zachary anchor me, give me a place to stand, and thus a place from which to move. I could not be more grateful, nor love them any more. This is for them.

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1

Introduction America, the Angry

What happened to the country that loved the

underdog and stood up for the little guy? What

happened to the voice of the forgotten man? The

forgotten man is you.

—GLENN BECK, INTRODUCTION TO

GLENN BECK SPECIAL, MARCH 13, 2009

PROLOGUE

“What’s a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn doing in a place like this?” I ask myself as I slide into my booth at the roadside diner. I’m right off Interstate 81, near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, along the southern tier of that state’s border with Maryland, near the actual Mason-Dixon line. I’m here to meet “Rick,” a thirty-two-year-old father of three from Shippensburg. I had met him yesterday, and I invited him to meet me for breakfast at the diner so I could interview him.

I had driven to Shippensburg to attend a gun show that was held, as many are these days, in the gymnasium of the local high school. (The schools rent out their facilities to local merchants to raise extra funds.) At the entrance to the show, a long table was filled with literature— some advertising circulars for gun merchants and army/navy supply stores, a couple of catalogs of survivalist gear, and some pamphlets from Patriot groups, some anti-immigrant organizations, and even a

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2 ANGRY WHITE MEN

single photocopied informational sheet from David Duke and “to- day’s Ku Klux Klan” (KKK). “How the government is taking away your rights!” announces one pamphlet.

Rick was standing behind the table, talking with a few other guys. “Is this your stuff?” I asked, picking up the leaflet. The guys turned and looked at me. No one looked especially hostile, though they certainly didn’t look friendly, either. More like “Do I know you?” Like “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“I’m a writer, and I’m on a research trip, and wanted to talk to you.” They eye me suspiciously. I am not very tall, obviously “ethnic,”

older, balding, and wearing a button-down shirt. “What are you writ- ing about?” “Who the fuck are you?” “You Jewish?” “How’d you hear about this?”

“Wait,” I said. “I’ll answer your questions. Yes, I’m Jewish. I’m a sociology professor from New York. I am writing a book about what is happening to white guys like you in our country. I’m really concerned about it.”

“You’re concerned about it!” snorts one guy. “We’re livin’ it. We’re concerned about it.”

“I hear you, really. I’m trying to figure it out. With all the economic changes in our country, and the social changes, I want to understand what’s happening to guys like you. Guys like Joe the Plumber,” I say citing a name that’s now familiar to every American since the 2008 election. (Chambersburg is along that long industrial corridor from Chicago to Harrisburg that flows through Gary, Toledo, Akron, Cleve- land, Pittsburgh—and Holland, Ohio, where Joe Wurzelbacher is ac- tually from.)

“Ha!” one guys laughs. “You just try getting a job as a plumber around here these days! There are no fuckin’ jobs at all, ’cept for Walmart hostess.”

“That’s what I’m trying to understand,” I say. “I want to know how America’s changed and what direction we’re going in.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you,” says the guy I eventually come to know as Rick. “We’re going down the fucking toilet, that’s what. I mean, just look around. There’s illegals everywhere. There’s Wall Street screwing every- body. And now there’s a goddamn . . . ” He pauses anxiously, a grimace on his face. Another second goes by; he’s obviously sizing me up. “Oh, fuck it, I don’t care if it is politically incorrect. We got a fucking nigger

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INTRODUCTION 3

in the White House. We’re all screwed. Nobody gives a shit about us guys anymore. It’s all over.”

“That’s what I want to write about!” I say. “I’ll listen to you. Seri- ously. I won’t agree with you, but hey, that’s not my job. I’m not here to convince you of some blue-state liberal agenda. My job is to under- stand how you see all this. I promise that I will listen to you. Would you be willing to talk to me?” I say, directly, to Rick.

His pals now look at him. “Yeah, Rick, you go talk to this guy.” “Yeah, I sure as shit don’t want to talk to no Jew.” “Yeah, Rick, go ahead, make his day.”

Rick, now seemingly put up to it by his pals, agrees to meet me the next morning for breakfast.

He arrives on time. (I’ve arrived a half hour early and parked my car a few blocks away.) He slides into the booth across from me. He wears a weathered Pittsburgh Pirates hat, a flannel shirt, open to ex- pose a Confederate flag T-shirt—“I wore this special for you,” he says, laughing at his own joke—jeans, and work boots. He has not shaved. Actually, neither have I.

He orders his breakfast; his coffee arrives. Milk, two, no, three, sug- ars. I take out my tiny portable tape recorder.

“Oh, shit,” he says. “Are you a fed? I can’t talk to you.” “No, no, not at all,” I say. I take out my wallet, show him my uni-

versity ID card. I put away the tape recorder. We begin to talk.

MEET AMERICA’S ANGRY WHITE MEN

Rick is one of the men you will meet in this book, men who feel they have been screwed, betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway. Theirs are the hands that built this country; theirs is the blood shed to defend it. And now, they feel, no one listens to them; they’ve been all but forgotten. In the great new multicultural American mosaic, they’re the bland white background that no one pays any attention to, the store-bought white bread in a culture of bagels, tortillas, wontons, and organic whole-grain designer scones. They’re downwardly mobile, contemptu- ously pushed aside by fast-talking, fast-driving fat cats and bureaucrats. And they’re mad as hell.

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You see them pretty much everywhere these days—yet they’re of- ten invisible. They patrol America’s southern border, determined to keep out Mexican immigrants. They tune in to venomous talk-radio hosts who translate economic anguish, psychological distress, and po- litical confusion into blind rage. They swarm into populist Tea Party rallies, hoping to find like-minded kinsmen willing to join with them to turn the country around. Some even take up arms against their own country, establishing semiautonomous enclaves and blowing up fed- eral buildings. And, of course, when threatened by external forces, they muster up their coldest steel-eyed Dirty Harry imitation and say, “Make my day.”

In suburbia, they’re the ones who cut you off on the freeway, screaming with rage if you dare to slow them down. If their kid doesn’t make that suburban soccer team or that heartland hockey team, they’re the ones who rush out onto the field to hit the coach or strangle the referee—or start a fight with another equally enraged dad. They hiss with rage at their ex-wives (and their ex-wives’ lawyers) in family court. Further up the economic ladder, they’re the guys seething in the corner of the corporate “diversity training” workshop, snarling that they are now “walking on eggshells” around the office, or stewing when their company hires a woman or a minority, because, they say, affirmative action is really reverse discrimination against white men. And some of their teenage sons are strolling through deserted suburban train sta- tions at night with a bunch of friends, looking for immigrants or gay men to beat up—or kill.

They are America’s angry white men. Actually, one might say more simply that they’re just America’s white men—they just happen to be angrier than ever before in our recent history. Journalists duly record the decrease in compassion and the increase in untrammeled selfish- ness, and pundits decry the collapse of civility in political discourse, even as they shout at each other at the top of the best seller lists. One guy’s a big, fat idiot! The other is a big, fat liar! The current political atmosphere in Washington has been called the nastiest and angriest in our history.

The past two decades have witnessed mainstream white Ameri- can men exploding like never before in our history. They draw their ranks from the middle class (office workers, salaried salesmen) and

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INTRODUCTION 5

the lower middle class (the skilled worker, small farmer, or shop- keeper). They’re the “pa” in the ma-and-pa store, Richard Nixon’s “silent majority,” and “Reagan Democrats.” They’re “Joe Lunch- bucket,” and “Joe the Plumber,” and just plain Joe. They feel they’ve borne the weight of the world on their backs, and they can’t hold it up any longer. And now, suddenly, some of these regular guys are re- inventing the American Revolution with Tea Party, Minutemen, and Patriot organizations, while others are further out there, organizing militias and joining survivalist cults, waging war on “feminazis,” rampaging through their workplaces, promoting protectionist and anti-immigrant policies.

They’re listening to angry white men like Rush Limbaugh, Mike Savage, and a host of other radio hosts who lash out at everyone else as the source of their woes. They’re trying to roll back the gains made by women and minorities in corporate and professional life and resisting their entry into the ranks of soldier, firefighter, and police officer. And their sons are either busy destroying the galaxy in their video games or actually opening fire on their classmates.

Some explode at work, “going postal” as they slaughter coworkers, supervisors, and plant managers before, usually, taking their own lives. You’ve heard of “suicide by cop,” where a perpetrator pretends to go for his gun and the police open fire? These guys commit “suicide by mass murder”: intent on dying, they decide to “take some of them with me.”

And when they’re not exploding, they’re just plain angry and de- fensive. They’re laughing at clueless, henpecked husbands on sitcoms; snorting derisively at clueless guys mocked in ads and reality-TV seg- ments; and snickering at duded-up metrosexuals prancing around ma- jor metropolitan centers while they drink cosmos or imported vodka. They sneer at presidential candidates like John Kerry who speak French, eat brie, and drink Chardonnay. They see nothing but feminized wusses who actually support global environmental policies and negotiation and diplomacy instead of “my way or the highway” unilateralism.

Unapologetically “politically incorrect” magazines, radio hosts, and television shows abound, filled with macho bluster or bikini-clad women bouncing on trampolines. These venues are the new “boys’ clubs”—the clubhouse that once said “No Gurls Allowed.” These

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moments allow these guys, who otherwise feel so put down, so “had,” a momentary feeling of superiority.

Yet few observers notice the gender of these vitriolic legions. Few, if any, couple the increase in American anger with the growing gulf between women and men. The gender gap—politically, socially, and economically—is as large as it has ever been. It’s not “Americans” who are angry; it’s American men. And it’s not all American men—it’s white American men. This is a phenomenon so visible, so widespread, that were it happening with any other group (say, black men or Asian women), it would be discussed incessantly. But precisely because it’s so ubiquitous, so visible, it has received hardly any serious discussion.

Now, it is true, one must say at the outset, that some of the most visible angry Americans these days are women, especially those parad- ing at Tea Party rallies. And the patron saint of American anger at the moment is not former vice president Dick Cheney, sneering arrogantly at all potential opponents, but his daughter Liz, and the seemingly omnipresent Sarah Palin. Palin has become a poster girl for right-wing rage—and I mean that more than metaphorically. She is the Betty Gra- ble of the political Right and the fantasy ideal of thousands, perhaps millions, of red-blooded American men. She’s salty and sexy, vampy and folksy, strong yet slightly slutty.

And the Tea Party, at 59 percent male, is somewhat anomalous on the political landscape. While the men who overwhelmingly populate the ranks of rage rely on some amount of women’s backstage support, the theme of their agitation, the motivation for their mobilization, is a desire to restore or retrieve a sense of manhood to which they feel entitled.

And they’re unmistakably white. Former MSNBC political show host Keith Olbermann called the Tea Party the “White People’s Party,” while Jon Stewart hailed it as “a festival of whites.” It’s ironic, since the election of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, was meant to suggest that America was becom- ing a “postracial” society. Instead of the predicted “Bradley effect”— in which white voters told pollsters that they were going to vote for Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, but then, in the privacy of the vot- ing booth, decided they just could not pull the lever for a black man— there was the “Obama effect,” in which more people ended up voting for Obama than told pollsters that they would and afterward congrat-

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INTRODUCTION 7

ulated themselves on having transcended racism. (I call this “prema- ture self-congratulation.”)

But Obama’s election and reelection have actually elicited the most viciously racist public discourse—only thinly veiled behind well- worn code words—in which Tea Partiers and other activists shout racial epithets at elected members of Congress, and half of those partiers be- lieve that Obama has usurped the presidency, having been born out- side the United States. Maybe we should call this version of the backlash the “reverse Bradley effect”—having now declared ourselves postracial, suddenly white people have given themselves more permission to ex- press deep-seated racism. It’s as if having a specific target for their rage enables their racism, because they have already congratulated them- selves for not believing those racial slurs about “all of them.”

And you’d see the same thing at all the other rallies across the country, rallies where newly formed groups of mostly white men evoke the spirit of the American Revolution—Minutemen, Patriots, Tea Party—to express their contemporary rage at immigrants, health care, and taxation. Populist movements have swept across America before— most notably at the turn of the last century, with similar contradic- tory politics, a combination of agrarian socialism and racist nativism. Then, as now, populism combined anti–Wall Street sentiment and anti-immigrant sentiment; together, they fueled an agrarian anger at their “enabling” government bureaucrats.

Populisms are always contradictory, because populism is more an emotion than it is an ideology. And that emotion is anger.

UNDERSTANDING AMERICAN ANGER

Why should so many white American men be so angry, anyway? After all, just being Americans, they are among the most privileged people on earth. Certainly, they are the most privileged group that isn’t part of a hereditary aristocracy. For one thing, the United States is the world’s wealthiest country, and we consume more than any other country. We’re only 5 percent of the world’s population, but we gobble up 40 percent of its resources. One American consumes as much energy as forty-one Bangladeshis. And although we are experiencing a significant tax revolt, the share of our gross domestic product that is accounted for

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by taxes is third lowest among all Organization for Economic Coopera- tion and Development (better known as OECD) countries, higher only than Turkey, Chile, and Mexico.

And in the United States, white men get the lion’s share of that wealth. Between 1983 and 2009, the top 5 percent of Americans took home nearly 82 percent of all the wealth gain; the bottom three-fifths actually lost 7.5 percent of their income, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (Doesn’t it seem sort of irrational for that bottom 60 percent to be angry at others in the same boat?)

But being white gives one a boost. In the United States, we get an additional bonus of 22 percent just for being white (compared with black men); compared with Hispanic men, white men’s bonus is 37 percent. And we get a bonus of 28 percent just for being male, com- pared with white women; compared with black women, it’s a bonus of 35 percent, for Hispanic women 47 percent. That’s right—at least an additional 25 percent just for a Y chromosome and a shortage of mela- nin. (Ironically, this “masculinity bonus” is virtually invisible because when we calculate the wage gap, we calculate the wages of women or minorities as a percentage of white men’s wages. So what we “see” is the discrimination; for example, white women make 72.2 percent of men’s wages.)

Yes, it’s true that the economic recession—caused by the absence of government regulation of banks making unwise predatory loans and the failure to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, let alone No Child Left Behind (which ran up US debt)—has hit America hard. (It’s equally true that the Angry Class has sided with those financial institu- tions in opposing the sorts of meaningful regulations that would ac- tually help us.) And yes, it’s true that many Americans have been fed a consistent set of distortions and outright falsehoods, designed to facil- itate that bait and switch, exonerated those who got us into this mess, and excoriated those who have been trying to fix it.

Yet the truth is that white men are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in world history. It’s called “world history.” White men so stacked the deck that everyone else was pretty much excluded from playing at all. When those others did begin to play, the field was so uneven that white men got a massive head start, and everyone else had to play with enormous handicaps. Maybe ac- tually having to play evenly matched, on a level playing field, is too

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INTRODUCTION 9

frightening for a gender that stakes its entire identity on making sure it wins every time.

Don’t believe me. Have you seen the brilliant comedian Louis C. K. talk about this? After describing how white people have a unique priv- ilege of being able to travel to any time in history where they’ll al- ways have a table for you, he says, “And I’m a white MAN,” noting it doesn’t get much better that this. “How many privileges can one per- son have? . . . You can’t even hurt my feelings!” he giggles.1

Angry is what white men seem to be. With whom are they angry? Why? And why now?

In this book, I try to answer those questions. I’ve traveled all over the country, all to take the pulse of angry American white men. I’ve sought to dissect their anger, their anxieties, the feeling they’ve been cheated out of their birthright. Regardless of their class position, Amer- ican white men are a nation of Esaus, and we have the sense we’ve somehow been had. It’s a story of the rage of the American “Every- man.” And I try to take seriously the race and the gender of American anger, by examining several points along a continuum of class—that is, I look at the ways that middle-class suburban anger is beginning to converge with working-class resentment and the agonizing cry of a declining lower middle class. All of these groups of men, in different ways, are experiencing a rage at what they perceive as dispossession.

White men’s anger is “real”—that is, it is experienced deeply and sincerely. But it is not “true”—that is, it doesn’t provide an accurate analysis of their situation. The “enemies” of white American men are not really women and men of color. Our enemy is an ideology of masculinity that we inherited from our fathers, and their fathers before them, an ideology that promises unparalleled acquisition cou- pled with a tragically impoverished emotional intelligence. We have accepted an ideology of masculinity that leaves us feeling empty and alone when we do it right, and even worse when we feel we’re doing it wrong. Worst of all, though, is when we feel we’ve done it right and still do not get the rewards to which we believe we are entitled. Then we have to blame somebody. Somebody else.

And that’s typically what we do. Listen to Harvard political scien- tist Harvey Mansfield, in an op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal. “The protective element of manliness is endangered by women who have equal access to jobs outside the home,” he writes. “Women who do

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not consider themselves feminist often seem unaware of what they are doing to manliness when they work to support themselves. They think only that people should be hired and promoted on merit, regardless of sex.” And anthropologist Lionel Tiger, known for his celebration of male bonding, argues that “the principal victims of moving toward a merit-based society have been male.”

But even that doesn’t completely explain things. All these pro- cesses were taking place before the current recession. Why? America stands alone as the most powerful country on earth. Prior to the Bush administration’s economic free fall, we had an economic surplus, un- employment was at its lowest rate in decades, the stock and housing markets were booming. And even then, American white men were an- grier than they’d ever been, a new, emerging, identifiable voting bloc.

Yes, it’s true that they’ve taken some hits in recent decades, and not simply from the most recent recession. Real income has fallen since the 1990s for white middle-class men, and it’s been pretty flat since the early 1970s. The median household income for a family of four (in to- day’s dollars) in 1971 was $56,329. Exactly forty years later, in 2011, it was $50,054. That’s right—in real income, the median income has de- clined by about $6,000. And the big difference between those median households in the ensuing forty years is that now the wives are work- ing. It literally takes two incomes to earn what one income earned for a family forty years ago—and even then, not quite.2

One of the men who journalist Susan Faludi spoke with while re- searching her 1999 book on male malaise, Stiffed, told her, “I’m like the guy who is hanging from the cliff. I’m starting to lose my grip.” Yet he was a middle manager at a large firm, made a very good living, and drove an expensive late-model car. The inequality gap has become an inequality gulf; the chasm of the 1960s is now a likely unbridgeable canyon. Can you blame men for being angry?

A lot of men seem to believe that their only alternative is to draw the wagons into a circle, hoping that a reassertion of traditional ideol- ogies of masculinity—and a return to the exclusion of “others” from the competitive marketplace—will somehow resolve this present mal- aise. By contrast, I believe that the solutions to white men’s anger lie beyond a psychological balm on their wounded egos. It requires that we both look into the hearts of regular guys, as well as those who feel marginalized, and that we examine the social and historical

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INTRODUCTION 11

circum stances that brought them to this precipice. Only by fusing a psychological and a sociological analysis can we ever hope to break the cycle of anger that impoverishes men’s lives—and endangers them, and everyone else.

ANGRY WHITE KIMMEL? UNDERSTANDING MY POSITION IN THIS BOOK

I’ve spent the past several years talking to these guys. As I have criss- crossed the country, first interviewing younger men on college cam- puses for my book Guyland, and later while crisscrossing it again being interviewed about the book, I’ve also been interviewing these angry white men. I’ve met white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Klansmen. I’ve talked to devoted followers of angry white male radio, been lec- tured to by Tea Party activists about a version of American history that bears no relationship to what is taught in school or written in standard textbooks, listened to men’s rights activists rage against feminism, and shared the anguish of divorced dads agonizing over losing contact with their children. I’ve read diaries by and online reporting on the rampage shooters who ultimately took their own lives.

I’ve also logged more hours than is probably healthy reading their blogs, lurking in their chat rooms and following the comments threads on their blog posts, and listening to the collection of radio ragers, especially as they massage anguish and confusion into rage at the “other” and the government that enables minorities to take over “their” country. I’ve even appeared on some of their talk shows.

In this book, I try to look into the hearts and minds of the Amer- ican men with whom I most disagree politically. I try to understand where their anger comes from and where they think it’s going. I do so not with contempt or pity, but with empathy and compassion. Many of the men I interviewed for this book are not bad men; they’re true believers in the American Dream, the same dream that I inherited, and in which I believe. It’s the same American Dream that Bruce Spring- steen sings about in “The Promised Land,” where “I’ve done my best to live the right way / I get up every morning and go to work each day.”

In my interviews with many of them—even Rick and some of his fellow white supremacists—I identified more with their knee-jerk

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belief in the American Dream than I do often with the detached cyn- icism of some of my hipster neighbors. I grew up proud to live in a country that had defeated Hitler and in that part of the country that had fought successfully against slavery. I was proud to believe, as I was taught in primary school, that “America had never lost a war, and never been the aggressor.”

I do not consider myself a breed apart from these men, as if I were a scientist examining the specimens of some esoteric species. Many of us who line up on the other side of the political spectrum understand that anger at our government for failing to live up to its promise and, in fact, for actively enabling those who crush our dreams. I believe that the anger of the American White Man is misguided and misplaced, yes, but it is not blind rage, without reason. Good or bad, many of the men I will discuss in this book are True Believers, and as such they are vulnerable to manipulation. If, as Susan Faludi argues, they’ve been “stiffed,” then they’ve also been had, duped. It is the corporate elites who fund the faux populism of hate radio, border patrols, Tea Partiers, and other groups who are, to my mind, the ones who have contempt for the simple working man.

And thus far, those elites have guessed right. Fed a steady diet of disinformation and misinformation, America’s white men have lashed out at all the wrong targets. They’ve blamed women, minorities, gays and lesbians, immigrants. Some blame the Jews. Some have blamed them generally and joined political movements to close our borders, to set back women’s progress, to oppose sexual equality. And others have lashed out more locally and individually, attacking or killing those who somehow come to personify their grievances.

But unlike those cynical elites, who try to steer them toward their own extinction, and would happily dance on their graves, I believe these men can turn it around. Make no mistake: the future of America is more inclusive, more diverse, and more egalitarian. The choice for these men is not whether they can stem the tide; they cannot. All the Limbaughs and Arpaios in the world cannot put the gender-equality genie back in the bottle. Their choice is whether they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future or walk openly and honorably into it, far happier and healthier incidentally, alongside those they’ve spent so long trying to exclude.

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INTRODUCTION 13

UNDERSTANDING WHITE MEN’S ANGER

But first we have to understand that anger, get inside it. For one thing, it’s an anger that knows no class nor originates in a specific class. Whether we’re talking about the white working class—shorn of union protection, stripped of manufacturing jobs that once provided a mod- icum of dignity with a paycheck, not to mention the hale-and-hearty camaraderie of the shop floor, they’ve watched as “their” jobs disap- peared with the closing of the factory gates. Or the lower middle class, that wide swath of small farmers, independent shopkeepers, indepen- dent craft workers—plumbers, electricians, contractors—and small businessmen whose livelihoods have been steadily eroded, as the farm crisis of the 1990s consolidated independent farmers into wage work- ers for agribusiness, as Walmart put local grocery and other retail stores out of business. Even upper-middle-class men, even those with jobs and pensions and health plans, feel ripped off—by affirmative action programs, immigration, welfare, taxation, and the general sense that they’re being had.

What unites all these groups is not just the fact that they are men. What unites them is their belief in a certain ideal of masculinity. It is not just their livelihoods that are threatened, but their sense of them- selves as men. Faludi observed in Stiffed that American men have lost “a useful role in public life, a way of earning a decent and reliable living, appreciation in the home, respectful treatment in the culture.”3 They’re feeling emasculated—humiliated. The promise of economic freedom, of boundless opportunity, of unlimited upward mobility, was what they believed was the terra firma of American masculinity, the ground on which American men have stood for generations. To- day, it feels like a carpet being snatched from under their feet.

And it’s not really their fault. Faludi subtitles her book “The Be- trayal of the American Man.” Unlike many of her subjects, who cast their eyes down for enemies but their allegiances upward at fictive allies, Faludi is clear that the betrayal has not been the result of an indifferent government doing the bidding of hordes of undeserving “others”—whether women, gays, immigrants, or whomever; rather, it has been perpetrated by the rich, the powerful, the corporate magnates,

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the corporate lobbyists and their plutocratic sycophants in legislatures and state houses. Like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Faludi observes a paradox of these white men voting for, and identify- ing with, the very people who are doing them in.

Middle-class white American men were the nation’s first, and re- main its most fervent, believers in the American Dream: that anyone can rise as high as their aspirations, talents, discipline, and dedicated hard work can take them. In my earlier book Manhood in America, I charted this ideology of the “self-made man,” the single defining fea- ture of American masculinity, over the course of American history. No single group of Americans has clung so tenaciously to those beliefs. No single group has so ardently subscribed to the traditional defini- tion of “what it takes” to make it in America. And no other group has felt so cheated.

Angry White Men tells the story of the other side of the American Dream: the futility, the dashed hopes, the despair, and the rage. It tells the story of the rich and famous wannabes, the ones who thought they could invent themselves, reinvent themselves, be even more successful than their fathers. It tells the story of how white American men came to believe that power and authority were what they were entitled to, by birth, and how that birthright is now eroding. Economic and social changes that are bewilderingly fast and dramatic are experienced as the general “wimpification” of American men—castrated by taxation, crowded out by newcomers who have rules bent for them, white men in America often feel like they are presiding over the destruction of their species.

In a sense, of course, they’re right. Or, at least, half right. Although they may choose the wrong targets for their anger—gay men, immi- grants, blacks, and women are hardly the cause of their anguish— white men have felt themselves to be falling in recent decades. That 1971 family income that was roughly the same as today’s? Then, it would have bought you a nice house in a good neighborhood with a decent school system, with about half left over for food and clothing and savings. Today, that income buys . . . well, let’s just say it buys a lot less. Most young men will never be able to afford to buy the very house they grew up in—and they know it.

Even more immediately, in the recent economic crisis, just about 80 percent of all the jobs lost since November 2008—a number in

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INTRODUCTION 15

excess of 5 million—were jobs held by men. Economists have been calling it a “he-cession,” since it is so gender skewed. (The Great Depres- sion was equally gendered, incidentally, but with single-breadwinner families, the crisis was experienced quite differently.) There is no doubt that white men have taken a big hit. And they’re more vulnera- ble: unions, which once offered a modicum of protection, have all but disappeared. Union membership has declined from about 40 percent after World War II to about 13 percent today, and if you remove fed- eral employees, it’s closer to 8–9 percent—which makes the tenacious clinging to traditional ideals of manhood that much more difficult.

An anguished letter to the editor of a small upstate New York news- paper written in 1993 by an American GI, after his return from ser- vice in the Gulf War, captured some of this sentiment. The letter writer complains that the legacy of the American middle class has been sto- len, handed over by an indifferent government to a bunch of ungrate- ful immigrants and welfare cheats. “The American dream,” he writes, “has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week’s groceries.” That letter writer was Timothy McVeigh from Lockport, New York. (McVeigh’s father was a union-protected worker in the steel plants in Lockport; Tim watched as the plants closed.) Two years later, McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Okla- homa City in what is now the second-worst act of terrorism ever com- mitted on American soil.

Their very adherence to traditional ideals of masculinity leaves so many white men feeling entitled to that dream—and so now they are feeling cheated, unhappy, and unfulfilled. American white men bought the promise of self-made masculinity, but its foundation has all but eroded. The game has changed, but instead of questioning the rules, they want to eliminate the other players. Instead of question- ing those ideals, they fall back upon those same traditional notions of manhood—physical strength, self-control, power—that defined their fathers’ and their grandfathers’ eras, as if the solution to their problem were simply “more” masculinity. Yet few, if any, are kings of the hill, top guns, the richest and most powerful. They’re passing on to their sons the same tired and impossible ideals of manliness and the same sense of entitlement. And they will spawn the same growing rage. The cycle continues—unless we recognize it and act both to defuse and to diffuse the anger.

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Actually, most men don’t want to be the king of the hill; they just don’t want to be underneath the landslide they feel is about to de- scend on their heads. They crave the dignity of the successful bread- winner, the family provider, the man who measures success by the look of respect in the eyes of his family and friends. To be a “man among men” is to be a “real man.” They don’t need to be leading the parade; they just can’t bear the idea that they’ve been tossed aside by history’s inexorable march.

It’s also true that many men spent the past two decades search- ing for some new definition of masculinity that would feel more emo- tionally resonant, more connected, more fulfilling. They felt lost, and so off they trooped to the woods with Robert Bly, or they filled foot- ball stadiums with the PromiseKeepers. They’ve claimed to rediscover timeless traditional verities and experimented with “new” involved fatherhood. There is definitely something happening with American men—they are searching for something, searching for some place where they can feel like real men again, a place unpolluted by the presence of those others, a pure homosocial clubhouse, locker room, or “talking circle.” Where can a guy go these days to just be around other men, just to hang out, be a guy, and not have to worry about who won’t like it, or having them wonder if he’s gay or some political Neanderthal?

At the same time as white American men cling ever more tena- ciously to old ideals, women and minorities have entered those for- merly all-male bastions of untrammeled masculinity. Gender and racial equality feels like a loss to white men: if “they” gain, “we” lose. In the zero-sum game, these gains have all been at white men’s expense. We employ what I call a “windchill” psychology: it doesn’t really matter what the actual temperature is; what matters is what it feels like.

The combination of these two forces—clinging to these old ideals and the dramatic changes in the actual contours of our lives—has been explosive. Men are angry and restless because of what they experience as the erosion of their “rightful” privilege, and they have convenient targets for their rage.

They’re angry at immigrants, who, they believe, are displacing them in the workforce. They’re angry at fat-cat capitalists, who, as they see it, downsize and outsource them out of their jobs, demolish communi- ties, and then jet off in their private planes, only to golden-parachute onto some tax-haven island. They’re angry at feckless bureaucrats, who

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INTRODUCTION 17

are deaf to their cries for help and in it only for themselves. They’re angry at women, who, they argue, are beautiful, sexy, and sexually available—yet turn them down with contemptuous sneers. They say they’re angry at wives (which is different from being angry at women), who keep men in harness as responsible breadwinners and providers, working in jobs they hate for bosses who are capricious morons, only to take them to the cleaners in the divorce, snatching the kids and leav- ing them penniless and childless. And finally, they say they’re angry at a government that, at best, does nothing to help them and, at worst, exacerbates the problem through its policies.

Let me give an example of how this works. I first began to think about these issues several years ago, when I appeared on a television talk show opposite three such “angry white males” who felt they had been the victims of workplace discrimination. They complained that affirmative action was really “reverse discrimination” and that it had ushered in a “new” ideology of unfairness into economic life. (Re- member, the reality that affirmative action was actually developed to remedy the unfairness that already existed is beside the point; it’s how it feels.) The title of this particular show, no doubt to entice a potentially large audience, was “A Black Woman Stole My Job.” In my comments, I asked the men to consider just one word in the title of the show: the word my. What made them think the job was theirs? Why wasn’t the episode called “A Black Woman Got the Job” or “A Black Woman Got a Job”? Because these guys felt that those jobs were “theirs,” that they were entitled to them, and that when some “other” person—black, female—got the job, that person was really taking “their” job.4

I’ve referred to this story many times since, because it stuck with me as an example of that sense of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that seems to be specific to middle- and upper-class white men. It ex- poses something important about these legions of angry white men: although they still have most of the power and control in the world, they feel like victims. Although it’s true that everyone needs to be a victim to even stand a chance of being heard in today’s political arena, the white-man-as-victim comes with a certain self-righteous anger that makes it distinct.

These ideas also reflect a somewhat nostalgic longing for that past world and explain why, whether they retreat to the woods as week-

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end warriors or to arm themselves for Armageddon, they speak of manhood—or of identity more generally—as something they have to “preserve,” or “retrieve,” or “restore.” To them, something has truly been lost—and it is their job to restore men to their “rightful” place.

That world, now passing into history, is a world in which white men grew up believing they would inevitably take their places some- where on the economic ladder simply by working hard and applying themselves.. It is the American Dream, the ideal of meritocracy. And when men fail, they are humiliated, with nowhere to place their anger.

And today, many white men feel that they know why their dream is being deferred. As Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and the first woman CEO of a major corporation in our history, put it, “There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.”5

It’s that “God-given right” that seems to be evaporating. What links all these different groups—rampage shooters and the Patriots, the Min- utemen and the vengeful dads, Rush Limbaugh and Joe the Plumber, and Tom Metzger and the neo-Nazi minions—is a single core experi- ence: what I call aggrieved entitlement. It is that sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful. You feel yourself to be the heir to a great promise, the American Dream, which has turned into an impossible fantasy for the very people who were supposed to inherit it. And where did they get the idea that it actually is their “God- given right” to begin with?

“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,” asks Bruce Springsteen in “The River,” perhaps his darkest song, “or is it something worse?”

FROM ANXIETY TO ANGER

In an earlier book, Manhood in America, I chronicled the history of American masculinity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a history of anxiety. The most dominant masculine ideal, from around the 1820s, was the “self-made man.” Henry Clay announced that “we are a nation of self-made men” on the floor of the US Senate in 1832. And that same year, the young French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the greatest observer of the American character ever, worried that this self-making was leading to a chronic restlessness, which he saw

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INTRODUCTION 19

as a defining psychological characteristic of the American self-made man: “An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on; he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires.” Tocque- ville was awed by the sight: “There is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance.”

So many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance—a phrase that defined the past two centuries of American life. A chronic rest- lessness, a constant hyperactive frenzy that has produced the most dazzling and miraculous of inventions, led to daring entrepreneurial risk taking, to a drive to expand, to conquer, to settle, that has pro- duced the strongest economy and the most enviable political form in the world, and left a path of both the “creative destruction” that Schumpeter said defined capitalism and vicious rapacious devastation of lands and peoples in its wake.

To be a self-made man was the American Dream—that anyone could, with enough hard work and discipline, and just the right amount of what Horatio Alger called “luck and pluck,” rise as high as his aspi- rations and talents and abilities and desires would take him. Rags to riches, from log cabin to the White House, the poor boy who “minds the main chance” and makes it big—these are distinctly American sto- ries. No Julien Sorel or Barry Lyndon for us, not even Edward Ferrars, whose virtue is rewarded, but who has no ambition. And they are dis- tinctly American men’s stories—of shipping out on the Pequod, joining the army, leaving home and heading west in search of riches, of “light- ing out for the territory,” ahead of Aunt Sally’s feminizing clutches.

These themes have long captivated American men’s imaginations— leaving home and seeking one’s fortunes in the ever-expanding West. It’s as powerful a theme in those canonical works that celebrate it— countless westerns, adventure stories, heroic sagas—as those that sug- gest its darker side, the road not taken (Alaska, in Death of a Salesman), fraudulent grandiosity (The Great Gatsby), or the deep psychic and sexual wounds of a supposedly glorious war (Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises).

The American Dream of endless upward mobility was always shad- owed by the American nightmare—just as you could rise as far as your

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aspirations and talents could take you, you could also fall off the cliff, and, unlike Europe, with its medieval villages and social safety nets, there would be no one there to catch you if you did. If America was the land of abundance, where anyone could go from rags to riches, then conversely you could blame only yourself if you didn’t make it. And so it is a dominant theme among the American middle class that you may strive for “the thrill of victory,” as the old ABC’s Wide World of Sports had it, but what really motivated you was avoiding “the agony of defeat.” American masculinity was thus chronically restless—energized, electric, entrepreneurial, and frightened, afraid of falling.

Such chronic, temperamental restlessness could be easily accom- modated as long as America was expanding—westward, overseas, into space. The ever-receding frontier was a gendered safety valve, siphon- ing off those who hadn’t yet succeeded and giving them a chance to start over. America is the land of the do-over, says Billy Crystal in City Slickers, a film about three middle-class white guys who try to reclaim their manhood on a late-twentieth-century dude ranch, playing cow- boy on the frontier.

As a New Yorker, I used to discomfit my students at Berkeley when I was a professor there. “American history,” I declared once in class, “is the story of the westward migration of losers.” The students looked puzzled and sometimes distraught. But consider: if you were a self- made man and you were successful in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston, you stayed put. But if you failed, you could move to that first frontier, Pennsylvania, or Ohio, and if you succeeded there, you stayed. Failure would bring you to Chicago or St. Louis, and if you failed there, again, well, Houston and Denver beckoned. If you couldn’t make it there, well, then, you came to California. After California—well, it was Alaska, the colonies, the colonies that we didn’t call colonies, perhaps, in fantasy, space, the final frontier.

That frontier is closed; indeed, it has begun to loop back on it- self. There are few places—perhaps cyberspace is the new frontier— where a man can start over and make it. And the competition has become increasingly fierce, both from others overseas as well as from those “others”—women, minorities, immigrants—who had been suc- cessfully excluded for decades.

As the competition has ramped up, and the frontier safety valve has closed down, American anxiety has morphed into anger, the specific

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INTRODUCTION 21

type of anger that I address in this book. It’s as though the emotional character, the American male temperament, has changed. Anxiety may be fraught, unstable, jittery, and fearful, but it was also generative, pro- ductive, entrepreneurial. America was a land of opportunity, and anx- iety can also be optimistic. Self-making was at least possible—even if you spent most of your time warding off the specter of failure. It was possible. Anxiety may be based in the past, but it sets one’s activities toward the future.

Not anymore. The new American anger is more than defensive; it is reactionary. It seeks to restore, to retrieve, to reclaim something that is perceived to have been lost. Angry White Men look to the past for their imagined and desired future. They believe that the system is stacked against them. Theirs is the anger of the entitled: we are entitled to those jobs, those positions of unchallenged dominance. And when we are told we are not going to get them, we get angry.

It is that sense of entitlement thwarted—what I will call aggrieved entitlement—that I believe characterizes America’s new breed of Angry White Men.

THE POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF AGGRIEVED ENTITLEMENT

Despite the romantic fictions of Victor Hugo, it’s not typically les miserables—the poor, the desperate, the hungry or homeless—who rise up politically enraged to ignite a revolution. They’re often too depleted and distracted by more immediate concerns about getting some food or shelter. What’s more, the poorest of the poor often feel they deserve nothing more, resigned to their fate.

Rather, it’s those just above the poor who compose the vast armies of revolution—the middle or even richer peasants in China or Cuba, the most skilled industrial workers in Russia.6 Earlier it was the lower middle classes of artisans or small shopkeepers in the towns and the independent yeoman farmers in the countryside who made up the sansculottes in revolutionary France or the Levellers and other radi- cal groups in mid-seventeenth-century England. Revolutions are made not by those with “nothing left to lose,” in Kris Kristofferson’s memo- rable phrase (and branded indelibly in memory through Janis Joplin’s

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incomparable voice), but precisely by those with something to lose— and a fear that they are, in fact, about to lose it.

The great political scientist Barrington Moore understood this when he offered this rejoinder to Marx’s theory that the most op- pressed class is the revolutionary one: “The chief social basis of rad- icalism has been the peasants and the smaller artisans in the towns. From these facts one may conclude that the wellsprings of human free- dom lie not where Marx saw them, in the aspirations of classes about to take power, but perhaps even more in the dying wail of a class over whom the wave of progress is about to roll.”7 The wellsprings of hu- man freedom lie there, yes, but so perhaps do the origins of those groups who would take that freedom only for themselves and deny it to others. It is the declining class—the downwardly mobile lower mid- dle class in particular—that has provided the shock troops of virtually every great social movement, whether they are on the Right (think of the Italian Fascists, the original Ku Klux Klan) or on the Left (think of the anarchist waiters in Barcelona in the 1930s, the American Pop- ulist farmers and workers in the 1890s). Political scientist Ted Robert Gurr called it “relative depravation”—that our sense of being deprived is measured not in an abstract calculus, but always in relation to those around us, those who are getting more but don’t deserve it.

The downwardly mobile lower middle class has more than just its economic position at stake; the class is defined by its economic autonomy—they are the nation’s small shopkeepers, independent craft workers, high-skilled union-protected manufacturing workers, in- dependent small farmers. It is this group who has lost the most over the past half century, and particularly since the 1980s, when outsourc- ing of manufacturing jobs was paralleled by the most extensive farm crisis since the Dust Bowl years. Small farms were foreclosed, swal- lowed up by corporate agribusiness; ma-and-pa stores were forced to shutter when Walmart moved in; and small family businesses, passed on from generation to generation—and generation to generation of men, as in “Kimmel and Sons”—and unions were decimated, unable to protect workers from factory closings and offshore corporate moves.

The lower middle class has always defined itself by its fierce eco- nomic independence and by its sense of community belonging, of citizenship in a political community in which their voices would be

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INTRODUCTION 23

heard. They are the heirs of the New England town meeting, that bul- wark of American democracy so heralded by Thomas Jefferson.

Today, they feel their voices are silent, drowned in the din of other voices shouting to be heard by a federal government that seems in- creasingly hard of hearing. Maybe, they imagine, their voices are not even silent, but silenced—deliberately suppressed to give others a chance. We, who were raised to believe our voices would be heard, are actually being told to be quiet. Surely, that is not fair. Economically, their independence is vanishing as they are downsized, outsourced, and foreclosed into service-sector jobs where they spend their days having to follow the seemingly unintelligible demands of undeserving supervisors.

It’s largely the downwardly mobile middle and lower middle classes who form the backbone of the Tea Party, of the listeners of out- rage radio, of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists—in many cases literally the sons of those very farmers and workers who’ve lost the family farms or shuttered for good the businesses that had been fam- ily owned and operated for generations. It’s this group—native born, white, middle class—that had bought most deeply into the American Dream of upward mobility, or at least of holding the line. And now they feel that they’re treading water at best, and more likely drowning.

It is that spring—the belief in the system, having something yet to lose, and feeling that they’re not getting what they deserve—that sources the rivers of rage that flow through America. Even before the anger is pain, the injury of losing something, something valuable, pre- cious, something that your father may have entrusted to you, or, more likely, that you felt your father was supposed to entrust to you before he lost your birthright. “The hallmarks of loss are idealization and rage,” writes Carol Gilligan, “and under the rage, immense sadness.”8

Before the anger or sense of being aggrieved, psychologist Carol Tavris notes, they must both want what they don’t have and feel that they deserve what they don’t have. Their sense of grievance depends on their sense of entitlement. That sense of entitlement can come from many places. It can come from specific promises made and unkept, like campaign-trail promises that are not implemented after an election. It can come from more abstract promises—like the American Dream that if a man works hard, is an honest and upstanding citizen, he will

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be rewarded with a good job that will enable him to support a family and give his children a solid foundation for their future, and will have earned the respect and authority that come with it.

Ironically, that sense of being entitled is a marker not of deprava- tion but of privilege. Those who have nothing don’t feel they deserve anything; those who already have something believe they are entitled to it. When one feels that slipping, one may idealize, as Carol Gilligan says, that earlier time when privilege was unexamined and assumed and rage at those who seem to be taking what you thought was right- fully yours.

Aggrieved entitlement can mobilize one politically, but it is of- ten a mobilization toward the past, not the future, to restore that which one feels has been lost. It invariably distorts one’s vision and leads to a misdirected anger—often at those just below you on the ladder, because clearly they deserve what they are getting far less than you do.

Of course, blaming others for your plight is the essence of scape- goating.9 Surely, it’s not my fault that I don’t have the things to which I am entitled! Scapegoating—whether of Jews, minorities, immigrants, women, whomever—directs the blame for your predicament away from the actual institutional sources of our problem and onto other groups who are less powerful. It grants them far more power—the power to take away from you that to which you are entitled—than they actually have; the “other” always looms large in the analysis of your own plight. “It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti- immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” is the way that then senator Obama understood this rise of rage.

Here’s a good example of that political scapegoating. Remember Jim Sasser? This Republican senator from Tennessee, a reasonable “moderate” in the Senate—he’d voted for the Brady Bill, for exam- ple (even though his state had a longer waiting period than the Brady Bill mandated)—was targeted by Far Right proto–Tea Party extremists within his own party. Big corporations, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and other groups began a media war against Sasser. Here is how he now understands his defeat:

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INTRODUCTION 25

They wrap you in the liberal mantra. He’s going to take away our guns and give women and blacks our jobs. In my campaign, it was the anger of the white male. The anger at Washington from unemployed trade union members who had lost their jobs on the assembly line and were now doing crummy service jobs. They blamed affirmative action; they blamed blacks. Most important, they blamed women. . . . During the Thomas hearings [the hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court] white men kept calling from the rural part of the state, which has a heavily black population, to support Thomas. Their accusations reaffirmed what was going on in their lives: women trying to run the show. Their masculinity is being threatened. I almost became majority leader. In ordinary times, people would have been proud. This year it worked against me. Public ignorance is the prob- lem. Plus the skillful effort to manipulate that ignorance.10

Perhaps the dynamic of aggrieved entitlement is best described by psychiatrist Willard Gaylin. “We can endure the fact that we do not have something unless we feel that something has been taken away from us. We will then experience a sense of violation,” he writes. “The smolder- ing rage which comes from being cheated [will be extended] to the so- ciety which allowed us to be so cheated.”11 It’s misdirecting that anger to others that is the central dynamic of America’s angry white men.

Ultimately, I argue that understanding white men’s anger requires a focus on class—the ironic parallel that finds the United States more racially and gender equal than ever before in our history and more un- equal in terms of class than at least the Gilded Age, if not ever. The tensions and anxieties produced by such dramatic increases in class in- equality lead many to look at those who appear to have gained, while “we”—the white middle and working classes—have most assuredly been losing. While race and gender are certainly the defining features of today’s angry American, it is the growing chasm between rich and poor that is the engine of that rage.

THIS BOOK

Angry White Men is thus the story of a wide swath of American men— mainstream, middle-of-the-road American white guys—who are feeling

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somewhat at sea these days. Some are looking for answers; others want payback. It’s a book about the mobilization—and manipulation—of a wide range of emotions into a politically motivated anger. It’s a book about how these normal, everyday guys—office workers and carpenters, firefighters and construction workers, sales clerks and skilled workers, handymen and hardware-store owners—are today also signing up for rural militias, opposing women’s participation in the military, and shrugging off harassment and assault. It’s about the guy who listens to the out-of-control fulminators and says to his wife, “Well, he does have a couple of good points there. Those feminists have gone too far.” And it’s about how these everyday guys are also raising sons who pick on weaker kids at school, cheer for performers who brag about attacking women or gays, idealize those miscreants who attack others and get away with it. And these sons are also staying up late at night, surfing the Web for enough explosives to blow up their schools. It’s also a story of the margins—the right-wing militias, guys who go on murderous (and suicidal) rampages against young women, the office workers who “go postal,” the raging divorced dads who rail against unfair child- custody arrangements.

Mostly, it’s the story of the connections between the margins and the mainstream, between the victims of bullying who take matters into their own hands and the nearly 70 percent of kids who have ei- ther been bullied or bullied themselves. It’s about the connections be- tween the ultra-right-wing extremists, the skinheads and Aryan youth who strut through Southern California shopping malls looking for tar- gets, and the millions who support closing America’s borders to keep our country white and safe. It’s about the connections between main- stream dads, eager to be involved fathers and trying valiantly to carve out more time for their families, and the furious fathers who blame feminism for their divorces and claim a feminist-enthralled judicial system deprives them of their rights to access to their children.

These connections are vital to our understanding of American an- ger. American men are, in my view, right to be angry. They have a lot to be angry about. Most American men live in a system in which they were promised a lot of rewards if they played by the rules. If they were good, decent, hardworking men, if they saddled up, or, even more ac- curately, got into the harness themselves, they would feel the respect of their wives and their children; if they fought in America’s wars and

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INTRODUCTION 27

served their country fighting fires and stopping crime, they’d have the respect of their communities. And, most important, if they were loyal to their colleagues and workmates, did an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, then they’d also have the respect of other men. “I grew up thinking that all I had to do was to sign up, you know, sign up to be a man the way they told me to be,” says Al, a fifty-two-year-old divorced father of three, who’s been downsized out of a good-paying sales job. “I mean, you know, suck it up, never show your feelings, be tough, strong, powerful—all that crap about . . . [grimacing, mak- ing air quotes] masculinity.” Al is explaining this to me—to the entire group, actually—at a workshop I’m conducting on improving male- female relationships. He makes the air quotes and rolls his eyes, look- ing at me. Okay, I nod, I get it. He says:

Look, I thought if I did it right, did everything they asked of me, I’d be okay, you know. Play ball and you’ll get rich; you’ll get laid. And I did, man. For thirty years, I’ve been such a good fucking soldier. And now these new laws about sexual harassment, about affirmative ac- tion? And now you’re telling me, “Sorry, but you aren’t going to get all those rewards.” Is that what you’re telling me? Jesus, I wouldn’t have done it if I knew I wasn’t going to get those goodies. How can you just take it away from us? We’ve earned it! We paid our dues! We did everything you told us, and now you’re saying we aren’t getting the big payoff? And they are?! Are you kidding me? And now we’re the enemy? We are getting royally screwed, guys. [Now he is looking at the rest of the men in the room.] We are just so fucked. [softer] Seriously, I would never have said “Sign me up” if I knew I wasn’t going to get to reap the same benefits my father and grandfather did. It all seems so unfair.

And he’s right.

THE PLAN OF THE BOOK

The book follows a thematic unfolding. Most chapters begin with a particularly egregious set of claims or a heinously headline-grabbing event as a way to get inside that subject. The chapters then move from

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the extreme cases to the more commonplace, all the while describing how these more general patterns are links to the more horrific.

Chapter 1 explores what we might call the “social construction” of white men’s anger. While I locate this rise in rage in the experiences of white men, whose sense of entitlement has begun to wane, their an- guish and confusion are also being carefully manipulated into polit- icized rage. I look at the mean-spirited media, which tries to fan the flames of discontent already smoldering across America’s suburban lawns, and consider those cynical marketers who are discovering that anger sells. I briefly discuss the Tea Party, Patriots and Minutemen, and the new suburban racism. This anti-immigrant and recharged racism and this virulent antigay rage are directed at anyone—a generalized eth- nic and racial “other”—who is seen as threatening to transform Amer- ica from a Christian (read: white) nation into a multi cultural polyglot with no center of racial gravity and, of course, gays, who transform that multicultural polyglot into a “depraved and immoral” polyglot.

The next three chapters explore the anger of men and boys. Chap- ter 2 is about angry white boys—those boys who open fire, seemingly randomly, on their classmates and teachers. What, if anything, do these random school shootings and these boys who are committing suicide by mass murder tell us about what is happening not only in their heads, but in our culture more generally?

Chapter 3 examines the angry men who seek to restore men’s rights. These men’s rights activists, spurred by radio commentators and an active blogosphere presence, trumpet various disparities—health, longevity, putative discrimination against boys in school—to rectify the gender imbalance perpetrated by feminist women and their male lackeys. Some promote men’s health initiatives, others educational re- forms, but all see women as the cause of men’s and boys’ problems.

A subgroup of these men’s rights activists are the fathers’ rights groups, the subject of Chapter 4. Many divorced dads were involved fathers and good husbands, yet in the aftermath of bitter divorces, they become enraged as their children were snatched from them and their wages garnished by capricious judges and vicious divorce attorneys. Ironically, the changes inspired by feminist women—increased com- mitment to family life, greater time spent with children—now come back to bite these guys on their butts, as they invested so much more emotional energy on their families, only to lose what they feel is every-

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INTRODUCTION 29

thing in the divorce. (You’ll notice, then, that I focus primarily on the white fathers’ rights movement. There is a significant fathers’ responsi- bility movement among African Americans, which inspired comments from President Obama about black men being more responsible husbands and fathers. The fathers’ rights movement spends virtually no energy on responsibility, which means that some of the efforts to bridge these groups have produced less than stellar results.)

Chapter 5 focuses on some extreme cases of what happens when women deny men what men feel entitled to. From the thousands of men who batter and murder their wives, ex-wives, and girlfriends every year to men like George Sodini, who embark on murderous rampages against random women at a local gym, some men blame women for their problems—with occasionally lethal results.

Chapter 6 shifts our attention away from America’s shopping malls to its industrial mills, to the angry white guys who “go postal” in their workplaces, bringing lethal weapons to work and opening fire, often targeting their supervisors or bosses, but also taking out a few coworkers in the process. Like the school shooters and George So- dini, many of the guys who go postal also end up committing suicide by mass murder.

Finally, in Chapter 7, I turn to Rick and his fellow travelers on the extreme right wing, the White Wing. Among the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups, we can see most clearly the sense of outrage that unites all of America’s angry white men.

In the Epilogue, I address anger as a form of resistance, not spe- cifically its content. After all, anger can be hopeful, instrumental, a belief that with enough effort, change is still possible. Anger can be politically mobilized outrage, the emotional fuel of every popular so- cial movement in history. But anger can also turn to bitterness, a sense of hopeless despair, that is the source of impotent nihilistic violence. Anger can temporarily relieve humiliation, but often only at the ex- pense of another. Many of the Patriots and Tea Partiers believe they are fighting for the future of “their” country and that it is still possible to reclaim it. And some lone wolves, like George Sodini, are resigned to the impossibility of change and commit suicide by mass murder only to go out in a blaze of glory.

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1 Manufacturing Rage The Cultural Construction of Aggrieved Entitlement

“Tom,” from Wichita, Kansas, has been waiting on hold, he tells us, for two hours and twenty minutes. An army veteran, he lost his job earlier this year. For months, he’s been looking for work, send- ing out hundreds of résumés. A few interviews, no offers. What will happen to his family when his unemployment insurance runs out? “We’re into the red zone,” he explains. “We’re cutting essentials: food, laundry, clothing, shoes.” He’s worried, he says, “scared to death.” Re- peatedly, he insists he is “not a whiner.”

What he wants to know, he asks Rush Limbaugh on his nationally syndicated radio show, is what President Obama is doing to turn the economy around. Why was he spending all this energy on health care when people are out of work? What has the stimulus plan done to create jobs for people like him, with families to support? Fortunately, he says, his wife has a job that provides health care for the family. But

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if he doesn’t find something soon, he’s considering reenlisting. He lost his own father in Vietnam, he says, softly, and he’s afraid that at forty-three, he might leave his own children fatherless. “My self-esteem is right now at its lowest that I’ve ever had it,” Tom says. “I’m getting choked up.”

“I know,” replies Limbaugh empathetically. “I’ve been there.” Lim- baugh recounts his own history of unemployment. But then, he trans- forms Tom’s experience. “I don’t hear you as whining,” says Rush. “I hear you as mad.”

Wait a second. Did you hear Tom as mad? I’m no expert in auditory interpretation, but what I heard was anxiety, vulnerability, and more than just a slight tremor of fear. I heard someone asking for help. In a revealing analysis of Limbaugh’s radio persona, antiviolence activist Jackson Katz carefully parses this particular exchange as emblematic— how the talk-show host transforms this plaintive emotional expres- sion into something else. What starts as sadness, anxiety, grief, worry is carefully manipulated into political rage.1

Rush Limbaugh is a master at this translation of emotional vulner- ability or insecurity into anger. All that he needs is that shared sense of aggrieved entitlement—that sense that “we,” the rightful heirs of America’s bounty, have had what is “rightfully ours” taken away from us by “them,” faceless, feckless government bureaucrats, and given to “them,” undeserving minorities, immigrants, women, gays, and their ilk. If your despair can be massaged into this Manichaean struggle be- tween Us and Them, you, too, can be mobilized into the army of An- gry White Men.

Limbaugh is one of hundreds of talk-show hosts on radio dials across the nation—indeed, the AM radio dial seems to have nothing but sports talk, Spanish-language stations, and vitriolic white men hosting radio shows. Talk radio is the most vibrant part of the radio dial—thir- ty-five hundred all-talk or all-news stations in the United States—up from about five hundred two decades ago.2 According to the Pew Re- search Center for the People and the Press, while the majority of radio, newspaper, and magazine consumers are female (51 percent), Lim- baugh (59 percent), Sean Hannity (57 percent), and Stephen Colbert (58 percent) skew most heavily toward men. (So, incidentally, does Rachel Maddow, at 52 percent.) Limbaugh’s audiences skew slightly

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older, less educated (only 29 percent are college graduates, compared to 39 percent and 35 percent for liberals Colbert and Maddow, respec- tively). Their income tends to be squarely in the middle—30 percent make more than seventy-five thousand dollars, 37 percent between thirty and seventy-five thousand dollars, and 21 percent below thirty thousand dollars a year. Obviously, more than seven in ten identify as conservative.3

Visitors to Limbaugh’s website tilt even more rightward. It’s vis- ited by 1.1 million people a month—more than 94 percent white and 85 percent male, most are between thirty-five and sixty-five, with the biggest bulge at forty-five to fifty-four. Most (54 percent) do not have kids. Two-thirds have incomes below one hundred thousand dollars a year, though two-thirds also have at least a college, if not a gradu- ate, degree. (That’s an index of downward mobility; their educational achievements haven’t paid off in better jobs.)4 This would make the typical Limbaugh fan (enough to view his website) a downwardly mo- bile white male, whose career never really panned out (college or grad school but only modest income) and whose family life didn’t either (majority childless). That is a recipe for aggrieved entitlement. Every- thing was in place to partake of the American Dream, and it didn’t quite work out. Just whose fault is that?

Sociologist Sarah Sobieraj and political scientist Jeffrey Berry call it “outrage media”—talk-radio, blog, and cable news designed “to provoke a visceral response from the audience, usually in the form of anger, fear, or moral righteousness through the use of overgeneraliza- tions, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and partial truths about opponents.”5 Sobieraj and Berry trace this development through the technological shifts from radio and TV to cable news, the blogosphere, and talk radio as the news vehicles of choices and to the incredible consolidation of media companies, so that only a handful of companies control virtually all of America’s airwaves. (Women own about three of ten businesses in America but own only 6 percent of radio stations. Racial minorities own 18 percent of all businesses, but only 7.7 percent of radio sta- tions. Clearly, white men are being squeezed out, right?)6

But it’s also linked to the displacement of white men from every single position of power in the country. Talk radio is the last locker

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room, juiced not on steroids but on megahertz. It’s the circled wagons keeping out the barbarian hordes, who may be just a millimeter away on that dial. It’s the Alamo on AM frequency.

The rise of outrage media is coincident with the erosion of white male entitlement. Outrage media generally begins with Peter Finch in the film Network (1976), exhorting his audience to go to their win- dows and scream, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any- more!” Finch’s impotent outburst provides a heroic riposte to a film about the steamroller of corporate takeovers, the ethically rudderless drive for ratings trumping all other criteria, including quality. Like the tabloid newspaper or local newscast—whose motto is “If it bleeds, it leads”—the motto of outrage radio is closer to “If he yells, it sells.”

Of course, one needn’t be some academic postmodernist to un- derstand how the catharsis of the experience is what enables us to take more of it. We feel outrage, and we’re told it’s not our fault and that we have plenty of company.

But it’s more than just the cheerleaders of the angry mobs. An- ger sells. It’s become part of marketing strategies for products ranging from regular-guy cars and beer to defiantly politically incorrect items like Hummers and cigars. Anger, after all, implies some degree of hope, of “aspiration,” which is a core element in advertising strategy. Anger implies commitment; if you’re angry, you feel yourself to be a stakeholder. Anger is emotion seeking an outlet, an excited politicized electron seeking to connect with other atoms. (Contrast it with what happens to the anger that does not find a means of expression: it can become nihilistic, despondent, or resigned bitterness. The resigned and despondent do not buy products. They sulk. They give up.)

You could hear that anger, the aggrieved entitlement, on elec- tion night 2012, as President Obama handily defeated Mitt Romney for president. Romney, the unfathomably wealthy corporate pluto- crat, was unable to transform himself into a populist firebrand. Even though white men were the only demographic who went for Romney (although not decisively), it was too close in all those battleground states to offset the huge margins Obama racked up with African Amer- icans, women, union workers, and Latinos.

The fact that white men are not a monolithic group—and that enough voted Democratic, especially in blue states—is, of course, an important empirical counterweight to the claims of many of the Angry

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White Male choirmasters on talk radio and Fox News who say that they speak for all of “us.”

But it hardly deters them. Do you recall the commentary on elec- tion night 2012? Rush Limbaugh said that he went to bed thinking “we’d lost the country.” Bill O’Reilly quoted one of his listeners, mourning that “we have lost our American way of life.” “I liked it the way it was,” former Saturday Night Live news anchor Dennis Miller (now more of a self-parodying talk-show host) said about the coun- try. “It’s not going to be like that anymore.”7 And what was the single unifying campaign slogan the Tea Party had to offer? “We want to take back our country.”8

When I read these comments, I was reminded of a joke from my childhood. It seems that the Lone Ranger and Tonto were riding across the plains when suddenly they were surrounded by ten thousand an- gry Indian warriors. (The word savages would likely have been used in those days.)

“We’re in trouble, Tonto,” says the Lone Ranger. “What do you mean ‘we,’ kemosabe?” is Tonto’s reply. Tonto was right. Just what do they mean by “we”? Whose country

is it? One has to feel a sense of proprietorship, of entitlement, to call

it “our” country. That sense has led millions of Americans, male and female, white and nonwhite, to feel like stakeholders in the American system and motivated millions to lay down their lives for that way of life. It’s prompted some of the most moving stories of sacrifice, the most heroic and touching moments of connectedness with neighbors and strangers during crises. But it has its costs. That sense of holding on to what’s “ours” can be turned into something ugly, sowing divi- sion where unity should be. Just as religiosity can motivate the most self-sacrificing charity and loving devotion, it can also be expressed as sanctimonious self-righteousness, as if a privileged access to revealed truth grants permission to unspeakable cruelties.

It’s not the depth of those collective feelings that is troubling—ob- viously, love of country can inspire us to great sacrifice; rather, it’s their direction. When threatened, that sense of entitlement, of proprietor- ship, can be manipulated into an enraged protectionism, a sense that the threat to “us” is internal, those undeserving others who want to take for themselves what we have rightfully earned. “We” were willing to

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share, we might say, totally inverting the reality that “they” ask only for a seat at the table, not to overturn the table itself; “they” want it all for themselves. According to these angry white men, “they” not only want a seat, but now they got a guy sitting at the head of the ta- ble itself.

Note, also, that I said “can be manipulated.” The expression of emotion often leaves one also vulnerable, susceptible to manipula- tion. There’s little empirical evidence for some biologically driven or evolutionarily mandated tribalism—at least a tribalism based on such phony us-versus-them characteristics. Sure, it’s true that when threat- ened, we have an instinctive reaction to circle the wagons and protect ourselves against whatever threatens us. So, for example, the fierce pa- triotism that emerged after the 9/11 attacks was a natural, collective response to invasion, just as the mobilization of the entire nation’s sympathies after Hurricane Katrina or Sandy; few Americans were in- ured to the outpouring of collective grief, anguish, and shared purpose.

But to fixate on Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Iraq? That had to be manipulated: Iraq had not invaded us; indeed, Saddam Hus- sein was antipathetic to al-Qaeda. There were no weapons of mass destruction—but even had there been, why was it necessary to try to divert the outpouring of grief and desire for revenge to a different en- emy? That we feel collective sentiments tells us nothing about how those sentiments can be mobilized and manipulated. In the case of the Iraq War, there was no threat, just the raw sentiments ripe for ex- ploitation by cynical politicians.

Angry white men are genuinely floundering—confused and of- ten demoralized, they experience that wide range of emotions. But their anger is often constructed from those emotional materials, given shape and directed at targets that serve other interests. Angry white men are angry, all right, but their anger needs to be channeled toward some groups—and away from others.

OUTRAGEOUS RADIO

As an emotion, anger has a fairly short shelf life. It’s a “hot” emotion, like sexual desire, not a cooler emotion like devotion to a loved one, or abiding love of country, or pride in one’s child. Anger must be fed, its

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embers constantly stoked—either personally, by holding a grudge, or collectively, by having sustained the sense that you have been injured, wounded, and that those who did it must pay. Feeling like the wronged victim is a way to channel hurt into a self-fueling sense of outrage; a personal sense of injury becomes “politicized” as an illustration of a general theme.

The politicization of the countless injuries, hurts, and injustices is the job of the self-appointed pundits in the media. It is they who offer a political framework for the anguish that you might feel, suggest how it represents a larger pattern of victimization of “people like you,” and then urge collective action to redress it. (The collective action can be simply tuning in to the same radio show every day, knowing that you are among friends and allies.)

As a result, Angry White Men are a virtual social movement. I don’t mean that they are “virtually” a movement—as in “almost, but not quite.” I mean that they organize virtually, that their social-movement organization is a virtual organization. They sit alone, listening to the radio, listening to Rush Limbaugh and Mike Savage and Sean Hannity. They meet online, in chat rooms and on websites, whether promoting antifeminist men’s rights or the re-Aryanization of America. They troll cyberspace, the anti-PC police, ready to attack any blogger, columnist, or quasi liberal who dares to say something with which they disagree.

It is the task of the Angry White Male pundits in the media to act as the choirmasters of the Angry White Male chorus, to direct and re- direct that rage, to orchestrate it so that the disparate howls of despair or anguish, the whimpers of pain, or the mumblings of confusion can sound unified. They are the conductors; they believe that we are their instruments. It’s their job to take the anger that might, in fact, be quite legitimate and direct it elsewhere, onto other targets.

Say, for example, you are an autoworker, and you’ve seen your wages cut, your benefits dismantled, and your control over your hours steadily compromised. You may well be a bit miffed. But at whom? Left to your own devices—and conversations with your friends—you might conclude that it is the fault of rapacious corporate moguls, who line their pockets and pay themselves fat bonuses and who squeeze ev- ery drop they can from America’s working man. You might even list to the Left and make common cause with others in similar situations and try to get the government to regulate the industry, raise wages, protect

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benefits, and institute national health care. You might even work with your union.

So, if I were to try to channel Rush Limbaugh or Mike Savage, my task would be to redirect that anger onto others, those even less fortu- nate than you. Perhaps the reason you are so unhappy is because of all those immigrants who are streaming into America, driving the costs of labor lower and threatening “American” jobs. Or perhaps it’s because women—even, perhaps, your own wife—want to enter the labor force, and that’s what is driving down labor costs, as corporations no lon- ger need to pay men a “family” wage, since they no longer support a family. Your grievances are not with the corporations, but with those just below you. In other words, as Thomas Frank points out in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, it’s the task of the pundits to create “a French Revolution in reverse—one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy.”9

Limbaugh and Savage are only two of the hundreds of angry white men who have staked out an angry white male club on radio waves. I’ll focus on them briefly here not because they are any worse than any of the others, but rather because they are so similar—in that masculinity is so central in their radio ratings. They’re among the most popular: The Savage Nation is heard on 350 radio stations and reaches 8.25 mil- lion listeners each week, ranking third behind only Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Limbaugh outpaces everyone else, heard on more than 600 stations, with a weekly audience of more than 20 million.10

Angry White Men dominate the American airwaves (even though their claim that the media tilt leftward enables them to both claim dominance and victimhood); their goal is to protect and preserve the dominance of American white men, even at the moment when white men, in real life, are actually accommodating themselves to greater and greater gender equality—and, actually, liking it very much.

What, though, are they actually so angry about? Angry White Men exhibit what French social theorist Georges Sorel

called “ressentiment”—a personal sense of self that is defined always in relationship to some perceived injury and whose collective politics mixes hatred and envy of those who we believe have injured us. That “creative hatred,” Sorel argues, is anathema to serious collective action because it is so easily manipulated; it is more likely to spawn sporadic spasmodic violent eruptions than a serious social movement.

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This sense of self, grounded in victimhood, both hating and en- vying others, can be a brilliant strategy, generating an audience of consumers. And it’s not only these angry white men. Indeed, Oprah Winfrey’s early television success involved constructing her audience as victims. In the early 1990s, I entered a discussion to appear on her show following the publication of my book Men Confront Pornography. When I spoke to the producer, she suggested that I appear alongside several women whose “husbands or boyfriends had forced them to do degrading sexual things after they’d seen them in pornography.” I said no, that my book was a serious effort to invite men to take on the political debate that was, at the time, roiling feminism. I proposed being on with a few men who took the issues seriously. We went back and forth, up the ladder of increasingly senior producers. Finally, the very seniormost producer of the show, the one who talks directly with Oprah, admitted she didn’t understand how my idea would work or what was wrong with her idea. “I just don’t see it,” she said. “I don’t see who the victim is. You can’t have an Oprah show without a victim.”

What a revealing statement! As the producer saw it, the world was divided into two groups, viewers and victims. Viewers would tune in each day, perhaps feeling that their lives were miserable. And then they’d watch the show and exhale, and say, “Well, at least my husband doesn’t force me to do degrading sexual things after he sees them in pornography! Maybe my life isn’t so bad after all.” And the next day, as the effects wear off, and viewers feel crappy again, they tune in to see someone who has it far worse, and they feel, temporarily, better. It’s like Queen for a Day, a show I watched assiduously as a young child, in which three different women would tell of the terrible fates that had befallen them (husband injured on the job and unable to work, debil- itating illnesses, and so on), and the studio audience would vote (by the loudness of their applause, registering on an “Applause-o-Meter”) which one of the women would be crowned queen and receive gifts like a new refrigerator and other household appliances. (I ended up going on The Phil Donahue Show instead.)

Oprah’s shows in her last years on the air were more inspira- tional—not necessarily a parade of victims, but more about people who had triumphed over adversity, who had fallen down seven times and gotten up eight. But the theme of viewers and victims resonates more now on talk radio. It’s but a short hop from dichotomous viewers and

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victims to a more unified community of viewers as victims. The genius of Rush Limbaugh and the others is that they have appropriated a more commonly “feminine” trope of perpetual victimhood and successfully masculinized it. In fact, they claim, it’s your very manhood that is con- stantly under threat!

As befits an industry leader, Rush Limbaugh’s politics of ressenti- ment has been amply parsed for its racism and sexism—he’s popped into national consciousness usually when he strays over a line already drawn far to the other side of decency and respect.

He defends white people against what Lothrop Stoddard and Mad- ison Grant, early-twentieth-century racialists, called “the rising tide of color.” Limbaugh’s racism is as transparent as his nativism and sex- ism. Here’s what he said after Obama was elected the first time: “It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you ex- pect safety, but in Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yeah, right on, right on, right on,’ and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it: he was born a racist; he’s white.”11

And how does one get ahead in Obama’s America? “By hating white people. Or even saying you do. . . . Make white people the new op- pressed minority. . . . They’re moving to the back of the bus. . . . That’s the modern day Republican Party, the equivalent of the Old South: the new oppressed minority.”12

Poor white people, the victims of government-sponsored racial discrimination. And poor men, victims of reverse sexism as well. For example, when Sandra Fluke, a graduate student at Georgetown, testi- fied in support of requiring all institutions receiving federal funds to actually obey the law and provide contraception, Limbaugh launched into a vicious ad feminam attack against Fluke personally, calling her a slut and a whore for having so much sex, and demanded, as a taxpayer, that she provide high-quality videos of her sexual escapades. “If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

It’s easy to understand the sense of entitlement that this sixth- generation upper-class heir to a Missouri family of lawyers and pol- iticians might feel. And it’s not so very hard to understand how so

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many of his white male listeners might identify with him, even if they’re more recent arrivals, and they’ve always held jobs for which you shower after work, not before it.

What binds this bilious martinet to his listeners, though, is that they are men, at least the overwhelming majority of them, and their sense of entitlement comes from their deep-seated feeling that they are the heirs to the American Dream that, as Woody Guthrie should have sung, this land was really made for them. Note that he assumes that his listeners are male—that “we” are entitled to see videos of Sandra Fluke or that it’s a little white boy who is being harassed. “We” is white and male. Indeed, a cover story in Newsweek on talk radio called it “group therapy for mostly white males who feel politically challenged.”13

Rarely, though, have commentators gone much further than no- ticing how these shows resonate with white men. It’s as if noting the demographics explains the sociology. So they rarely discuss gender, discuss how masculinity is implicated. Nor do they see Limbaugh’s rage as a particularly masculine rage, the “gender” of the pain he claims to channel into outrage. On the one hand, he’s a real man, a man’s man—“a cigar-smoking, NFL-watching, red-meat right winger who’s offended by the ‘feminization’ of American society.”14 His sense of ag- grieved entitlement is to restore not the reality but the possibility of dominance. It is simultaneously aspirational and nostalgic—he looks back to a time when it was all there, unchallenged, and forward to its restoration. Limbaugh’s own public struggles with his weight, his failed childless marriages, his avoidance of military service, his addic- tion to OxyContin (surely the wimpiest addiction possible; real men smoke crack or shoot heroin), and his well-known need for Viagra all testify to a masculinity in need of propping up, in need of reconfir- mation. In Limbaugh’s case, right-wing racist and sexist politics is the conduit for the restoration of his manhood—and for the manhood of other fellow sufferers of aggrieved entitlement. Limbaugh offers a prescription for political Viagra, designed to get that blood flowing, reenergize a flagging sense of white American manhood.

But if the elite-born Limbaugh plays in the populist sandbox, Mike Savage is both the real deal and even more a poseur. At least he’s a working-class guy—born Michael Alan Weiner, the son of Rus- sian Jewish immigrants who settled in the Bronx during World War II. But then, why would such a nice Jewish boy, whose own mother and

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father were the beneficiaries of the American Dream of immigration, now want to slam the door on the faces of everyone else?

Limbaugh is positively tame compared to Savage, who seems to believe that the higher the decibels of his denunciations, the more persuasive they will be. And like Limbaugh, he’s interested in revers- ing the very multicultural trends that he represents. Like Limbaugh, he’s immensely popular, and like Limbaugh, he engages in a conspir- atorial Us-Them framing, in which “we” are the enlightened few and “they” are the dupes of the government-inspired hijacking of freedom. He calls illegal immigrants and their allies “brown supremacists” and ac- cuses activists for sexual equality of “raping” children through media campaigns for tolerance.

But ultimately, it all has to do with masculinity. Savage alternates between Limbaugh’s conspiratorial outrage—can you believe what they are doing to us?—and chastising his audience for allowing this all to happen under their very noses. The campaign for so-called civil rights is a “con,” and affirmative action stole his “birthright.” What you have now, he claims, is “the wholesale replacement of competent white men.” And what has been our reaction? We’ve become a “sissi- fied nation,” a “sheocracy.” Part of “the de-balling of America,” “true red-blooded American types have been thrown out of the—out of the government.”15

Part of this is women’s fault, of course—feminist women who have become more masculine. Here’s what he said on his show: “Particu- larly today, the women are not, you know, what they were thirty years ago. The women have become more like guys, thanks to the hags in the women’s movement, and the white race is dying. That’s why they won’t reproduce, because the women want to be men. They want to behave like men, they want to act like men, they’ve been encouraged to think like men, act like men, be like men. Consequently, they don’t want to be women, and they don’t want to be mothers.”16

Were you to ask Limbaugh and Savage, and the others who as- pire to their seats of influence, they’d likely tell you that they aren’t really antiwomen but antifeminist, and specifically promale, more about legitimizing the anger of white men. Feminism comes under attack—after all, it was Limbaugh who popularized the term feminazi— phantasmagorically linking campaigns for wage equality, or safety

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from battery and rape, to the organized, methodical genocide in the Third Reich.

Now, why has this resonated? Because the defensiveness of white men is so narcissistic that any criticism of masculinity and male en- titlement is seen as the effort to leverage the apparatus of the state in the service of the destruction of an entire biological sex. But these guys aren’t really interested in women. They’re interested in promoting the interests of white men.

In a particularly revealing rant, Savage links racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant nativism in his pitch to fellow angry white men:

Many of you have been hoodwinked into believing that we are a multicultural nation, which we are not. We’re a nation of many races and many cultures, that is true, it has been true from the beginning, but in the past people would come over and become Americans. Now they come over, and they want you to become them. . . . We’re going to have a revolution in this country if this keeps up. These people are pushing the wrong people around. . . . If they keep pushing us around and if we keep having these schmucks running for office, catering to the multicultural people who are destroying the culture in this country, guaranteed the people, the white male in particular . . . the one without connections, the one without money, has nothing to lose, and you haven’t seen him yet. You haven’t seen him explode in this country. And he’s still the majority, by the way, in case you don’t know it. He is still the majority, and no one speaks for him, everyone craps on him . . . and he has no voice whatsoever. . . . And you’re going to find out that if you keep pushing this country around, you’ll find out that there’s an ugly side to the white male.17

Outrage media is not, however, a one-way street. The audience is an active participant; together with the host, they produce the rage of the day and direct it toward the issues on which the free-floating rage will land. Each day offers no shortage of the horrors of what “they” are doing to “us”—“they” being government bureaucrats in thrall to the feminist cabal, implementing the gay agenda, illegals, and minori- ties guided by sinister Marxian forces. (They often come perilously close to denouncing their Zionist puppeteers of the International

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Jewish Conspiracy. Indeed, were it not for the convenience of stok- ing anti-Muslim sentiment since 9/11, we’d hear quite a bit more anti- Semitism from some of these hosts. Generally, the right wing loves Israel, but hates Jews.)

Angry White Male Radio is the New England town meeting of the twenty-first century. The participatory experience, with its steady stream of callers, ups the emotional ante. Sure, there’s plenty of de- fensive anger to go around. But the tone expresses a sense of aggrieved entitlement. Rush’s followers call themselves “dittoheads,” echoing ev- ery sentiment. “What Rush does on his shows is take frustration and rage and rearticulate and confirm them as ideology,” writes Sherri Paris, after listening nonstop for several weeks. “Limbaugh’s skill lies in weaving political alienation and anger into the illusion of common political ground.” He’s creating a community out of people’s individ- ual frustrations, giving them a sense of “we-ness.”18

“I love it,” says Jay, a twenty-six-year-old Nebraskan with obvi- ous self-consciousness. Jay was one of several dittoheads I talked with around the country. Actually, he drove the taxi from the univer- sity where I’d been lecturing to the airport. Rush was on in the cab. “I mean, all day long, all I get is multicultural this and diversity that. I love it because I can let off steam at how stupid the whole thing is. I can’t stop it—there’s no way. But I get all these other guys who remind me that it’s not right, it’s not fair, and the system’s out of control. And I’m the one getting screwed!”

Jay was among the more articulate when it came to discussing sub- stantive issues like affirmative action or race and gender preferences in admissions. Most of the guys I spoke with whose analysis came from Limbaugh and Fox News merely mouthed platitudes they took directly from the shows, without so much as actually thinking if they applied to their situations. I cannot count the number of times I heard lines like “It’s not the government’s money, it’s the people’s money” in re- sponse to tax policy.

You’d think that after nearly a half century of sustained critique of racial and gender bias in the media, of the most convincing em- pirical social and behavioral science research imaginable, of civil rights, women’s, and gay and lesbian movements, white guys would have finally understood how bias works and would have accommo- dated themselves to a new, more egalitarian, more democratic, and

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more representative media. Or at least you’d think they’d be less vocal in their resistance. But as far as they’re concerned, the world hasn’t merely changed—it’s been upended, turned upside down into its per- verse mirror image. “It’s completely crazy,” says Matt. “The inmates are running the asylum. They’re completely in power, and they get any- thing they want. And us regular, normal white guys—we’re like noth- ing. We don’t count for shit anymore.”

Outrage media offers a case of what Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation.” Although not ex- actly the catchiest of phrase makers, Marcuse was on to something that, as a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, he found so scary: how the ability to sound off angrily, to express all your pent-up rage (the “desublima- tion” part), could actually serve the interests of those in power. Being able to rebel in these impotent ways actually enables the system to continue (hence, the “repressive” part). You think you’re rebelling by listening to jazz, or punk rock, or even angry rap music, having a lot of sex, drinking and screaming your heads off about how the system is oppressing you. You find common cause with others who are doing the same thing: instant community. And, after desublimating, you go back to work, a docile, sated drone, willing to conform to what the “system” asks of you because the system also lets you blow off steam. Bread and circuses. Participatory entertainment. (Instead of worrying, for example, that an excessive diet of violent video games would make a young guy more likely to commit an act of violence, the Frankfurt School would have been more worried that he’d be more docile, that he’d never rebel socially, collectively, because he got all that rebellion out of his system on a machine created by one of the world’s largest corporations.)

Yet, ironically, the very medium that provides the false sense of community of Limbaugh’s dittoheads can also be, simultaneously, iso- lating. “People tend to be less angry when they have to interact with each other,” writes journalist and media commentator Joe Klein; they become afflicted with “Information Age disorder”—the “product of our tendency to stew alone, staring into computer screens at work, blobbing in front of the television at home.” Perhaps we’re not bowl- ing alone, but fuming alone. Together.19

So American white men, still among the most privileged group of people on the face of the earth—if you discount hereditary aristocracies

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and sheikdoms—feel that they are the put-upon victims of a society that grows more equal every day. It’s hard if you’ve been used to 100 percent of all the positions of power and privilege in the world to wake up one morning and find people like you in only 80 percent of those positions. Equality sucks if you’ve grown so accustomed to inequality that it feels normal.

Listen to the words of one leader, defending the rights of those disempowered white men: “Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding Caucasian middle class, Protestant or even worse evangelical Chris- tian, Midwest or Southern or even worse rural, apparently straight or even worse admittedly [heterosexual], gun-owning or even worse NRA card-carrying average working stiff, or even worst of all, male working stiff. Because not only don’t you count, you’re a downright obstacle to social progress.”20 That leader was, incidentally, Charlton Heston, act- ing less like Moses and more like an angry Pharaoh, feeling powerless as he watches his slaves disappear.

These are not the voices of power but the voices of entitlement to power. The positions of authority, of power, have been stolen from them—handed over to undeserving “others” by a government bureau- cracy that has utterly abandoned them. If listening to Guy Radio and watching Guy TV is about blowing off steam, this is what that steam smells like.

Far from fomenting a reactionary revolution, Limbaugh and his ilk are the Peter Finches of the twenty-first century, screaming about how they are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore—which is the very thing that enables them to take far more of it.

A GLANCE BACK: A BRIEF HISTORY OF AMERICAN ANGRY WHITE MEN

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Americans have been treated to a chorus of complainers that rail against the “masculinization” of women and the “feminization” of men.21 A century ago, pundits across America bemoaned what they saw as a crisis of masculinity. They bemoaned the loss of the hardy manly virtues that had settled the country, harnessed its natural resources toward amazing industrial breakthroughs, “tamed” a restive native population, and fended off ex-

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ternal threats. Men were becoming soft, effeminate. Ironically, it was the somewhat effete novelist Henry James who captured this sentiment most eloquently in the character of Basil Ransome, the dashing south- ern gentleman in The Bostonians (1885):

The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering, cant- ing age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is . . . that is what I want to preserve, or, rather, recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt!22

Where these critics disagreed was over the source of this emasculation—and, therefore, of course, what solutions might be helpful to restore American men’s manly virtues. Most agreed that modern urban civilization had a feminizing effect: instead of work- ing in the fields, or in factories, or as artisanal craft workers, American men now sat in stuffy offices, in white-collared shirts, pushing paper around desks. Instead of being apprenticed to older, seasoned male workers, young boys were now taught by female teachers, by female Sunday-school teachers, and, most of all, by their mothers, as fathers were away all day at work. (The separation of work and home may have meant that women were “imprisoned” in the home, as Betty Frie- dan would later argue, but it also meant that men were exiled from it, away all day, and returning to an increasingly feminized Victorian living space.) Even religion had become “feminized,” as Protestant ministers spoke of a beatific and compassionate Christ, who loved his enemies and turned the other cheek.

Not only were women demanding entry into the public sphere— going to work, joining unions, demanding the right to vote and go to college—but native-born white men were facing increasing competi- tion from freed slaves migrating to northern industrial cities and waves of immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe, moving into tenement slums and creating a vast pool of cheap labor.

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Everywhere men looked, the playing field had grown increasingly competitive and uncertain. Just as Horatio Alger was celebrating the “luck and pluck” that would enable young men of modest means to make their way to the top, native-born American white men were be- coming far less concerned with how to make it to the top and far more anxious about sinking to the bottom. Restoring or retrieving a lost he- roic manhood was less about the thrill of victory, as television announc- ers might have said, had there been ABC’s Wide World of Sports in 1900, and far more about forestalling or preventing the agony of defeat.

Actually, there was the equivalent of Jim McKay, host of that iconic TV show. Or, rather, a lot of equivalents. It was at the turn of the last century that all the modern sports we know and love today—hockey, football, baseball, basketball—were organized into leagues and pre- scribed, especially, for schoolboys to promote a healthy, hardy man- liness. Following on the heels of the British elite private schools and the success of Tom Brown’s School Days, American reformers were quick to point out the restorative qualities of athletic prowess and the tonic virtues of the outdoors. Baseball, for example, was trumpeted by Theo- dore Roosevelt, himself the epitome of manly triumph over aristocratic weakness, as a “true sport for a manly race.” “All boys love baseball,” wrote the western novelist Zane Grey in 1909. “If they don’t, they’re not real boys.”23

Getting in shape was a manly preoccupation at the turn of the last century, as urban men fretted about the loss of manly vigor. In study- ing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I discerned three patterns of response to this mounting crisis, three avenues in which American men were counseled to restore the manhood that seemed so threatened.

First, they sought self-control. Believing that American men had grown soft and indolent, they sought to demonstrate greater amounts of self-control. Believing that the body was an instrument of their will, American men at the turn of the twentieth century bulked up, pumped up, and worked out as never before. As famed psychologist G. Stan- ley Hall put it, “You can’t have a firm will without firm muscles.”24 Gyms sprouted up all over the country, especially in large cities where middle-class white-collar office workers followed athletic regi- mens offered by scions of “physical culture” (like Bernarr Macfadden) and admired the physique of bodybuilders like Eugen Sandow. By the

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1920s, they’d begun to follow a young, scrawny, Italian American im- migrant who’d been unsuccessful at picking up a girl at the beach at Coney Island, Brooklyn. Ashamed of his physique—he called himself a “97 Pound runt . . . skinny, pale, nervous and weak”—young Angelo Siciliano developed a muscle-building regime that became the most successful body-transforming regimen in US history. Along the way, Si- ciliano changed more than his physique, becoming the “world’s most perfect man.” He also changed his name, to Charles Atlas.

The biceps weren’t the only muscles over which American men felt they needed to exert greater control. They were equally concerned that they’d grown soft and weak because of their sexual profligacy. Mas- turbation not only threatened a man’s healthy development, but was also a moral threat to the nation. Reformers utilized what one histo- rian labeled the language of a “spermatic economy” to discourage it. Sperm were a resource, not to be squandered or “spent,” but rather “saved” and “invested” in the future. Other health reformers like Syl- vester Graham, C. W. Post, and J. H. Kellogg experimented with differ- ent whole grains and flours in their crackers and cereals to help keep men regular and thus prevent the blockages that pollute the body, and thus the mind, and lead to solitary vices. It’s one thing to prescribe graham crackers or Post Toasties, or even Corn Flakes, and quite an- other to prescribe suturing the foreskin closed without anesthesia as a way for parents to ensure that their sons didn’t masturbate. But that is what Kellogg did in his efforts to treat all sorts of male malaise in his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan (Kellogg’s own hysteria was held up to hilarious ridicule by novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle in The Road to Wellville).

These efforts represented only one of the three major patterns of solutions to the “crisis” of masculinity that were offered to American men at the turn of the last century. A second strategy was “escape.” Boys needed to escape the feminizing clutches of women; they had to run away, ship out on the Pequod, join Henry Fleming in the army, or otherwise be “lighting out for the territory,” in the immortal last words of Huckleberry Finn, “because Aunt Sally she’s gonna adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Modern society had turned “robust, hardy self-reliant boyhood into a lot of flat-chested cigarette smokers with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality,” according to Ernest Thompson Seton, who founded the Boy Scouts of America in 1910 to

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turn the tide of feminization. Other clubs and organizations followed, including the Boone and Crockett Club, and later the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) itself, proclaiming itself a “man factory,” providing a homosocial haven in an increasingly coeducational world.

Just as their sons needed to be rescued from the feminizing clutches of mothers and teachers, American men, too, set off to retrieve their deep manhood. And while the boys were busy with Boy Scouts and the Boone and Crockett Club, college guys were joining Greek-letter fraternities and rowing and boxing. Middle-aged men were joining fra- ternal lodges (nearly one in four American men belonged to a lodge in 1900) or heading off on safaris and treks and military-inspired ad- ventures in search of the ever-receding frontier, or creating the frontier itself at newly invented “dude ranches” where urban gentlemen could get their hands dirty learning to rope and ride and play cowboy. “The wilderness will take hold on you,” wrote western naturalist George Ev- ans. “It will give you good red blood; it will turn you from a weakling into a man.” Or they could always read westerns, like The Virginian (1902), by Owen Wister, the story of an urban dude who encounters a real man of the West and devotes his life to recounting his exploits (written by a Harvard-educated upper-class dandy who, himself, was a convert to the vigorous virtue of the West).25

Or they were attending men-only religious revivals with itiner- ant preacher Billy Sunday (a former Chicago Cubs baseball player– turned-evangelist) whose “Muscular Christianity” was a riposte to the “dainty, sissified, lily-livered piety” of mainstream Protestantism. Je- sus, Sunday thundered, was a scrapper, who kicked the money chang- ers out of the Temple; Christianity was “hard muscled, pick-axed religion, a religion from the gut, tough and resilient.”26

Finally, and most germane to our purposes here, men saw “exclu- sion” as a strategy to protect their ability to sustain themselves as men. If the playing field had now grown more crowded, and the cries for lev- eling it had grown more insistent, then one strategy was to kick them out. One can read American nativism, racism, anti-immigrant senti- ment, and, of course, anti-feminism through this lens; movements to restrict immigration, to keep women out of college or the labor market, to maintain racial segregation were all efforts by white men to make the playing field smaller and therefore minimize the com-

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petition and maintain the opportunities that white men had earlier enjoyed. Then, as now, social Darwinism and the “natural” hierarchies of race and nation were useful fictions on which to base this exclusion. “How long before the manly warlike people of Ohio of fair hair and blue eyes,” asked Ohio congressman Samuel Sullivan Cox, “would be- come, in spite of Bibles and morals, degenerate under the wholesale emancipation and immigration [of black slaves]?”27

Racists, nativists, and anti-Semites all made common cause: pro- tecting the pure white race from degeneracy required keeping “them” out, away from “our” women, and from competing for “our” jobs. Anti- immigrant sentiment from the Know-Nothings of the 1840s to the present day has seen border closings as a win-win: we don’t have to deal with “their” ways and accommodate ourselves to their needs for health care or education in their own languages, and we can eliminate the additional competition for jobs.

Interestingly, the grounds for exclusion were often gendered—that is, the “other” was simply not appropriately masculine. In what I have come to call the “Goldilocks Dilemma,” the masculinity of the other was like the porridge—either “too hot” or “too cold,” but never “just right.” They were either “hypermasculine” (violent, out-of-control, rapacious animals) or “hypomasculine” (weak, effeminate, irrespon- sible, and dependent). We, by contrast, had just the right mixture of hardy self-reliance and community spirit: we had tamed our animal nature into civilized gentlemen, but not so much that we lost sight of our rugged side.

Jews were imagined as weak, effete, and bookish nerds, who were also so avariciously greedy that they controlled the economy of the entire world. Blacks were lazy, irresponsible, dependent, and also ra- pacious predatory sexual animals. Feminist women, for that matter, were more masculine than their men. Chinese men were slight, frail, and effeminate, were nonviolent, and wore women’s clothing, and, at the same time, they were part of a yellow peril that was maniacally sweeping over California ports. One critic wanted it both ways; the Chinese were, he wrote, “a barbarous race, devoid of energy.” This con- stant jumping between hyper- and hypomasculine, often in the same utterances, would be echoed by today’s white supremacists, as we will see later in this book.28

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Of course, these strategies for manly restoration are broad, and not mutually exclusive. For example, many of the fraternal orders were not only for men only, but also racially exclusionary. The Loyal Order of the Moose, Modern Woodmen, and the Order of the United Amer- ican Mechanics were all white by charter; the latter could be relied on as a racist goon squad. And, of course, the resurgence of the fraternal order of the Ku Klux Klan in the first decades of the twentieth century, in border regions like southern Indiana, was dedicated to expunging “aliens” as well as resisting racial equality.

Several best sellers at the turn of the last century sounded an alarm that has echoed across the century into the voice of today’s angry white men. Then, Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color (1920), Homer Lea’s The Day of the Saxon (1912), and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) prefigured contemporary warnings about the dangers of immigration, miscegenation, and interracial sex. At the turn of the last century, it bordered on hysteria. “The whole white race is exposed to the possibility of social sterilization and final replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races,” wrote Stoddard; that would be “an unspeakable catastrophe.” “The white man is being rap- idly bred out by negroes,” echoed Grant, resulting in an “ever thinning veneer of white culture.” Grant was convinced that “the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro,” and “the cross between a Euro- pean and a Jew is a Jew.” Race mixing was race destroying. (This last is a revealing insight into the fears of angry white men: that the sexuality of the other is imagined as both more predatory and rapacious, but also that the other is far more sexually capable, whether in stereotypes about black men’s penis size, hot-blooded Italian ardor, Filipino alac- rity, or Latino suaveness. Of course, such projections are far less about the feared and far more about the anxieties and insecurities of the fear- ful and their insecurities about their ability to satisfy increasingly sexu- ally entitled women.)29

Women’s and men’s missions were clear. Women had to have babies—white babies—and a lot of them to avoid “race suicide” and ensure the perpetuation of the purity of the race. Men had to stand tall and determined against the rising tide of color, providing steadfast resistance to the promise of the Statue of Liberty. If the promise of America would be a welcome mat to new opportunities for the world’s “huddled masses,” angry white men would make sure they felt utterly

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unwelcome. There was no way they would let the welcome mat to others turn them, the Americans who were entitled to be here, into a doormat. It’s a fine line, and they would not let it be crossed.

At the turn of the last century, that’s how it sounded, how racism and nativism blended together in fears of loss and downward mobility and rage at a government that would so casually erode the inalienable rights of native-born white folk. And that’s pretty much how it sounds today, along the fences that anti-immigrant groups patrol to make sure “they” stay out.

BORDER PATROLS

Old habits die hard. At the turn of the twentieth century, those angry white men sought to seal the borders and make sure that aliens did not overrun the country. Today, their grievances are no less palpable. Perhaps these are the great-grandsons of the Lothrop Stoddards and Madison Grants of the 1920s—still protecting their women from those bestial hordes, still furious at a government too enthralled with the ideals of multiculturalism, and beholden to corporations who like the wage suppression that invariably accompanies immigration, and terrified that the country they knew, “their” country, was becoming un- recognizable. They don’t ride horses along those borders very much; now it’s mostly pickup trucks with gun racks and high-beam lights. But their anger echoes their forebears, and their sense that “their” country is being taken away from them is no less tangible.

The sense of aggrieved entitlement is evident in the language of these contemporary nativists. It’s not “immigration” but an “in- vasion” of “illegals” who are “alien” and unsuited for our way of life. “An invasion is spreading across America like wildfire, bring- ing gangs, drugs, and an alien culture into the very heartland of America” is how a video from the Voice of Citizens Together put it in 1999. Anti-immigration activists use the same language as Na- zis or Hutus and others who promote genocide. They are a “cancer” threatening the healthy body from within, a foreign invading army, threatening from outside—often both. Immigrants are a “hostile force on our border” and a “cultural cancer . . . eating at the very heart of our nation.”30

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They come because they want what we have—which has always been one of the reasons for immigration to the United States, after all, the promise of a better life, of starting over in the land of the do over. The founding fathers remembered that America had been founded by illegal immigrants who had been hounded out of their own country for being too religiously rigid; they created an open society where, by the turn of the twentieth century, the world’s “huddled masses, yearn- ing to breathe free,” came by the boatloads. Today’s nativists have for- gotten their own origins in another country and want to deny to others what they, themselves, found.

The mobilization to repel this invasion of illegals is justified by gender. “Their” women are hypersexual, reproductive machines, crank- ing out babies with utter disregard for propriety. They’re unwashed, unclean, and unpleasant. Their men are sexually irresponsible, equally unwashed, and predatory. Listen to Joe Arpaio, America’s nativist in chief, the racist, self-proclaimed “America’s toughest sheriff,” sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona: “All these people that come over, they could come with disease. There’s no control, no health checks or any- thing. They check fruits and vegetables, how come they don’t check people? No one talks about that! They’re all dirty. I sent out 200 in- mates into the desert, they picked up 18 tons of garbage that they bring in—the baby diapers and all that. Where’s everybody who wants to preserve the desert?”31

Arpaio is hardly an environmentalist, seeking to preserve the des- ert. He’s far more interested in preserving white native-born entitle- ment to the desert. Perhaps the most visible public figure seeking to close the border to Mexican immigration, he seems to revel in accusa- tions of racism (he is said to have found it “an honor” to be compared to the KKK, since “it means we’re doing something”). He’s been under federal indictment for racial profiling (which he admits), for setting up some of the most miserable jail conditions in America, including a tent city for overflow inmates (which he calls a “concentration camp”), feeding inmates surplus food, limiting meals to twice a day, and forc- ing inmates to wear pink underwear as a sign of their humiliation.

But Arpaio is also a figurehead in the anti-immigration movement and one of the more willing to see the battle as between “real men” and poseurs. While Mexican men are lazy, dependent on welfare, dirty, and clearly unable to maintain the necessary self-control to be real

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Americans, they’re also bloodthirsty soldiers in a war of reconquest. “My parents did not regard any inch of American soil as somehow be- longing to Italy, so their arrival here never constituted a ‘reconquest’ of that land. A growing movement among not only Mexican nation- als, but also some Mexican-Americans contends that the United States stole the territory that is now California, Arizona and Texas, for a start, and that massive immigration over the border will speed and guaran- tee the reconquista of these lands, returning them to Mexico.”32

Arpaio is hardly alone. Take Harley Brown, a perennial candidate for office in Idaho. (He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2010.) In his campaign for the state’s sole congressional seat, Brown, who bills himself as “A Real Man for Congress,” outlined his policy positions:

THE MIDDLE EAST: “Nuke Their Ass, Take Their Gas” GUN CONTROL: “Hitting Your Target” GAYS IN THE MILITARY: “Keep the Queens Out of the Marines” IMMIGRATION POLICY: “Adios, Amigos”

Sure, Brown is a life-size cartoon, a caricature of the crazed armchair warrior, a Duke Nukem who has never been to actual war. But Brown expresses the epigrammatic anger of a wide band of American men who are joining the Tea Parties, rural militias, Minutemen, and Patriot groups to patrol our borders. “The Zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African,” commented one Tea Party placard.

As with Limbaugh’s legions, it was difficult to get any of the Tea Party protesters I met at any of the sparsely attended rallies I ob- served to say anything of more substance than the aphorisms that were already on their placards. I’d ask what I thought was an inno- cent question, and I usually got puzzled looks, as though I might have been speaking a different language. For example, at one rally, I asked a nicely dressed older guy named Ralph, a former sales rep perhaps in his late sixties, who was wearing khakis, a plaid shirt, and a three-cornered hat, what about the original Boston Tea Party had proved so inspiring to him. “They revolted against taxation from an illegitimate government,” he said flatly, as if he were reciting a cate- chism. “They were revolting against a government takeover.” When I asked what he meant, he said—as did every single Tea Partier with whom I spoke—that Obamacare was socialized medicine that would

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raise taxes on the middle class. “It’s part of the plan. They want to take over everything. But America was founded on the idea that the govern- ment couldn’t tell you what to do. We need to get back to that.”

Such contentless statements are what often passes for political dis- course in America in 2013. When I tried, foolishly, as it turned out, to ask exactly how universal health care would raise taxes, or raise the cost of care, or how government spending on such things as educa- tion, highways, or the GI Bill augured a government takeover, or how government regulations to rein in corporate greed somehow hurt mid- dle-class Americans—well, I got initially puzzled looks, followed pretty quickly by more hostile glares and a simple shrug as they walked off. Slogans are the Tea Party’s version of political theory; oft-repeated falsehoods gradually become self-evident truths.

I heard the same thing when I talked with anti-immigrant groups. These groups see illegal immigration as an “alien invasion,” as the Minutemen do. And most see the repulsion of this invading horde as akin to the colonials kicking out the British colonists in 1776. (It’s one of the great ironies of the current nativist movement that it cloaks itself in the language of the founding fathers, but its politics are far more reminiscent of those of King George III. Well, except for that fact that he taxed the colonials to further his own ambition.) The Minutemen, another private paramilitary band of white middle- and working-class guys in border states who patrol the borders, doing the job that they believe our own immigration police fail to do, are most explicit in call- ing for a second American Revolution against a tyrannical King Barack. “Do the citizens of the United States view the Federal Government as an oppressive force occupying Washington? There came a point in American history—April 19, 1775—that the colonists could no longer tolerate oppression of the occupying forces that consumed their rights and led to the revolution. It was a moment in history, which not only shocked the Kingdom of Great Britain, but also set off a cascade effect that is still felt today.”33

And these sentiments are not limited only to the southwestern border states. I talked to people who were demonstrating against the building of an interfaith Islamic community center in Lower Manhat- tan, who seemed to think that establishing a place for dialogue and day care was establishing a beachhead on Normandy Beach in prepa- ration for the full-on assault on the capital of the world economy.

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(These are the same people who complain that the “legitimate” Mus- lim world did not immediately condemn the terrorist attacks of 9/11. When a group actually does want to build a bridge, they’re accused of refusing to design it properly.)

One of the most horrific cases happened, in fact, right around the corner from my campus on Long Island. Long Island is the quintessen- tial American suburb—one of the first suburbs in the nation. Its de- mographic profile—largely white and middle class, with a significant influx of immigrants and minorities in recent decades—makes it a cauldron in which anti-immigrant sentiment bubbles up to unify dis- parate levels of discontent. Here, in those split-level houses atop those leafy front lawns, breathes the same rage that drives pickup trucks along the Texas-Mexico border, patrolling illegal immigrants and at- tacking their families.

Farmingville is a “typical” middle-class Long Island suburb. But in 2004 it erupted when two Mexican day laborers were attacked and nearly murdered by a gang of white male suburbanites. Not far away, in 2008 an Ecuadoran immigrant named Marcelo Lucero was attacked by seven white teenagers and stabbed to death simply because of his ethnicity. Lucero had been walking with a friend near the Long Island Rail Road station around midnight in November 2008 when they were confronted by the white teenagers who had gone out specifically look- ing for a Hispanic to attack. “Let’s go beat up some Mexican guys,” they had said. They found one, and they killed him. Four of the teen- age boys pleaded guilty to the hate crime and testified against the other three.

Although we northerners are used to feeling horror, revulsion, and more than a little contempt for the white South when we hear about racist lynchings in the Jim Crow South, we don’t really know how to absorb that such things are happening all over our country. The siege mentality, the defense against invasion—these are themes that echo across all classes and in every region.

This notion that America is under siege contains several layers of anxiety among white American men. The fear that “they” are taking over is an insult to “our” manhood—for they will take our jobs, our homes, and our women if we are not vigilant. The fear that they are taking what is rightfully ours—a government that serves our needs to be left alone, as opposed to their need to have everything handed to them

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on a silver platter. The fear that we are being emasculated—by these less than fully manly hordes and by a feckless government utterly in their thrall.

In a sense, the government that is imagined by Angry White Men embodies the same hyper- and hypomasculine qualities that the “other” embodies. On the one hand, the government is weak, having been invaded by all these special interests (like women or unions or minorities or gays and lesbians) and unable to resist being taken over by them. The “others” are the real men, more masculine than the gov- ernment, which has become weak, a “nanny state,” feminized.

On the other hand, the government is voracious, taxing and reg- ulating, greedy beyond measure. Hypermasculine, it subdues the raw, noble masculinity of the heroic American white man and subordinates it to the ignoble, undeserving, unmanly hordes clamoring for what we have. This is a government that doesn’t “permit” others to learn in their native language and thus become integrated; it’s a government that will pretty soon require that everyone speak Spanish. Thus, “En- glish only” is not arrogant and entitled but protectionist, just holding on to what we have.

Angry White Men are thus stuck—between a voracious state and the hypermasculine invading army, or between a feminized nanny state and these dependent, weak, and irresponsible masses. Or perhaps it’s more of a mix and match: a hypermasculine alien force capturing the weakened state, or a greedy nanny state taking from us, from real men, and giving to those whining, victim-mongering wimps. The per- mutations are far less important than the result of the equation: we, we once-happy few, we American men, who built this country with our own hands, are now having it wrenched from us and given to these undeserving others. Right under our noses.

The thread that ties together these disparate and often contradic- tory strands is gender—masculinity. These tropes float, collide, contra- dict, but they fit together in an ever-shifting cosmology because they are bound together by codes of gender. “They” emasculate “us”—both by being more primally masculine than we are (and thus in need of control) and, simultaneously, by being dependent and weak (and thus needing the state to control “us” from succeeding). Only from the posi- tion of aggrieved entitlement can these various images be reconciled— irrationally, but viscerally.

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ANGRY WHITE MEN AT THE MOVIES

Perhaps media will give us some relief. What if some white guys, moved to righteous anger, can single-handedly halt an alien invasion, a horde of zombies, a crowd of vampires, or a brilliantly coordinated band of terrorists? What if I play some first-person-shooter video game and can wipe out the entire terrorist conspiracy with only my biceps, an assault weapon that never runs out of ammunition, and the ability to jump onto roofs from a standing position three stories below? After all, it’s a psychological axiom that what we lose in reality, we re-create in fantasy. If we feel ourselves losing, how will we get back what is rightfully ours to begin with?

American men have always flocked to action movies where the he- roes rise victorious from the ashes, bloodied and battered, but always unbowed. Earlier films that attracted angry white male resentment saw heroic men constrained by institutional ennui or bureaucratic red tape—like GI Joe, or Dirty Harry. Sylvester Stallone in Rambo played a guy who single-handedly returned to Vietnam to win the war that the bureaucrats lost, a triumph of will over red tape and institutional corruption. Movies like the Die Hard and Rush Hour series have proved extremely versatile, as renegade cops prove themselves heroes, despite the doubting skeptics. (No other country produces guy flicks with such consistent themes.)

Of course, there are counterexamples of cross-racial pairings, like the black-white buddies in the Lethal Weapon series, or Rush Hour (black and Asian), or films of women who are as heroic as men, like Demi Moore in GI Jane. And they’ve become such a genre that they have spawned a subgenre of near-satiric films, in which the aging stars participate in their own self-parody, like The Other Guys or Red or The Expendables.

American films are among the most gendered in the world: men tend to like action movies in which, as one producer explained to me, they “blow shit up” (this was offered as a technical Hollywood phrase), and women tend to like chick flicks in which grown-up women try to navigate the thorny world of grown-up relationships despite the fact that most of the men in their lives are big babies.

Several films go further and have captured the zeitgeist of Angry White Men. A film like Office Space or Horrible Bosses, for example,

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provides a few comedic moments in its effort to show how white men who are trying to do the right thing and work hard to make a living are continually thwarted by arbitrary and cruelly sadistic bosses. For younger men, Fight Club has become the touchstone cinematic text of the guys in their mid- to late twenties that I interviewed for Guyland. The film, like the novel on which it’s based, is a sustained assault on middle-class male existence, a critique of the life that men have to live these days. They live in boxes, work in boxes, drive to work in boxes, are utterly cushioned and protected and safe and driven mad by their things. As Chuck Palahniuk writes in the novel, “You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

Modern men have no identity, no soul. They’re lost, confused, aimless, adrift. In one of the film’s most memorable soliloquies, Tyler Durden says, “You are not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.” (I will return to this film in Chapter 6 when I discuss how middle-class white guys are cop- ing with changing working conditions.)

No movie encapsulates this decline of the white-collar guy into the blind-rage angry white male politics of despair better than Falling Down (1993). The film, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Mi- chael Douglas, is an allegory of the besieged middle-class white man. Having bought into the American Dream, even after his layoff from an aerospace company in the Los Angeles area, William Foster, whose vanity license plate reads “D-Fens,” becomes progressively unhinged as the traditional props of privileged white masculinity are shed. He’s blindsided by his sudden unemployment and divorce—his wife wants greater independence also—and he’s torn apart by his inability to get to his daughter’s birthday party. (His wife has taken out a restraining order against him, and he is legally barred from seeing her.)

Determined to get to the party regardless, Foster’s journey leads to an encounter with pretty much every single “other” that is perceived as threatening to white males in America today: young Latino men (here

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gangbangers); upwardly mobile, hardworking Asian immigrants (who own a deli); a beautiful policewoman—all of whom he blames for his inability to cling to both economic security and mental stability. He even scares a few fat-cat rich white guys on a golf course. In one scene, Foster explains a sort of moral economy to a Korean grocer: he is will- ing to pay for what he wants—but only at 1965 prices, the year that the immigration laws changed.

At one point, Foster enters an army surplus store. By now, he’s beaten up Latino gang members and the Korean grocer and is wanted by the police. The store owner perceives him as a fellow white suprem- acist and shows him some World War II memorabilia, including some empty gas canisters used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. This en- rages Foster. He assaults the store owner, shouting, “You’re not like me! I’m just a man who’s trying to get home! You’re insane!” Angry white men are not the lunatic fringe, Foster is saying, just guys trying to make their way home.

Of course, he has no home—no wife, no family, because he has already become somewhat unhinged. He’s spiraling downward, and his impotent rampage leads inevitably to his death: traditional mas- culinity cannot be resurrected, and even the old pillars of white male entitlement—racism, sexism, nativism—cannot keep the edifice from falling down.

A similar theme is sounded in Gran Torino (2008), Clint East- wood’s ode to the sacrificial heroism of white working-class American men. The movie proceeds toward a similar, and equally inevitable, outcome. If William Foster is blindsided by his decline, Eastwood’s character, Walt Kowalski, eventually accepts it elegiacally; his death is heroic and sacrificial, whereas Foster’s is defiant and uncomprehend- ing. It took fifteen years, but now the angry white man surrenders to his fate.

Kowalski evokes the pre-1960s white working class. A Korean War veteran, widower, and retired blue-collar Ford factory worker in De- troit, he’s embittered and unbowed. All he wants is to be left alone. He fought a war in Asia, and now all he sees are Asians moving into his working-class neighborhood of small, clean homes and well-cut lawns. He’s an equal-opportunity racist—he hates everyone, including “those jabbering gooks” (the Hmong who have moved next door). In one of the film’s most strangely touching scenes, he teaches Thao, his young

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Hmong neighbor, how to navigate acceptable racist put-downs in a barbershop. (It was Thao who had tried, on a dare, to steal Walt’s car, the 1972 Gran Torino of the film’s name, Walt’s vintage prize automo- bile that he had, himself, helped to build.)

The film offers the viewer the same elegiac, sentimental pathos that his antiwestern Unforgiven (1992) offered—a sacrificial coming to terms with the new, multicultural world. Walt, like Moses, can see the promised land, but can’t enter it. He realizes that these “gooks” are decent, hard-working Americans, like him, and in the end he not only sacrifices himself for them, but leaves his prized car to Thao as a part- ing gift—and a parting blow to his saccharine children and spoiled granddaughter.

The extreme Right did not appreciate Walt’s sacrifice. In a review of the film in a white supremacist magazine, Stephen Webster calls it “dishonest,” because it “convincingly portrays the dispossession of white, middle-class America . . . graciously giving way to its non-white future.” At the end, Webster complains, “we are led to believe that al- though immigrants are alien to begin with, they will soon become good Americans—perhaps even better Americans than whites.”34

What they miss, of course, is that Walt embodies the very mas- culine characteristics they claim to admire and the ones that are in such short supply these days among American men: honor, sacrifice, courage. Walt’s self-sacrifice is not because “they” are better Americans than he is, but rather it’s Walt who shows them—and shows us all— that heroic sacrifice is noble in the service of others. Now that he has understood that his stereotypes were wrong, and that the Hmong fam- ily is worthy and virtuous, his actions are the ultimate demonstration of heroic masculinity—a demonstration that the extreme right wing, blinded by racism and nativism, couldn’t possibly see.

ANGRY WHITE WOMEN

Of course, by now most of you are ready to remind me that it’s not just white men who are angry. Quite true. There are plenty of angry people of color—both male and female. And plenty of them feel some amount of aggrieved entitlement—feeling “entitled” to an even playing field in education, employment, or housing, to health care, to the right

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to vote without some arcane new law that throws up obstacles. And, to be fair, many poor and working people, of all races, feel entitled to government support for health care, for food and financial support if they are unemployed, for support to raise their children. That is, they tend to feel entitled while looking “up,” looking at what their country tells them they are entitled to—equality, fairness, an equal chance at making it.

Angry White Men feel entitled while looking “down”—at the hordes of “others” who are threatening to take what they believe is rightfully theirs and are being aided in their illegitimate quest by a government that is in their thrall. It’s ironic that the Angry White Men I am discussing in this book feel they can actually get what they are entitled to only if the government shrinks—nearly to the point of disappearing. By contrast, poor people should—I emphasize the normative—understand that they can get what they want only if the government expands to stimulate growth, promote consumer spend- ing, and provide a social safety net.

This irony is resolved not by some abstract analysis of entitlement, but by a sense of historical context. Angry White Men tend to feel their sense of aggrieved entitlement because of the past; they want to restore what they once had. Their entitlement is not aspirational; it’s nostalgic. Poor people and people of color, by contrast, feel entitled to what they should have, what others in fact do have. Angry white men feel entitled to restrict equality; people of color want to expand it.

And, of course, there are legions of angry white women. Since 2008 they’ve been mobilized through the Tea Party and its standard-bearers, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and Minnesota congresswoman Mi- chele Bachman. Angry white women are decidedly not upper-middle- class, Volvo-station-wagon-driving, Chardonnay-sipping soccer moms. They’re hockey moms, drinking beer and driving Chevy pickups. (Palin famously explained the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick.) Now they’ve declared themselves “mama grizzlies.”

At first glance, the presence of so many women in the Tea Party— surely, one of the angriest white people’s organizations this side of the Klan—would tend to undermine my argument that the current polit- ical rage is such a gendered phenomenon. In addition to their femme fatale standard-bearers, many of the most visible leaders of the move- ment are also women, like Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots,

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Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express, and Tabitha Hale of Freedom- Works.35 Keli Carender, then a thirty-year-old Seattle woman, is often credited with initiating the whole movement, even before CNBC host Rick Santelli famously used the phrase on the air (although his utter- ance was what mobilized the well-publicized and well-financed and male-backed events). According to Slate writer Hanna Rosin, six of the eight board members of Tea Party Patriots, their national coordinators, are women; fifteen of the twenty-five state coordinators are women.36

That’s not, of course, to say that the Tea Party is a “women’s move- ment.” Its rank and file tend to be male: the typical Tea Partier, ac- cording to a New York Times/CBS poll, is white, male, married, and older than forty-five—similar to the typical Limbaugh listener.37 But that is illusive, since nearly half of the Tea Party members are female. And yes, it’s also true that the big money behind all these spontaneous eruptions of populist sentiment is male—in fact, the overwhelming amount of funding comes from the billionaire Koch brothers, fab- ulously wealthy right-wingers who want to foment the illusion of a populist groundswell.

As a result, it’s been easy for some to write off the Tea Party as internally incoherent—epitomized by the “Keep the Government Out of My Medicare” placard—and often contradictory, with members perfectly happy with their benefits, but unwilling to extend them to anyone else. The Tea Party’s been castigated as a fake populism, ma- nipulated from outside by powerful corporate interests (which is, it- self, ironic, since so much of their message is also tending toward the anticorporate). The male money financing the movement also leads many to dismiss the gender of so many of its followers. That’s also a mistake. The Tea Party is a populist movement, a movement from below—it just happens to be directed at those even further below them (minorities, immigrants) and those in the government who are seen as supporting them.

Populism is an emotion, not a political ideology. And its domi- nant emotion is outrage at what is being done to “us,” the little guy. This is true of populisms of the Left, like the American populists of the turn of the last century or the Spanish anarchists or even the Pa- risian mob so lovingly portrayed in Les Miserables, just as it is true of populisms of the Right, like the Italian Fascists or the violent anti-

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immigrant Know-Nothings of mid-nineteenth-century America (and equally lovingly portrayed in Gangs of New York).

So let’s acknowledge that the anger of the Tea Party is real. It’s just not true. That distinction is important for us: Tea Partiers are right to be angry. There is a lot to be angry about. But like all the other groups I de- scribe in the book, they are delivering their mail to the wrong address.

So, what of the women of the Tea Party? What is the particularly gendered source of their anger?

In some cases, these angry white women of the Right are living lives very much like their leaders, who are making a career out of tell- ing women they shouldn’t pursue careers. But in other cases, as his- torian Ruth Rosen points out, the Tea Party acknowledges that these women need to work, that some even choose to work. Excluded from the Republican Party (GOP standing for Grand Old Patriarchs), these working women do not—cannot—embrace the traditional roles that the party might have envisioned for them.38

What Rosen misses, I think, is that they want to. The women of the Tea Party believe themselves entitled to live in a traditional, con- servative household. Their sense of aggrieved entitlement runs par- allel to the men’s: they want their men to be the traditional heads of households, able to support their families. They want to be moms, not “women.”

Look at how they describe themselves: hockey moms and mama grizzlies. “It seems like it’s kind of a mom awakening,” said Sarah Palin in a 2012 speech. It’s “a lot of mama bears worried about their families,” says spokeswoman Rebecca Wales.39

Listen to Debbie, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three, whom I met at a Tea Party rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “I’m afraid. You know, I think I’m angry because I’m so afraid. I’m afraid that we’re bankrupting our children. We’re spending so much, in debt up to our eyeballs, and who’s going to have to pay for that? My kids. Their kids. We’re going to leave them a complete mess—a debt-ridden country where immigrants feed off our taxes like we’re goddamned breast-feeding them. It’s just wrong. It’s all upside down.”

Debbie’s sentiments were echoed by pretty much every one of the Tea Party women with whom I spoke. Again, their statements were largely aphoristic and contentless. But their fears and their anger

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were real. In their view, the government is a misguided sponge, slurp- ing up all the resources from hardworking “real” Americans and then squeezing it out all over the undeserving, unwashed, undocumented. “I can’t believe we’ve gone so wrong,” says Lucy, a forty-one-year-old bookkeeper and mother of two. “The way we tax and spend, we will have nothing left for our children. We’re breaking open their piggy bank, instead of putting money into it!”

Tea Party women speak as mothers, not as women. Their language is more reminiscent of another “women’s” movement at the turn of the last century: the temperance movement. They speak of caregiving, of mothering, of fixing the mess that men have made of things. They are going to clean up the national household—since women, the bear- ers of morality and sobriety, are better at cleaning up the messes in their own homes.

Feminist in practice, antifeminist in theory, conservative feminism hopes to secure the economy so that women can return to their fam- ilies and their homes and leave the labor force. If liberal feminists are housewives who want to be working, these conservative feminists are working women who want to be housewives.40

Of course, there are class differences: when those liberal feminists are eager to enter the labor force, they’re thinking not of being cashiers or secretaries or waitresses, but of being accountants and lawyers. Even in the labor force, Tea Party women think as women, not as workers. When they campaign against higher taxes or government interven- tion, it’s less about the rights of entrepreneurs to keep their profits and more about balancing household accounts, shrinking family budgets, unsustainable spending. They’re concerned about the economy this generation is leaving for its children. As one sign at a Tea Party rally put it, “My Kid Isn’t Your ATM.”41

That seems to be the particular genius of the Tea Party. Alongside traditionally libertarian slogans about smaller government and lower taxes—words like autonomy, individual, and freedom—the Tea Party has added words like family, community, children, and mother. The Tea Party mobilizes angry white women alongside angry white men, wannabe stay-at-home moms alongside wannabe domestic patriarchs, look- ing back to a long-gone era in which white men went to work, sup- ported their wives and families, and all the government programs that enabled and supported that—the roads, the bridges, the schools, the

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training sites, the military—were paid for invisibly, so it appeared that they had built it all by themselves.

The future of the Tea Party is unclear. But one thing that is clear is that it’s going to have fewer women. Women flocked to the Tea Party as a populist movement because the Republican Party had so long ig- nored them, especially as mothers. But the Tea Party has done little to address distinctively mothers’ needs, either. Republican corporatist eco- nomic policies don’t hold much appeal; corporations would prefer to staunch any trickle-down economics; they’d like tax policies and regu- lation to better turn the faucets upward in a reverse waterfall. The very programs that mothers need to have the lives they actually say they want—the option to work, with well-fed and -clothed children, who go to good schools, and remain healthy—require massive government expenditures.

Support among white women is waning; according to a Washing- ton Post poll, white women were less interested in and less positive about the Tea Party in 2012 than they were in 2011, whereas rates of approval among white men have remained relatively stable. The Tea Party will, most likely, come increasingly to resemble all the other populist iterations of aggrieved entitlement: white, southern, midwest- ern and rural, lower middle class, overeducated, or underemployed— that is, downwardly mobile, if not from their family of origin, then at least downwardly mobile from the expectations they had about where they’d end up. And male. For women, aggrieved entitlement may be more of a fleeting emotional response to setbacks; for men, it may become more of a way of life.

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69

2 Angry White Boys

I am not insane. I am angry.

— LUKE WOODHAM (AGE SIXTEEN),

PEARL HIGH SCHOOL, PEARL, MISSISSIPPI

We’ve always wanted to do this. This is payback.

We’ve dreamed of doing this for years. This is for

all the shit you put us through. This is what you

deserve.

— ERIC HARRIS (AGE EIGHTEEN) AND DYLAN KLEBOLD (AGE

SEVENTEEN), COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL, LITTLETON, COLORADO

By now the story has been told so often it’s begun to have the gloss of fable. On a sunny Tuesday morning in April 1999, two seniors walked calmly through the halls of Columbine High School, open- ing fire, seemingly randomly, on their fellow students. By the time the carnage was over, twelve students and one teacher lay dead, along- side the two troubled teenagers who had pulled the triggers. Another twenty-four were injured. More than a dozen years and several novels and movies later, a large security apparatus has appeared in suburban schools, the phrase “pull a Columbine” is uttered menacingly almost daily in countless high schools and middle schools across the country, and Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris have joined a parade of storied kill- ers that includes Bonnie and Clyde, Billy the Kid, and Babyface Nelson. To some current high schoolers, they’re Butch and Sundance; to others,

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they’re Leopold and Loeb. (The rampage was the second-most-covered emerging news story of the entire decade of the 1990s, edged out only by the O. J. Simpson car chase.)1

In the immediate aftermath of that horrific day, there was no shortage of facile armchair explanations offered by observers. Some suggested Goth music and particularly Marilyn Manson. President Clinton thought it might be the Internet. Dr. Phil chimed in, blaming violent video games. Right-wing pundits like Newt Gingrich credited the hippie embrace of freedom of the 1960s, and Thomas Sowell ar- gued that the ’60s exonerated individuals from responsibility (it was “society’s fault”). Speaker of the House Tom DeLay just blamed day care, the teaching of evolution, and “working mothers who take birth control pills.”2

Then came the somewhat more reasoned academic explanations. Maybe, some thought, it’s the media. “Parents don’t realize that tak- ing four-year-olds to True Lies—a fun movie for adults but excessively violent—is poison to their brain,” noted educational avatar Michael Gurian. In her erudite warning on violence, Sissela Bok suggested that the Internet and violent video games “bring into homes depictions of graphic violence . . . never available to children and young people in the past,” which undermines kids’ resilience and self-control.3

Or perhaps it’s guns. After all, firearms are the second-leading cause of death to children between ten and fourteen, the eighth-leading cause of death to those aged one to four. In 1994, 80 percent of juve- nile murderers used a firearm; in 1984, only 50 percent did.4

But the amount of violent media content has surely been increas- ing, while at the same time youth violence generally and school vi- olence in particular have actually been decreasing. Juvenile violence involving guns has also been in decline since 1994 (largely as a re- sult of the decline of the crack epidemic). As liberal firebrand Michael Moore reminded us, there are more rifles per capita in Canada than in the United States, and there have been no Canadian rampage school shootings. (In both Britain and Australia, where there had been ram- page shootings, intensified gun-control laws have ensured that there have been no repeats.)

Maybe it’s both. Barry Krisberg, president of the National Coun- cil on Crime and Delinquency, said that “the violence in the media and the easy availability of guns are what is driving the slaughter of

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innocents,” while then NRA president Charlton Heston believed the problem was actually not enough guns. Had there been armed guards in the schools, he argued, the shooting would have ended instantly— which is also what the current NRA executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, said after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. But boys everywhere are frustrated, abused, and saturated with media violence, although not all of them live in places where guns are so readily available.5

Some have proposed psychological variables as possible explana- tions, including a history of childhood abuse, absent fathers, domi- nant mothers, violence in childhood, unstable family environments, or the mothers’ fear of their children. All possible. But empirically, it appears that none hold up. Most shooters come from intact and rela- tively stable families, with no reports of child abuse.

Subsequent government-supported investigations—such as the FBI report, the surgeon general’s report Youth Violence, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ “Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2000,” as well as a major study of bullying—all concentrated on identifying po- tential antecedents of school violence, such as media influence, drugs and alcohol behavior, Internet usage, father absence, and parental ne- glect.6 But surely these influences are far too universal to predict why some kids who are subject to these large-scale influences pick up guns and others—the overwhelming majority, in fact—don’t.

These large-scale cultural explanations got so vague, so grandiose, that they were utterly unpersuasive. We needed to get closer.

Since then, our tendency has been to abandon the search for big- ger sociological interpretations, as if Columbine represented some frightening trend, and to look closer, a lot closer, at each individual event. Most recently, in Columbine, published on the tenth anniversary of that tragic day, journalist Dave Cullen completely jettisons a bird’s- eye view of that tragic school shooting in favor of an extreme close-up psychological portrait of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Like a poin- tillist painting, each dot of color is rendered in excruciating detail, as we read about Harris’s deep-seated psychopathologies and Klebold’s eagerness to be accepted by his sociopathic friend and mentor.7

Cullen’s right, of course—as right as any analyst of those tiny dots of color can be. Any event, I imagine, looked at closely enough, ceases to resemble any other, as the existential uniqueness of the individuals

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involved makes comparison with other events impossible. It’s no doubt true that Harris externalized his rage at the world and his con- tempt for those he considered inferior and that Klebold, depressed and suicidal, followed him like a lost puppy.8

Such an analysis begs several questions, however. How did such a decidedly disturbed kid manage to fool everyone who ever came into contact with him, as he glided under the radar of every parent, teacher, administrator, and guidance counselor? And why is that same phe- nomenon true of all the other school shooters—that few, if any, adults in their lives noticed just how disturbed they were? Are our schools so poorly run, or teachers and administrators so blind, or our nation’s parents in such denial or so oblivious that they have no idea what is happening with their obviously psychotic children?

In one sense, Cullen is right. These boys acted because they were so psychologically troubled that they could have been diagnosed as psy- chotic. He also misses the point. After all, Klebold and Harris weren’t the first school shooters. And as the multitude of subsequent shoot- ings have tragically shown—from Santee, California, to Sandy Hook Elementary School—nor are they the last.

But what Klebold and Harris did represent was a new type of rampage school shooters; they finally forced us to notice something that had been happening for some time. Up until 1990 or so, school shootings fitted a certain profile. They took place in urban schools, where one boy, almost always a boy of color, would carry a handgun into school, looking for a particular target, either because of a roman- tic dispute, a drug deal gone south, or the escalation of group animosi- ties. (In some cases, it’s true that the shooter had been “dared” to do it, his masculinity relentlessly questioned, having been the target of gay baiting and bullying. But even then, he wasn’t out to “show the world” he was a man; he was just confronting the guy who dissed him.)

By 1990 these school shootings had become rare, partly because metal detectors had been installed and police officers had been sta- tioned in many high-risk urban schools. As a result, the number of such school shootings dropped dramatically. (This was also due to an artifact of the data collection. Since schools now had metal detectors and armed security personnel, it seemed much easier to wait just off school property for one’s target to appear before opening fire. If the

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incident took place just off the formal boundary of the school, it was not counted in the category “school violence.”)

But beginning in the late 1980s to early 1990s, the profile of the school shooter shifted dramatically. Now, the shooter was almost al- ways white, from a suburban or rural school, using rifles or assault weapons, and opening fire seemingly randomly, killing teachers and fellow students. Since 1999 rampage school shooters have also com- mitted suicide at the end of their rampages—sort of “suicide by mass murder”: take as many of “them” with you as you can before you take your own life. And, it seems, they don’t just want to get even with their tormentors any longer; they want to go out in a blaze of glory, to be re- membered, to be “famous.” (Harris and Klebold left a videotape; Cho sent one to the news media.) School shooters used to want to get even; now they want to be celebrities.

In fact, there was only one constant in those two profiles. They were all boys. All of them. Does that not merit attention? And should we not pay attention to race, now that virtually every single rampage school shooter since 1987 was also white? What about region—since all but a couple were in rural or suburban schools?

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Ha- ven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence.

Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand- wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their be- havior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys.

Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shoot- ers were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from

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single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.

But these categories—race, class, gender—provide the middle ground between the pointillism of David Cullen’s myopic approach and the vague abstractionism of the government-sponsored studies, which paint on such a large canvas as to universalize the events out of any specificity.

A more comprehensive analysis of the school shooters stands fur- ther back from that pointillist painting, where the microdots of juxta- posed color actually form discernible patterns, where the minimalist details form recognizable shapes that make such individual psychol- ogies comprehensible. That’s why humans invented such concepts as categories in the first place, as cognitive devices that enable us to see such social patterns.

We need not ignore the individual pathologies of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; it neither diminishes the horror of their crime nor el- evates them to some status as sublimely martyred victims to acknowl- edge that Harris and Klebold exhibited some similarities—and some differences—with Michael Carneal, Barry Loukaitis, Evan Ramsey, Gary Scott Pennington, Luke Woodham, Andy Williams, Kip Kinkel, and all the rest of the young suburban white boys who opened fire on their classmates and teachers.

To ignore these “categories”—all were boys, all but one were white, all but two were suburban or rural—is to have no sense of the forest in which these boys were lost, but a very good idea of the texture of any individual leaf. Race, region, religion—all these and more shape the social context in which school shootings take place.

There are discernible patterns that compose profiles of school shooters. Peter Langman, a researcher at KidPeace Children’s Hospi- tal, constructed a typology of shooters that ranges from “traumatized” boys (those, like Evan Ramsey or Jeffrey Weise, who came from bro- ken homes and suffered sexual or physical abuse), “psychotic” boys (such as Michael Carneal, Kip Kinkel, and Seung-Hui Cho, who came from intact families but exhibited schizophrenic symptoms that might have included hallucinations, voices, and other ideations), and “psy- chopathic” boys (like Eric Harris and Andrew Golden, who were con-

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sumed by narcissistic rage and a lack of empathy). Such a model helps understand the psychological spectrum on which these boys might have fallen, though given the number of other boys who don’t fit the model, it’s of limited utility.9

School shootings are a psychiatric issue, to be sure, but they are also a community issue if no responsible adult notices the psycho- paths in their midst. It’s a sociological issue, given the eerie similarities among the shooters. And it’s a cultural issue, an issue of how we edu- cate our children and what sorts of differences we tolerate—and which ones we don’t.

From an early age, boys learn that violence is not only an accept- able form of conflict resolution, but one that is admired. Four times more teenage boys than teenage girls think fighting is appropriate when someone cuts into the front of a line. Half of all teenage boys get into a physical fight each year.

These are not just misguided “kids,” or “youth,” or “troubled teens”—they’re boys. All of them. They are a group of boys, deeply aggrieved by a system that they may feel is cruel or demeaning, or, in the case of Eric Harris’s fraudulent reversal, beneath him. Feeling ag- grieved, wronged by the world—these are boilerplate adolescent feel- ings, common to many boys and girls. What transforms the aggrieved into mass murders is also a sense of entitlement, a sense that using violence against others, making others hurt as you hurt, is fully jus- tified. Aggrieved entitlement justifies revenge against those who have wronged you; it is the compensation for humiliation. Humiliation is emasculation: humiliate someone, and you take away his manhood. For many men, humiliation must be avenged, or you cease to be a man. Aggrieved entitlement is a gendered emotion, a fusion of that humiliating loss of manhood and the moral obligation and entitle- ment to get it back. And its gender is masculine. “Some young men experienced a sense of humiliation that emerged from perceptions of loss of privilege made evident in schools; and when merged with fan- tasies of retribution and images of a form of masculinity grounded in violent action, their sense of humiliation led some young men to open fire in schools.”10

Humiliation is so injurious to the psyche, so threatening to the self, that it must be healed. When that sense of self is gendered, it is masculinity that must be restored. Anger and rage are the translation

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of that humiliation into the potential for action. And anger can mobi- lize the self to retrieve and restore the individual’s sense of masculinity through any means possible, including violence.

PROFILING THE SHOOTERS

Random school shootings are extremely rare. More than 99 percent of public high schools have never had a homicide—and never will. Not only that, but their incidence varies widely. According to the Na- tional School Safety and Security Services website, the total number of school-related violent deaths varies from a low of eleven in 2009–2010 to a high of forty-nine in 2002–2003. Curiously, the numbers seem to vary in cycles—two to three years at low rates in the low teens, and then more than doubling for the next three or four years, only to drop back down again. Since the total numbers are so low to begin with, it’s pos- sible that these cycles are episodic and random, correlating with one or two well-publicized incidents in one year that led to a spate of deaths for a couple of years, only to return to preevent levels.11

Yet since 1999, virtually all the shootings—and, even more, the rampages that were planned but were thwarted by more alert parents, kids, or teachers who notified authorities—referenced Columbine as their template model of what a shooting should look like. Columbine is now more than a tragedy; it is also a trope, a cultural reference point. The history of school shootings is now demarcated by Columbine; rampages can be sorted into “pre-Columbine” or “post-Columbine.”

Before Columbine, sociologist Ralph Larkin explains, shootings were more “personal”—focusing on specific perceived injustices, female rejections of male romantic interest, or personal revenge for bullying and humiliation. Since Columbine, rampages have generally moved up- ward in age, largely to college campuses where surveillance is more lax and access to weapons is easier, but also because the mental illnesses that produce these paroxysms of violence have had longer to develop and manifest. All have been boys, and all have been solo efforts. Of those that have been thwarted—there were at least thirty—several were pairs or groups, and one, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, involved a girl with three boys, but she eventually broke ranks and warned a teacher she particularly liked who had been marked for death.12

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The post-Columbine pattern has been more “political,” all target- ing the supposed “jock culture” that, to the plotters, so dominated the school’s culture as to make daily life a constant torture. Columbine has now become the single script upon which virtually every other shooter has drawn.

But what causes the unleashing of such homicidal rage? With my colleague Matt Mahler, I have investigated all the rampage school shootings that took place in the United States since 1987. Reading the press coverage of each of these cases, middle school, high school, or college, Matt and I began to notice another pattern. Virtually every one of the shooters described their school days as a relentless gauntlet of bullying, gay-baiting epithets, physical assault, and harassment until they “snapped.” These boys spent a good part of every day fending off a constant barrage of criticism of their masculinity. They were desper- ate to prove their detractors wrong and to exact revenge against their tormentors and the other kids who laughed, went along with it, or said nothing and allowed it to continue. In his insightful book, psy- chiatrist James Gilligan suggests that violence has its origins in “the fear of shame and ridicule, and the overbearing need to prevent others from laughing at oneself by making them weep instead.” Shame, in- adequacy, vulnerability—all threaten the self. Violence is restorative, compensatory.13

The damage to these boys’ sense of self was incalculable, their hu- miliation so severe that they felt they had pretty much ceased to ex- ist. Going out in a blaze of glory becomes, ironically, the affirmation of that self through its annihilation—as long as you can take some of them with you.

The work of cultural anthropologist Katherine Newman and her students is illuminating. In Rampage and subsequent articles, New- man and her students identified five factors that together contributed to school shootings: (1) social marginalization (the incessant bully- ing or gay baiting), (2) individual predisposing factors (a catchall psy- chological category that led some boys who had been marginalized to lash out and others to find other coping strategies), (3) cultural scripts (some sort of cultural media that inspired or justified their actions), (4) failure of the surveillance system (both physical security and the mental health surveillance system so that shooters passed under the ra- dar of those who might have picked up warning signs), and (5) the

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availability of guns. “It’s the boys for whom a range of unfortunate circumstances come together,” they write, “who constitute the likely universe of school shooters.” All of these factors, from the individual psychological predisposition to the cultural and material apparatus, are necessary conditions for a rampage.14

Some interesting recent research by two psychologists compared the profiles of the rampage school shooters to volunteer suicide bomb- ers in the Middle East. Rampage school shooters are irrationally acting out of pent-up rage; suicide bombers are rational, if fanatic, politi- cal actors seeking to further a cause. But Adam Lankford and Nayab Hakim find some interesting similarities: both groups were composed of young people who had troubled childhoods, suffered from low self-esteem, sought revenge from a precipitant personal crisis, were ea- ger for fame and glory, and lived in what the authors call “oppressive social conditions.”15

Rampage school shooters are the suicide bombers of the American educational system. Listen to the stories of a few of these boys.

Fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal was a shy and frail freshman at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, barely five feet tall, weigh- ing 110 pounds. He wore thick glasses and played in the high school band. He felt alienated, pushed around, picked on. Boys stole his lunch, constantly teased him. He was so hypersensitive and afraid that others would see him naked that he covered the air vents in the bath- room. He was devastated when students called him a “faggot” and almost cried when the school gossip sheet labeled him as “gay.” On Thanksgiving 1997, he stole two shotguns, two semiautomatic rifles, a pistol, and seven hundred rounds of ammunition, and after a week- end of showing them off to his classmates brought them to school, hoping that they would bring him some instant recognition. “I just wanted the guys to think I was cool,” he said. When the cool guys ignored him, he opened fire on a morning prayer circle, killing three classmates and wounding five others. Now serving a life sentence in prison, Carneal told psychiatrists weighing his sanity that “people re- spect me now.”16

Luke Woodham was a bookish and overweight sixteen-year-old in Pearl, Mississippi. An honor student, he was part of a little group that studied Latin, read Nietzsche, and got fascinated by Satanism. Students teased him constantly for being overweight and a nerd and

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taunted him as a “fag.” “People always picked on me,” he said af- ter the fact. “They always called me gay and stupid, stuff like that.” Even his mother called him fat, stupid, and lazy. On October 1, 1997, Woodham stabbed his mother to death in her bed before he left for school. He then drove her car to school, carrying a rifle under his coat. He opened fire in the school’s common area, killing two students and wounding seven others. After being subdued, he told the assistant principal, “The world has wronged me.”17

A few minutes before he opened fire, he handed this message to a friend:

I am not insane. I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. . . . All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. . . . It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can’t pry your eyes open, if I can’t do it through pacifism, if I can’t show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet.18

The list goes on. Gary Scott Pennington, seventeen years old, who killed his teacher and a custodian in Grayson, Kentucky, in 1993, was labeled a “nerd” and a “loner” and was constantly teased for being smart and wearing glasses. Fourteen-year-old Barry Loukaitis, who killed his algebra teacher and two other students in Moses Lake, Wash- ington, in 1996, was an honor student who especially loved math; he was also constantly teased and bullied and described as a “shy nerd.” Evan Ramsey, age sixteen, who killed one student and the high school principal in Bethel, Alaska, in 1997, was also an honor student who was teased for wearing glasses and having acne.19

Then, of course, there’s Columbine, the locus classicus of rampage school shootings. This connection between extreme homophobic bul- lying and Harris and Klebold’s violent rampage was not lost on Evan Todd, a 255-pound defensive lineman on the Columbine football team, an exemplar of the jock culture that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris found to be such an interminable torment. “Columbine is a clean, good place, except for those rejects,” Todd said.

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Most kids didn’t want them there. There were into witchcraft. They were into voodoo dolls. Sure, we teased them. But what do you ex- pect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? It’s not just jocks; the whole school’s disgusted with them. They’re a bunch of homos, grabbing each other’s private parts. If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease ’em. So the whole school would call them homos, and when they did something sick, we’d tell them, “You’re sick and that’s wrong.”

Athletes taunted them: “Nice dress,” they’d say. They would throw rocks and bottles at them from moving cars. The school newspaper had recently published a rumor that Harris and Klebold were lovers.20

On the surface, both boys seemed to be reasonably well adjusted. Harris’s parents were a retired army office and a caterer, decent, well- intentioned people. Klebold’s father was a geophysicist who had re- cently moved into the mortgage-services business, and his mother worked in job placement for the disabled. Harris had been rejected by several colleges; Klebold was due to enroll at the University of Arizona that fall.

But the jock culture was relentless. One boy described what it was like to be so marginalized:

Almost on a daily basis, finding death threats in my locker. . . . It was bad. People . . . who I never even met, never had a class with, don’t know who they were to this day. I didn’t drive at the time I was in high school; I always walked home. And every day when they’d drive by, they’d throw trash out their window at me, glass bottles. I’m sorry, you get hit with a glass bottle that’s going forty miles an hour, that hurts pretty bad. Like I said, I never even knew these people, so didn’t even know what their motivation was. But this is something I had to put up with nearly every day for four years.21

“Every time someone slammed them against a locker and threw a bot- tle at them,” another former friend said, “I think they’d go back to Eric or Dylan’s house and plot a little more—at first as a goof, but more and more seriously over time.”22

You know the rest. Harris and Klebold brought a variety of weap- ons to their high school that April morning and proceeded to walk

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through the school, shooting whomever they could find. Students were terrified and tried to hide. Many students who could not hide begged for their lives. The entire school was held under siege until the police secured the building. In all, twenty-three students and faculty were in- jured, and fifteen died, including one teacher and the perpetrators.

In the videotape made the night before the shootings, Harris says, “People constantly make fun of my face, my hair, my shirts.” Klebold adds, “I’m going to kill you all. You’ve been giving us shit for years.”

So the profile that gradually emerges is that of white boys who have been targeted, bullied, beaten up, gay baited, and worse— virtually every single day of their lives. They were called every ho- mophobic slur in the books, and then some. They were mercilessly ridiculed, threatened, attacked, and tortured. Most strikingly, it was not because they were gay (none of them were gay, as far as I can tell), but because they were different from the other boys—shy, bookish, honor students, artistic, musical, theatrical, nonathletic, a “geek,” or weird. Theirs are stories of “cultural marginalization” based on criteria for adequate gender performance—specifically the enactment of codes of masculinity.

And so they did what any self-respecting man would do in a situ- ation like that—or so they thought. They retaliated. They knew they were supposed to be “real men,” able to embody independence, in- vulnerability, manly stoicism. The cultural marginalization of the boys who committed school shootings extended to feeling that they had no other recourse: they felt they had no other friends to validate their fragile and threatened identities, they felt that school authorities and parents would be unresponsive to their plight, and they had no ac- cess to other methods of self-affirmation. It was not because they were deviants, but rather because they were overconformists to a particular normative construction of masculinity, a construction that defines vio- lence as a legitimate response to a perceived humiliation.

In a sense, then, these boys were not simply “nonconformists”— by which we mean they were mentally ill, disturbed, or unbalanced. At the same time, they were “overconformists,” clinging quite tena- ciously to an ideal of masculinity that can be—and must be—proved by heroic deeds. They were not either mentally ill or rational but both: deeply disordered to the point of breaking and simultaneously con- vinced that they knew—from the assembly of cultural means available

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to men who seek to prove their manhood—how to remedy their situ- ation. For some, it was a rampage itself that restored, at least to their troubled minds, their sense of themselves as men. For others, it was in their glorious suicide that they became martyrs, restoring their man- hood in one defiant, glorious explosion.

But still, something is missing from this picture. It’s as if we’re looking at a painting, a group portrait of the boys, posed, armed to the teeth in front of their schools, and paying attention only to how different they are from other boys or even, in my case, to how similar they are to each other at the same time. But so many boys feel ag- grieved, and many also feel that sense of aggrieved entitlement that might legitimate revenge—whether in fantasies of blowing up the galaxy or in being superheroes and taking one’s vengeance against all who have wronged them, or in actually becoming bullies themselves and enacting on others what they, themselves, have endured. The roots of rampage murders lie perhaps in the story of the individuals who make those tragically fatal choices. But we need also to make the back- ground present, to foreground it even, for a fuller portrait.

Looking at two more cases in a little more depth can illuminate this dynamic more fully. These two stories can enable us to see the connections between the profiles of the shooters and the profiles of the schools—and the importance of both levels of analysis. We need to reinstall these angry white men and boys in a cultural and social context in which that anger can find expression.

ANDY WILLIAMS “PROVES HIS POINT”

Consider first the case of Andy Williams, the shy, scrawny, fifteen-year- old new kid in town, a freshman at Santana High School in Santee, California. Not yet pubescent, Williams tried hard to fit in with his new neighbors when he went to live in this San Diego suburb, adopt- ing a skate-rat affect and clothes and hanging around the local skate park, even though he was terrible at it and ached to return to South Carolina to live with his mother.

He never seemed to fit in, no matter how hard he tried. “His ears stuck out, he was small, skinny, had a high voice, so people always

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picked on him ’cause he was the little kid,” one of his friends said. His nickname was “Anorexic Andy.”

Daily life was a torment. “He was picked on all the time,” remem- bered one student. “He was picked on because he was one of the scrawniest kids. People called him freak, dork, nerd, stuff like that.” Another friend said, “They’d walk up to him and sock him in the face for no reason. He wouldn’t do anything about it.”

That wasn’t the half of it. He was beaten up, taunted, locked in his locker, set on fire, his skateboard stolen, money taken, his skater clothes taken off his body, his skate sneakers ripped off his feet. His public defender listed eighteen incidents of bullying in the few weeks leading up to his rampage, including being burned with a cigarette lighter on his neck; sprayed with hair spray and then lit with a lighter; beaten with a towel, leaving large red welts on his body; and being slammed against a tree a couple of times, because of utterly unsub- stantiated rumors about his sexual orientation. His father said the bul- lying was so severe that it was “bordering on torture.”

On March 5, 2001, he walked into a school bathroom and opened fire, killing one boy, and then walked into the quad, at the center of the school, killing one more boy and wounding twelve others (two teachers and ten students). He then walked back to the bathroom and waited for the police to arrive. He was unarmed when they came through the door.

Why, we ask? Why did he do it? As expected, psychologists weighed in on how mentally unstable he was, which is no doubt true. Class- mates had said that for weeks they’d heard him say he was going to “pull a Columbine.” But those experts never seem to see the sources of that destabilization, that mental imbalance doesn’t necessarily bubble up from within a troubled mind. It can be produced. With some pre- existing proclivity, circumstances can “unbalance” a mind, destabilize someone whose resilience is compromised. And that is clearly what happened to Andy Williams.

Two years prior to Williams’s rampage, the school received a $137,000 grant from the US Department of Justice to study the causes and effects of school bullying. The school never conducted a survey, organized a focus group, or conducted a single interview with the stu- dents about the bully culture that permeated the school. They spent

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the money instead on computer equipment and software for the po- lice, hiring consultants whose advice was promptly ignored.

Both the school administration and the prosecutor who took the case denied that bullying and torture might have had any impact on Williams’s violent explosion. The district superintendent denied Wil- liams had been bullied at all and thought it a distraction from the actions of the perpetrator. It’s no wonder that, as journalist Mark Ames found, “Santana High School kids and parents both felt that there was no point in complaining to the administration because they wouldn’t have done anything anyway.” The parents and students were right. In- deed, after the shooting, the school hired a consultant who conducted interviews with students, parents, and teachers and provided a set of recommendations about how to change the school culture. The school board rejected every one of her recommendations.23

When this tragic rampage occurred, then president George W. Bush called it a “disgraceful act of cowardice”—which, given my analysis here, actually makes matters worse, decrying the boy’s ostensible lack of manhood yet again.24 Any effort to expose the toxic environment in which Williams suffered was met with a brick wall of denial. When you are tortured so relentlessly, and they don’t seem to believe you, and you feel you have no hope of a remedy, you can hit your head against that wall for only so long before you decide, instead, to line your antagonists up against it and re-create the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. When Andy Williams explained why he had committed this terrible act, he was brief. “I was trying to prove a point.”

THE AGGRIEVED ENTITLEMENT OF SEUNG-HUI CHO

Consider the case of Seung-Hui Cho, the disturbed Virginia Tech stu- dent who slaughtered thirty-two people and wounded many others be- fore committing suicide in April 2007. Cho’s hours of rage culminated in the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in American history.25

At first, Seung-Hui Cho seems the exception to the pattern I’ve de- scribed. The middle-class son of South Korean immigrants (his parents owned a set of dry cleaners), he’s the only nonwhite rampage shooter

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in more than a decade. At twenty-three, he was older than the high school and middle school boys who had murdered their classmates over the previous decades. Cho, also, was clearly mentally ill; he’d been diagnosed but was largely untreated, meaning that there had been some warning signs, but that he continued to fly just under the radar. (Privacy laws actually hid Cho’s diagnoses and treatment from Virginia Tech residential officials when they assigned dorm rooms and roommates.) Despite his diagnosis of a serious mental disorder, he had easy access to guns.

Being Asian American, of course, prompted all sorts of racially based explanations. (The fact that virtually all the other rampage shooters were white had never elicited any question of race.) Finally, after two decades of school shootings by white kids in which race was never once mentioned as a variable, suddenly the entire explanation centered on the fact that Cho was Asian American. Whatever hap- pened, some asked, to the model minority? Perhaps being an Asian American came with so much pressure to perform, to be that model minority, that it was simply too much. Perhaps he simply cracked un- der the strain.

The psychological profile of Seung-Hui Cho suggests some bully- ing, to be sure, and some serious humiliation. In his video, he says that he’d been treated like a “pathetic loser” and had experienced such hu- miliations as being spat on in public and having garbage shoved down his throat. (It is not known if such statements were true.) He claimed that these other students had “raped” his soul and “torched” his con- sciousness.26 Perhaps his life was not quite the same quotidian torture that high schoolers like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold experienced. Per- haps he was less overtly bullied, but he was no less marginalized.

Awkward socially, Cho never seemed to feel that he fitted in. He was teased and dismissed as a nonentity. Former classmates of Seung- Hui say he “was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy” be- cause of his “shyness and the strange, mumbly way he talked.” Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from the same high school as Cho, recalled that he almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the

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teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said. “As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China.’”27

At Virginia Tech, he had no friends; rarely, if ever, spoke with his dorm mates; and maintained a near invisibility on campus. His web screen name was a question mark—he toyed with his invisibility. No one seems to have actually known him, although his teachers in the English Department said they thought he was strange and possi- bly dangerous.

Cho’s marginalization also appeared cultural, class based, not en- tirely the result of his obvious overdetermining psychiatric problems. His videotape raged against the “brats” and “snobs” at Virginia Tech, who weren’t even satisfied with their “gold necklaces” and “Mercedes.” Apparently, too, some of it had a racist component. In addition, there was a deep alienation from campus culture. Few campuses are as awash in school spirit as Virginia Tech: the campus is festooned with maroon and orange everywhere, and the branding of the campus is a collegiate consumerist orgy of paraphernalia.

But what if one doesn’t feel to be much of a citizen in “Hokie Nation”? What if one isn’t much interested in football or in sports- themed, beer-soaked weekend party extravaganzas? It’s possible that, to the marginalized, Hokie Nation doesn’t feel inclusive and embrac- ing, but instead feels alien and coercive. If one is not a citizen in Hokie Nation, one does not exist. And perhaps, for some, if I don’t exist, then you have no right to exist, either.

Cho’s marginalization must also have been gendered. After all, re- call the way that race is “gendered,” as discussed in the last chapter. Asian American men are stereotypically perceived as soft, almost fem- inine, both in body and in mind. Their bodies are often thin and hair- less, unmuscular, their faces beardless and their features delicate. They are seen as robotically disciplined grinds, but not men of “action” or experience. They study extremely hard, perhaps too hard, a sure sign of gender nonconformity for males, since academic disengagement is so often heralded as a sign of masculinity. Unlike other ethnic or ra- cial minorities, like Latino or African American males, Asian American males are perceived as hypomasculine, as insufficiently manly. What better way to prove them wrong?

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Of course, not everyone who is bullied in school, nor even those whose masculinity is a big question mark because of race or ethnicity, picks up a gun and starts shooting. Indeed, there are kids who are bullied relentlessly, mercilessly, every day at probably most of Ameri- ca’s high schools and middle schools. Bullying seems to have become such a national “crisis” that it has inspired countless policy programs, intervention strategies, and even presidential initiatives.

There has to be something more. His videotaped testament shows a young man enthralled with fantasies of revenge, in full-bore aggrieved entitlement, externalizing his inner torment on everyone around him. “You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul, and torched my con- science,” he declares on his videotape. “You thought it was one pa- thetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.” Cho was another suicide bomber; his self-immolation was intended to inspire others to destroy the oppressive systems arrayed against them.

But did he have to? Many have commented that no one in au- thority seemed to pay any attention to Cho, despite warnings from teachers and female students that they felt unsafe around him, that his fantasies expressed in class papers were disturbing enough to war- rant attention. Nikki Giovanni, the celebrated feminist poet, refused to teach him because she said he was “mean.” Diagnosed with mental problems, he was able to buy guns, attend classes, fantasize revenge, and eat in the dining halls—all, apparently, just like anyone else.

There are many Seung-Hui Chos out there, victims of incessant bullying, of having their distress go unnoticed. So many teen suicides have this same profile: they turn their rage on themselves. So many teenagers who fit this profile self-medicate, taking drugs, drinking, cut- ting themselves. There are so many of them, and virtually all fly just beneath the radar of teachers, parents, administrators.

They don’t all explode. Is it possible that the environment in which Cho lived had anything to do with it? Is it possible that the elements of a rampage school shooting include access to firepower, an explosive young man who is utterly marginalized, humiliated and drenched in what he feels is righteous rage, as well as an environment that sees such treatment of its weakest and most marginalized as justified, as “reasonable”? Is it possible that it’s not just the shooters that need pro- filing, but also the schools?

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PROFILING THE SCHOOLS

What if we shift the lens through which we look at these cases of ram- page school shootings to the widest-angle lens we can? What if we make the background the foreground for a moment? Is there some- thing that distinguishes schools as well as the shooters? What makes a violence-prone school different from a relatively violence-free school?

Here’s one way to do it. Here is a map of the United States, with thirty-two cases of school shootings marked on it. (I’ve omitted those where there was a specific target and included only those that could be coded as “rampage” shootings.)

Notice anything? For one thing, it’s clear that rampage school shootings are not a national trend. Of thirty-two school shootings be- tween 1982 and 2008, all but one were in rural or suburban schools (one in Chicago). New York, Boston, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles—nothing. All but two (Chicago again and Virginia Tech) were committed by a white boy or boys. The Los Angeles school district has had no school shootings since 1984; in 1999 San Francisco, which has several programs to identify potentially violent students, had only two kids even try to bring guns to school.

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Now, here are that same data, superimposed on a map that might be more politically familiar.

Of the thirty-two school shootings, twenty-two took place in red states, by this map. Of the ten in the blue states, only two were in ur- ban areas—one was in suburban Oregon, one was in rural (eastern) Washington, two were in Southern California, one was in rural and another in suburban Pennsylvania, one was in rural New Mexico, and one was in rural Illinois. Six of those eight took place in “red” coun- ties (such as Moses Lake, Washington; Santee, California; Red Hill, Pennsylvania; and Deming, New Mexico). Even Springfield, Oregon, located in a blue county, is known as “Springtucky”—which gives you an idea of its political leanings.

What this suggests is that school violence is unevenly distributed. I am not suggesting that the sons of Republicans are more prone to open fire on their classmates than the sons of Democrats. But I am suggesting that different political cultures develop in different parts of the country and that those political cultures have certain features in common. (Most of the time, we celebrate these diverse political cultures.) Some of those features are “gun culture” (what percentage of homes have firearms, gun registrations, NRA memberships), local

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gender culture, and local school cultures—attitudes about gender non- conformity, tolerance of bullying, and teacher attitudes.

Here’s one element of local culture that directly affects whether the psychological profile would show up on anyone’s radar. Since local school districts are funded by local property taxes, some “violence- prone schools” may have been subject to a significant decline in school funding over the past two decades. Coupled with the curricular de- mands of the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandates performance outcomes that require increased attention to a set curriculum, schools have cut back significantly on after-school programs, sports, extracur- ricular activities, teacher training, remedial programs, and, most im- portant, counseling.

One in five adolescents has serious behavioral and emotional problems, and about two-thirds of these are getting no help at all. In the average school district in the United States, the school psychologist must see ten students each day just to see every student once a year. In California, there is one counselor (not to mention psychologist) for every one thousand students, and 50 percent of schools do not have guidance counselors at all. It is likely that this paucity of funding for psychological services enabled several very troubled students to pass undetected in a way they might not have in past years.

In his exemplary analysis of the shootings at Columbine High School, sociologist Ralph Larkin identifies several variables that he be- lieves provided the larger cultural context for the rampage. The larger context—the development of a culture of celebrity, the rise of paramil- itary chic—spread unevenly across the United States; some regions are more gun happy than others. (Larkin credits the West; Cho’s rampage implicates the South.) But more than that, he profiles both the boys and the school and suggests that the sociological and psychological variables created a lethal mixture.

It wasn’t just that Harris and Klebold—and other eventual ram- page shooters—were bullied and harassed and intimidated every day; it was that the administration, teachers, and community colluded with it. At Columbine, when one boy tried to tell teachers and administra- tors that “the way those who were ‘different’ were crushed . . . what it was like to live in constant fear of other kids who’d gone out of con- trol,” the teachers and administrators invariably turned a blind eye.

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“After all,” he says, “those kids were their favorites. We were the trou- blemakers.” Thus, Larkin concludes, “By allowing the predators free rein in the hallways and public spaces and by bending the rules so that bad behavior did not interfere too much with sports participation, the faculty and administration inadvertently created a climate that was rife with discrimination, intimidation and humiliation.”28

And sanctimony. Larkin also argues that religious intolerance and chauvinism directly contributed to the cultural marginalization of the boys. Jefferson County, where Columbine High School is located, is more than 90 percent white, 97 percent native born, and almost en- tirely Christian, with nearly 40 percent evangelical Protestants. (Indeed, it has one of the largest concentrations of Christian evangelicals in the country.) Whereas local preachers saw in Klebold and Harris the pres- ence of the devil, Larkin believes that evangelical intolerance of others is more cause than consequence. “Evangelicals were characterized,” he writes, “as arrogant and intolerant of the beliefs of others.” Evangelical students were intolerantly holier than thou—they would “accost their peers and tell them that if they were not born-again, they would burn in hell.” In most cases, Larkin writes, this would be “merely annoying.” But “in combination with the brutalization and harassment dished out on a regular basis by the student athletes, it only added to the toxicity of the student climate at Columbine [High School].”29

Columbine, like Virginia Tech, was a “jockocracy”—a place where the jocks ruled, the students adored and respected them, and the teachers, parents, and administrators enabled them by BIRGing in the glory of “our boys.” (BIRGing is a well-known social psychologi- cal process of “basking in reflected glory,” identifying with those who are perceived as heroes.) Jocks ruled; everyone else worshipped. Here’s what two Washington Post reporters observed at Columbine: