Why Can't We Shut Up And Listen To The Anguished Cries Of The Fiscally Liberal, Socially Conservative White Man?
No, The Atlantic. Just no.
From what I can tell, Michael Powell has never written a goddamned thing on economic policy or poverty. For the last several years, at The New York Times, he has been on the general Bari Weiss, “Some College Students Disagree With Me And It Will Be The End Of Us All” beat — which his bio describes as “issues around free speech and expression, and stories capturing intellectual and campus debate.” Prior to that, he primarily covered sports.
Powell whines about affirmative action, about how trans people are ruining everything for varied and sundry groups of people, about how the Left is murdering free speech and what have you. You know, the usual railing against the supposed '“excesses of the Left” that we have come to know and groan at from the Times.
But now he’s writing in The Atlantic, another storied publication that has also been very hot for this sort of content lately. His latest article imagines “Where Donald Trump Meets Bernie Sanders,” a hypothetical middle ground wherein Democrats keep pushing for economic justice for the poor but without ever making white men feel badly about their individual prejudices.
This has always been a favorite comparison for those who somehow do not understand the difference between “I would like to help you economically by using tax money to ensure that you have health care and child care, a steady job that pays you a living wage, a place to live, and that you and your kids are able to go to college to get an even better job if you like” and “The only reason you don’t have those things is because of whichever minority group we have decided is bad this week.”
At the center of Powell’s thesis is Oliver Anthony, the “Rich Men North of Richmond” guy that we are apparently going to have to keep talking about for the next year, his “primal cry of pain,” his anguish, his despair and Chris Murphy, the unlikely Democratic senator who “gets it.”
Via The Atlantic:
From the start, Senator Murphy, a liberal Democrat from Connecticut, winced at the anti-welfare and anti-tax tropes, which are hardly new to country music. But he was more struck by the anguish encoded in a haunting song by an artist who struggles with alcoholism and depression, and who lives in a camper in rural Virginia.
I got on the phone with Murphy recently to talk about all of this. “To just ridicule and dismiss the things that he is saying is a real lost opportunity,” the senator told me. “I worry that we are entering a world where we don’t talk unless people are 110 percent in alignment with us.”
Well, we’re not. If you actually pay attention to what people were criticizing about this song, it was the very idea of complaining about these things and then blaming exactly the wrong people and policies.
I see people on the Left disagreeing all of the time. Hell, people disagree with me, personally, all of the time. And as long as we do it from a base of kindness and respect for other people’s humanity, we usually get over it quite quickly and find common ground on another thing. There is a big difference between that and “Oh please, won’t anyone hear my primal cry of pain over hypothetical fat people eating hypothetical fudge rounds?”
People love this line, but it’s bullshit and it always has been.
The reason it feels this way to certain people is because they not getting the “Wow, you’re so smart, I never thought of it that way” reactions to which they thought they were entitled. Free speech, for them, isn’t when they get to merely express themselves, it is when they win. Or at least when no one criticizes them.
By proposing a broader conversation, Murphy has given himself an intriguing task. At times, he wonders if liberals can recognize a primal call of pain for what it is. Anthony sings in an argot filled with cultural allusions that may sound offensive or at least alien to some (one commentator criticized his supposedly inferior use of rhyme). Progressives who want to fix a broken economy, Murphy argues, better find a way to hear out people like Anthony.
It is, in fact, entirely possible to empathize with Oliver Anthony’s economic situation while also thinking he is perhaps a bit of a jackass going around trying to blame fat people and other poor people for it. It does not have to be “Oh wow, we didn’t realize you were hurting so much! We feel your pain and therefore give you a pass on all of the incredibly shitty things you just said!”
If you want the truth, where I feel a little annoyed is with the idea that (mostly) conservative white men are currently dealing with a special kind of anguish. That they are in serious pain and the rest of us are just ignoring it and concentrating on issues that either don’t affect them or that possibly take something away from them that they are accustomed to having. They’re not supposed to bear the kind of “Hey, I agree with you here but not here” scrutiny that barely registers to most other people.
That’s where I feel annoyed and it’s where a lot of other people feel annoyed as well. You want health care? You want a living wage? Great, let’s talk! You want to trash talk fat people and blame them for your pain? No. Sorry, no. We’re gonna say “Dude, you’re blaming the wrong people.”
Powell repeatedly drives home his theory that the ideal stance of the Democratic Party would be economically liberal and socially conservative — which is not terribly surprising given his history of hysteria surrounding the existence and humanity of trans people.
Murphy is a repeat provocateur. In July, he tweeted that “there are a lot of social conservatives who believe in populist economic policies, and it would be a good idea to have those people a part of a Democratic/left coalition and accept a bit more intra-movement friction on culture issues as a consequence.” That post included a thoroughly unscientific but still revealing poll that found that 77 percent of those who responded disagreed with him. […]
I would just like to remind Chris Murphy that he is an actual elected representative and that it is positively absurd for him to blame anything at all on what liberals are doing on social media. Does he legitimately believe that he would be able to come up with and pass better legislation if only people on social media had said “Oh boy, Oliver Anthony, it’s totally okay that you are mad at all the wrong people, the important thing here is that you are in pain, and we feel that pain.”
It’s all getting very tired, especially when one considers the way the Right behaves on social media. I mean, I’m really gonna have to point out here that Republicans are out here trying to pass bills meant to protect conservatives from the consequences of their Nazified social media feeds, while Democrats like Chris Murphy are blaming liberals on social media for all kinds of nonsense.
Both Murphy and Powell praise Bernie Sanders’s ability to connect with all kinds of working class voters, but I would like to point out that Sanders manages to do this without throwing in a single word about how it would be totally fine for those voters to to say horrible things about fat people or discriminate against trans people if they want.
The Republicans are aware of these shifting class tectonics. “I have a very smart conservative friend who describes the next five years as a race,” Murphy said, “to see whether the right can become more economically progressive before the left becomes a bigger tent.”
Personally, my theory is that the Right keeps trying to promise people that the thing that will truly improve their lives is getting to oppress some other group of people and the ability to say terrible things without anyone ever thinking they are an asshole and the Left just becomes even more economically progressive and focused on improving everyone’s lives both socially and economically, becoming a bigger tent by both default and necessity. How about that?
Excellent writing Robyn, thank you.
It's the "forgotten man" syndrome - white males have been the only people worth thinking about for millennia, so now that all the rest of us are being considered, the white males are forgotten. They aren't really forgotten, but just feel that way, because the rest of us are being remembered. To them, it's a zero sum game.