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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsUS is Faced With a Feverish Populism of Anger and Hatred
. . .
With the sharing of power and acceptance of "non-masculine" values, according to sociologist Michael Kimmel, also comes a backlash. The angry white male is a major force in the ferocious efforts to return the United States to a patriarchal society. Such is the topic of Kimmel's latest book: Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era.
An excerpt from the Introduction to "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, contemptuously pushed aside by fast-talking, fast-driving fat cats and bureaucrats.
And they're mad as hell.
You see them pretty much everywhere these days - yet they're often 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 political 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 federal buildings. And, of course, when threatened by external forces, they muster up their coldest steel-eyed Dirty Harry imitation and say, "Make my day."
An excerpt from the Introduction to "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, contemptuously pushed aside by fast-talking, fast-driving fat cats and bureaucrats.
And they're mad as hell.
You see them pretty much everywhere these days - yet they're often 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 political 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 federal buildings. And, of course, when threatened by external forces, they muster up their coldest steel-eyed Dirty Harry imitation and say, "Make my day."
THE REST:
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20211-united-states-is-faced-with-a-feverish-populism-of-anger-and-hatred
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US is Faced With a Feverish Populism of Anger and Hatred (Original Post)
Triana
Nov 2013
OP
"...reinventing the American Revolution with Tea Party, Minutemen ...promoting protectionist and
pampango
Nov 2013
#1
pampango
(24,692 posts)1. "...reinventing the American Revolution with Tea Party, Minutemen ...promoting protectionist and
anti-immigrant policies."
The past two decades have witnessed mainstream white American men exploding like never before in our history. They draw their ranks from the middle class (office workers, salaried salesmen) and the lower middle class (the skilled worker, small farmer, or shopkeeper). They're the "pa" in the ma-and-pa store, Richard Nixon's "silent majority," and "Reagan Democrats." They're "Joe Lunchbucket," 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 reinventing 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 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.
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 contradictory 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.
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.
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 contradictory 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.
Nice find, Triana. Thanks for posting.
Number23
(24,544 posts)2. And pining for The Good Old Days along with the rest of the 1%. And by 1% I mean the folks that
don't give a crap about others, as long as they and their families are "secure" and get theirs. And even though their numbers are actually much higher than 1% (more like 30-40%), those folks are by no means all wealthy and never have been.
november3rd
(1,113 posts)3. He's Over-generalizing
He can't really say "blowing up buildings" in connection with an angry political conservative group.
Plus, the talk radio consciousness is more central to this problem than he let's on. After all, he's talking about consciousness here, and that's what mass media target.