Come See us: 123 Main St

•

Find us on Social Media

After the Future

· ·

Jim Sleeper on White Male Rage

White guys who succumb to ressentiment aren’t as trapped and brutalized as black guys. But unlike blacks, who’ve been denigrated, mauled and murdered forever in almost routinized ways that whites can barely…

White guys who succumb to ressentiment aren’t as trapped and brutalized as black guys. But unlike blacks, who’ve been denigrated, mauled and murdered forever in almost routinized ways that whites can barely imagine ever happening to themselves, the white guys are reeling now because their loss seems so recent, humiliating and, to them, inexplicable.

In ressentiment some of them find “easy” enemies on whom to wreak vengeance for frustrations borne of exploitation by powers they’re afraid or ill-prepared to confront. By making them feel big even as it diminishes them, ressentiment warps their assessments of the hardships and challenges before them. It shapes disguises they put on when they run those shell games in education, real estate and employment, pursuing vengeance, if not vindication, without risking punishment or reproach.

Wherever ressentiment has erupted throughout history — whether in medieval Catholic Inquisitions, Puritan or McCarthyite witch hunts, Chinese cultural revolutions, nihilist extremes of “people’s liberation movements,” or political correctness in academic departments — its most telling symptoms have been paranoia and routinized bursts of hysteria. Its collective passions touch raw nerves, often under the ministrations of an increasingly surreal journalism that brutalizes public discourse itself. (Cue Murdoch and Fox.)

Those “journalists” who’ve made a fine art of fomenting and feeding on overstressed people’s fears and resentments soften up the public sphere for something much worse. Movements borne of ressentiment carry legitimate grievances to a fleeting brilliance, but soon they curdle and collapse, tragicomically or catastrophically, on their own cowardice, ignorance, and scapegoating and other lies.

As they collapse, adherents spin their resentments into newer, more perverse kinds of force and fraud that emerge in racist shootings, road rage, addictions to violent video games, intensively marketed security precautions against armed home invasion, gladiatorialization in sports (including cage fighting but also hockey and football), nihilism in entertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment, and a huge prison industry that employs mostly white guys to punish mostly nonwhite, broken, violent men, even as schools in the whitest neighborhoods are imprisoned by fear of gunmen who are often the students themselves.

Staggering through this growing derangement, which Democratic and Republican policies are enabling and which Murdoch, the Koch brothers and their minions are fomenting, millions are spending billions on palliatives, medications, addictions and even surveillance designed to protect them from themselves.

No wonder that neoliberal economic and political strategists survey the public wreckage they’ve caused, cluck their tongues and tell one another at Davos that, after all, the people must be ruled. Yet these supposed leaders can barely rule themselves, and they, too, become reliant on demagogues who vow to rule everybody for everybody’s own good.

There’s certainly no harm in well-meaning whites . . . plumbing their own feelings about race. But only newly instructive leadership and organizing could turn white guys’ heads, rattle the commentators’ rationalizations, and politicize the spiritually inclined.

The civil rights movement did all that when it roused impoverished black churchgoers to walk, unarmed and trembling, into silent Southern squares ringed by armed white guys and dogs. It didn’t always deter the white guys, but it did instruct and shame some of them.

Is anything analogous possible now? 

(Source)

Comments

10 responses

  1. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Not sure I follow this. Far too sweeping to be based on “ressentiment.” There’s a reference to the Chinese Cultural Revolution — how is that “white male rage,” exactly?

    Reply
  2. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    ?!White male rage toward liberal elites disenfranchising them in favor of another group is a species of the larger phenomenon ‘ressentiment’. Rage of peasant youth toward intellectual elites was likewise a species of ressentiment. Both result in group hyteria and violence.

    Reply
  3. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Obviously my concerns are greater here than the way that black men are being killed by police or by any other white person without fear of legal consequences. I see it as a particularly toxic symptom of a deeper illness, which the metaphor du jour for me is the ‘flood’.
    Jonathan, whether you agree with me or not, it should be clear by now that I think about social/political sphere as a critical arena for spiritual activity. Sleeper in describing the effects of ressentiment is describing the flood. And the only way we survive the flood is by publicly resisting it the way the early civil rights movement did.
    Sleeper seems to ‘get’ this. Ressentiment by the dispossessed is natural; it’s instinctive. But with the right kind of leadership it can be transformed the way a dam resists and transforms the raw energy present in the flow of a river. The question Sleeper asks at the end is the same one I’ve been asking, which is how to resist? How to take all this raw energy channeled into resentment and transform it into something constructive? Gandhi did it, and MLK did it. It’s possible with the right kind of leadership and organization.

    Reply
  4. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Yeah, but you can’t draw up a list of evils spanning 800 years and a half dozen cultures, toss around a French word, and then call for something “analogous” to the Civil rights movement. I don’t think that’s helpful. I’m not sure what Sleeper wants to see happen in a positive sense. What does the “analogous” mean? What’s on this side of the analogy? He has to posit something for that closing question to make any sense, even rhetorically. I did read the whole thing, and I don’t think he offers anything clear. Maybe I’m saying this because I wasn’t around in the 60s, but the gesture to the Civil Rights movement doesn’t work for me. Protest and outrage don’t work like they did (or didn’t) in the 60s. Capitalism and culture have changed since then, in large part due precisely to the various social revolutions of the aforementioned period of unrest. The Civil Rights movement in the US was only one of many liberalizing trends. Sleeper seems to object to the results of most of the others. There’s the rub. The Civil Rights movement wasn’t actually dissent. In fact, it was the opposite, it was a group of people demanding the right to assimilate, i.e. to live in peace and prosperity with their fellow citizens, who were liberalizing fast. Sleeper seems to be calling for dissent from mainstream culture, and that means the reference to civil rights, however glorious that movement was and however urgent its aims still should be, is a red herring when you look at what the deeper argument should be here.
    Since I’ve raised the complaint, I ought to offer something at least vaguely positive. Maybe Sleeper would go in this direction — though I doubt it, because I think he approves the moral autonomy that we possess in ever greater measure even as we’re more fiscally and legally manipulated. I think the only radical thing left to do is the only really radical thing there ever has been to do: build real communities. The problem with a community, though, is that it’s not very liberating in the Enlightenment sense. A real community or communion of individuals depends on bonds between people, obligations, constraints on consumption and behavior. The new radical dissent is going to have to take the form of voluntary renunciation, a new asceticism and a non-utopian communitarianism. I guess there was plenty of this going around in the 60s too (although paradoxically it turned easily into libertinism), and before that in the 1840s. . . and before that with the rise of the monasteries in western Europe, and before that with the earliest Christian communities in the Mediterranean basin. Maybe someday it will stick.
    Of course, you could say the agonistic and the constructive go hand-in-hand. But I think modern consumer capitalism has become so tricky it’s better to disengage than to engage.

    Reply
  5. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    The civil rights movement should not be confused with other New Lefty forms of protest in the sixties and seventies. There was a dignity and discipline to it that was completely different in spirit than the stuff that came later mostly in protest of the Vietnam War. I’m hoping this new movie Selma will make that clear, and it’s timing couldn’t be better if it does.
    So I’m not calling for people to take to the streets willy nilly. I’m talking about and I think that Sleep is too, a movement like OWS but that actually has leadership, goals, and strategies. I don’t think such a movement will have broad legitimacy unless it is religiously inspired as the early civil rights movement was.
    OWS or any other secularly inspired protest with a New Left ethos will never win broad support even if many people agree with their goals in theory. It’s all about symbols, and the symbols used by the Left in this country are antipathetic to too broad a swath of the American public.
    The Civil Rights movement won broad support, even with the inherent racism that affects broad swaths of the US, because it tweaked the conscience of the nation because of it religious ethos, it commitment to non-violence; it’s ability to take the brutal bashing that disgusted the country in a way that it could no longer ignore.
    Something similar has to happen if we’re to have any hope avoiding this drift toward an ever more rigid and brutal police state. There is an American mythos that can be tapped that could provide an antidote if someone charismatic enough can tell us a new story about being an American that most of us can believe in again, even if it’s just an aspirational ideal.

    Reply
  6. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    But do you see what I’m saying, Jack, about positive content to vision? And how the civil rights movement was fundamentally assimilationist? Saying Occupy Wall Street only needed to be better organized doesn’t do it for me. I need to know organized for what. It’s one thing to hate on Big Money. Anybody can do that, and has done it, since Big Money has been around. It’s something else entirely to have an alternative vision. It’s not that Occupy didn’t have goals. I don’t think that movement could possibly have had a coherent set of goals, and it certainly couldn’t have assented to the laundry list of mutually contradictory grievances Sleeper vented in his piece. To the extent Occupy made any sense, it was a moment of dissent. Everybody gets what Occupy was dissenting from. But what was it, or could it have been for?
    MLK was a great man. I have no doubt of that. But I believe my point holds. Insofar as what he wanted, in a positive sense, it’s hard for me to see it. Rights are, as I’ve said on here too many times, essentially negative. They assert someone’s, or some group’s, privileges over against some other’s. There’s nothing intrinsically bad about that. Sometimes it’s an assertion that needs to be made in a major way. Tragedy erupts when we try to go beyond rights. What is the positive content of the world to be? If it’s just more of the “American Dream” for more people, then we have a major problem. And that would be true even if the American Dream were remotely sustainable for even just Americans. It’s not, never mind the rest of the world. This wasn’t a factor, or magnitude, that Rev Dr King could have reckoned with in his time. But it’s a huge part, or should be, of what contemporary thinking and acting about “social justice” is for us now. Honestly, it stops me in my tracks.

    Reply
  7. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    I think we’re closer than appears. What we both want is justice. Now of course that’s a transcendent ideal, and my point in recent posts has been that the difference between just more of the same and real progress is determined by the degree to which any transcendent ideal (which I see as sourced in the Absolute Future) plays a role in shaping action in the political or in any other sphere.
    Now you can grade social movement by measuring the degree to which those ideals played a role. In fact I would lay out a spectrum with one pole identified as Justice and the other as Ressentiment. And you can locate different social movements somewhere along that spectrum. I was against the Vietnam War, and I am against the way the political system is a rigged game that is set up to protect the interests of the already rich and powerful, but I would argue that the mainstream of the protest movements against the war and OWS would be located more on the resentment end of the spectrum, and so while I wanted to become more actively engaged with it, I felt repelled by its raw anger and the ressentiment and ego-driven motives that were its dominant motivators.
    I’d situate OWS further toward the Justice end, but its reliance on Marxist/anarchist ideology makes it unappealing to me for other reasons. And I’d argue that the pre MLK assassination civil rights movement was rather close to the transcendent justice end of the spectrum, and that makes all the difference.
    When resentment is the main inspiration to action, it’s just part of the eternal cycle of what goes around comes around, and there is no possibility for real progress in that–it’s just one intererst group supplanting another. But when transcendent ideals are at play, then there is a real, even if small, step toward the Absolute Future.
    So you’re right–Big Money we shall have always with us, and no time soon is the iron law oligarchy going to be repealed, but there is such a thing as making gains and then regressing, and I’d argue that there was much in the Declaration of Independence, in the ideals of the abolitionists that led many to fight in the civil war, in the ideals that led Progressives to push back against Gilded Age predators that was inspired by the Absolute Future. There were real gains. We grew up a little, matured a little, but now we’ve regressed, and will continue to until some movement inspired by the Absolute Future arises to push back.
    So I agree with you that everything depends on how we define ‘social justice’. I have a very clear idea what that means for me, and i don’t see that reflected in a lot of the contemporary discourse about it, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t become part of that discourse again.

    Reply
  8. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Want a vision of what to be for?: social credit.
    I’m sympathetic to any Basic Income talk, but when they’re just tax-and-redistribute schemes that leave the debt-money financial system in place, I doubt it would be enough.

    Reply
  9. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Getting down to the nitty gritty policy is a second order or prudential issue. Prudence requires discernment of how the ideal can be activated in a particular time and place. I can think of situations where tax and redistribute might be prudent or others when it might not.

    Reply
  10. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Jonathan was asking for “positive content.” I was giving one. You can’t fight for “Justice” unless you have specific injustices you’re targetting, like segregated busses etc. This has been the problem with more recent protests; they are discontented but don’t know, specifically, what the hell they want done. This is why there’s been such an angry reaction to Ferguson protests. I’m upset because what do they want? What fo they want me to do?? I’d do it if I had any idea, but their plaint seems to boil down to “we wish bad stuff would stop happening to us disproportionately.” But how to address that structurally in such a way that people other than the bad guys would be able to do something about it?
    You absolutely NEED policy specifics you’re pushing for. Otherwise you’re just venting frustration non-constructively.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *