When a candidate who had been caught bragging about sexually assaulting women ran during the 2016 presidential election with the full-throated support of the Ku Klux Klan, all while repeatedly promising to âMake America Great Again,â he both embodied and deployed a form of nostalgia that was particularly appealing to white men. Indeed, as a discrete demographic, white American men were the group who supported Donald Trump far more than any other did. 1 Since the election, simmering resentment has surged into the open as âalt-rightâ support for what amounts to a form of fascism grounded in white nationalism, and the vast majority of its adherents have been disgruntled men who mourn the way things supposedly used to be. What many clearly miss in particular is unchallenged white male dominance, which Trump helped them locate in a fantasized past, where ethnoracial minorities and women cowered in the background, except when summoned into service by their white male betters.
As those who reject such a reactionary vision struggle to find effective ways of doing so, one way that has arisen is to fight back. One such example is âPunch a Nazi,â a revived form of World War IIâstyle sloganeering that constitutes a left-leaning form of nostalgia promulgated primarily by, again, white American men. Another, potentially more productive way of countering the new wave of overt nationalism is to examine how such illusory fears of disempowerment function inside white men and where such feelings come from. In addition to the important work of understanding the contexts that produce such fears, what interior psychological and emotional responses do they produce? How does what amounts to a collective delusionâentitled, domineering white masculinityâwork at the individual level, and what part is played by the contrary notion, common among the white American male collective, that they are not a collective and are instead atomized, free-floating individuals? Although nostalgia is often thought of as an emotion felt by individuals, how does it work within them to shore up entrenched collective power? Where has this misguided sentiment come from historically?
Twentieth-century literary fiction often includes intricate portrayals of common psychological and emotional states, and the novels examined here provide adept analysis of representative white American male psyches. In addition, as Frederik Tygstrup points out in his study of literary representations of affect as a function of mapped geographical space, if we understand the self as socially situated in such a way that discernible structures such as whiteness and masculinity tend to provoke common emotional responses, then literary fiction can help us âstudy the self in different historical situations and chart different historically contextualized emotions.â With its often deeply examined portrayals of personal interiority, literary fiction can help to trace âhow subjectively felt emotions taint the perception of outer stimuli âŠâ 2 Common proclivities and reactions are, of course, prompted and shaped by the particulars of any personâs social situatedness; a crucial yet overlooked feature of the ironically collective white American male mindset that the novelists considered here illuminate is the forms of nostalgia often provoked in white American men by those who resist their dominance. Perceiving this emotion as common to a particular collectivity calls for explanatory context, especially that of the actual history denied by what appears to be a common white male nostalgic reflex. Writing from various identities positioned outside of normalized middle-class white masculinity, these authors dramatize how complex and widespread such longings among the dominant have been. Such feelings surface nowadays among white men of the sort who would likely never consider voting for a demagogue like Trump . Since the mid-1990s, scholars have extensively examined literary depictions of reactionary forms of white male backlash, but the personally felt and imagined forms of backwardness signaled by the term âreactionaryâ have received little attention. 3 This study conducts such an endeavor, finding in analytic case studies a preliminary taxonomy of particular forms that white American male nostalgia has recently tended to take.
Common White Male Dispositions
A working understanding of this study is that the perspective of the subordinated outsider can induce a keen understanding of the dominant white male psyche. The novels considered here are by authors socially categorized in ethnoracial and national terms as African American (Richard Wright), Italian American (Don DeLillo), Jewish American (Louis Begley), and Canadian (Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood, who focus extensively as well on patriarchal inclinations). The sixth author, Sloan Wilson , is commonly regarded as a more or less âordinaryâ American man of his time, but his zeitgeist-capturing novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), betrays both him and his protagonist, Tom Rath, as another sort of outsider, the bearer of a largely unconscious White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) heritage. This positionality is largely hidden from Tom and apparently even from Wilson himself. Nostalgic feelings repeatedly arise for these novelsâ white male protagonists, usually when faced with heightened expectations of egalitarian treatment and opportunity by women and subordinated ethnoracial minorities. The protagonists often evoke elements of selectively conceived pasts, illustrating not only an illusory sense of unfair treatment of themselves but also a broader failure of the social order that has long favored and exalted them. This failure springs from a collective refusal to acknowledge, let alone attempt to reconcile, a lurking contrast between the brutal realities of the nationâs past and its mythical, vainglorious representations of both itself and its archetypal white male leaders, a contrast that to this day continues to haunt the nationâs sociopolitical landscape.
With their sustained method of sociohistorically situated interior portraiture, these novelists demonstrate that, in terms of self-conception, white men in the United States are not what they are more likely than others to think and feel they areâfree-floating individuals without significantly raced and gendered identities. As legal scholar Ian Haney LĂłpez reminds us about the history of racial formations in the United States, all identities are socially formed and thus ineluctably relational: âFathoming the content of white identity requires a shift from thinking about races as categories toward conceptualizing races in terms of relationships. [âŠ] It is in the elaboration of these relationshipsâinvariably of domination and subordination, normativity and marginality, privilege and disadvantageâthat white identity is given content.â 4 A grounding presumption of this study is that in a putatively meritocratic, egalitarian social order, dominance is continually normalized into commonsense ideology. The largely unexamined social water in which we all swim inculcates in individuals a discernible array of suppositions, feelings, prejudices, and inducements toward seemingly appropriate action; this array generally functions, as social theorist Pierre Bourdieu succinctly puts it, as that which âgoes without saying because it comes without saying.â 5 Race, gender, sexuality, and other categorizing forces have intertwined coterminously in favoring and disfavoring ways, and those least aware of the resultant hierarchical social order tend to be those most marked, yet unmarked , as the normâheterosexual middle-class white men. Their greater ignorance of such social forces and their results constitutes a mass delusion, a psychological and emotional state produced by a history of often brutal dominance within a culture that denies such history and such dominance.
As the chapters here demonstrate, understanding white male dominance in the hopes of countering it calls for elucidation of both its historical context and the inner workings of those who enact it. As Joel Kovel put it in his groundbreaking âpsychohistoryâ of white racism, âIt is the average man, with his ânormalâ racism and fantasies, whose behavior will give the key to the deeper meanings of racism. For, if personality and culture are congruent, then it is the ânormalâ manâs personality which most accurately mirrors the psychohistory of his culture.â 6 I have drawn heavily from both critical whiteness studies and critical masculinity studies for theoretical help, but I do see in each a common lack: what is posited in critical whiteness studies as true of white people is often especially true of white men, and what is posited in masculinity studies as true of men is also often especially true of white men. I hope that my project will help to flesh out this rarely acknowledged conceptual overlap. 7
Additionally, as historians of the United States continually remind us, stark contrasts have always existed between the way the nation presents itself to both its citizens and the rest of the world and the reality of its often brutal ways; indeed, the obliteration of other âAmericasâ in its other, well-fondled name effectively emblematizes the erasure that is endemic to the nationâs self-presentation. Although any nation functions as such on the necessary grounding of a narrated, shared past, the truths of which often get glossed over, in the United States, certain obscured truths exist at an especially grotesque level and scale. The harsh realities of genocide, stolen lands, stolen lives, enforced labor, and more continue to go largely unspoken (especially by the dominant) andâwhen spokenâlargely unheard. When the subordinated speak historical truth and resist its ongoing results, they increasingly do so in ways that must be heard by the dominant, because they make the contrast between putative meritocratic egalitarianism and ongoing subjugation and expropriation too obvious to deny. Common white male reactions, both individually and (ironically enough) collectively, are to deny national truths that strike others as obvious and to seek reassertion and bolstering of white male dominance. Hearkening back nostalgically to earlier eras, in which the subordinated are cast as less restive, and the settings more enabling of unfettered white male action and self-staging, can seem to provide such reassertionâor at least, an assuaging, compensatory reassurance.
As the novels studied here effectively dramatize, white men who engage in such self-bolstering denial and nostalgia are not only those who display white supremacist tattoos and haircuts while marching for recognition of the supposedly threatened white race, but âordinaryâ men as well, members of the normalized middle-classâa group in which the majority of men also voted for Donald Trump and his revanchist agenda. The desired return to previous eras of seemingly unchallenged eminence commonly animates even those white American men who do not recognize the dominance of their collective or, if they do, would not consciously seek reassertion of such dominance. Nevertheless, such men often react negatively to progressive change that highlights and challenges their ascendancy, resulting in feelings that they struggle to understand. These feelings in turn often result in emotionally saturated returns to fantasized earlier social arrangements and settings that seem more congenial to the performance of unfettered white masculinity.
Extended studies of white male nostalgia per se do not yet exist, although studies of white masculinity do, within and across numerous fields. 8 A common assertion in such work i...