A Loose Affiliation of Millionaires and Billionaires and Babies
On May Day 2017 I was waiting for a train in Manhattan when a bunch of assholes in MAGA gear started going down the platform causing a scene, during that time period where they believed they had won and could act out with no consequence. I recognized one of them, their apparent leader, from a video where he was counterprotesting earlier that day in Union Square and got clocked in the face, because it was during that time that people decided those guys should face immediate physical consequences for acting out. I, being generally mouthy, looked at him and said “I’m happy you got punched”. I meant it. He was clearly flustered and said “Where did you see that?”. I just responded “I’m happy you got punched” again, and intentionally got on a different subway car than him.
It took less than a minute for him to go between the subway cars. He opened the door somewhere between Union Square and Brooklyn Bridge and hollered “WHY DID YOU SAY THAT? YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH ME?”. I did have a problem with him but I certainly wouldn’t tell him that so I told him that he deserved it again. He got real close to me and asked me if I wanted to go, a classic tristate tough guy sign I had hit a nerve. Mind you, this was on a reasonably full subway car just after rush hour, in clear view of dozens of witnesses. He wasn’t going to punch me, and I knew that.
I promise you that what happened next is real, and I wouldn’t tell the story if I didn’t have a friend who was also there to back me up on it because it feels like liberal Marine Todd when I tell it. I looked at his red MAGA hat and said “you only wear all that Trump shit to look big”. What I wasn’t expecting was for it to deflate him entirely. He was silent for a few seconds, sputtered out “well, at least I look big”, and slunk back to his car. I learned later that year that him and his gang of weirdos had called what they did the “May Day Slay” and had intended to “bash commie skulls”. I learned this after someone reported in December that he got his clock cleaned in a bar fight. I tell you this story because it’s a window into the psychology of the modern conservative, a collection of thin-skinned guys who need to resort to sad lows to feel like men.
Everyone involved with the MAGA movement and all of its various hangers on are weak in one way or another. Some will just come out and tell you that they’re weak, like the dudes who are afraid of cites for some reason, who are closely related to the gun guys who think they can’t go out of their house without being able to threaten deadly force to everyone. There are the people who lost their mind at the suggestion that they needed to care about other people during a pandemic, and who are hellbent on calling whatever manager the can so nobody can ever tell them to do that again. Those guys’ weakness is the absence of an ability to be strong for someone else’s sake. There are the hangers-on, guys who won’t go full MAGA, but are off gleefully using slurs just the same. They really bother me because they’re clearly using the R-slur like all slurs are used, to try to create clearance between them and people they feel are lesser, but they also sound like teenagers who think Eric Cartman is a cool guy they should try to emulate. It just doesn’t work the way they think it does.
Then there’s the high profile cases, dudes like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk isn’t particularly interesting to me as a man. He’s someone who pays someone else to play video games for him so a number will go up as proof he’s “dominant”, and bought a social network so that he could make people laugh at his jokes. You can diagnose that guy’s weakness from space. Mark Zuckerberg is, at least by comparison to Musk, a completely fascinating figure. He’s someone who spent the last decade trying to secure the optics of being a conscious, middle of the road liberal. A conscious CEO for a new age of company coming out of Silicon Valley in the Web 2.0 era. He went and toured Iowa, and it was generally assumed he had presidential ambitions. That made his open embrace of MAGA in the last couple months interesting.
Jamelle Bouie talked about this heel turn in depth, and I think he’s right when he says “We have a clique of powerful middle-aged men who want nothing more than to be boys.”, but I also think there’s something else there worth exploring. Zuckerberg was a part of a group of people who generally tried to do the right thing, or at least seemed to try to do the right thing. And I say seemed to there intentionally because I beleive his heel turn coinciding with Trump’s reelection gives away that he wasn’t actually sincere in his convictions, but was just afraid of other people getting mad at him. When there was no longer any kind of advantage to appearing socially progressive, or downside to being an asshole if you’re on the more cynical side, he shed those pretenses like a snake shedding its skin. That’s a type of weak guy I think we’re going to see more of.
I’ve mentioned all of these different types of guy because, while a lot of people have spent time identifying their flaws like I did, I haven’t seen a lot of discussion about how a man should be from anyone that I would like to see discuss the topic. The right wing is full of people who will tell you how to be a man. They’re convinced that being a man is a competition with every other man for dominance. That’s what leads you to pay people to play your video games so you can say you won, or use slurs to put other men down, or carry a gun with you at all times so you can feel strong, feel like you can put the men in their place. It’s a trap.
The reality is that being a man is a struggle with exactly one person — you. Your whole life is a struggle to be better than your mistakes, the things you didn’t do well. It’s a dedication to self-improvement in all forms. To be smarter, to be kinder, to take the time to learn from someone else about why what you’re doing or how you see the world is wrong. Jeb Lund once said that being progressive as a straight cis white guy is “making a lifelong commitment to being wrong” and it stuck with me. Every day I do something where I feel like I didn’t live up to who I am supposed to be, and I try to learn from that. It’s never a straight path, and I’ve spent a lot of time making the same mistakes over and over again, but the point isn’t the results, it’s the process. The essence of being a man, and true strength as a man, is the ability to face yourself and your flaws because it’s so easy to run.
There’s this saying that male influencers love — “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times”. They misunderstand it, because they don’t realize that the good times are good because enough people have tried to be better. The weakness they create is in men who no longer think they need to be better. Mark Zuckerberg taking the mask off is the sign of a weak man. Using the slurs because everyone else says you can now is the sign of a weak man. Turning the force of a government on the vulnerable becasue it makes you feel powerful is the sign of a weak man. The hard times, the times that try us for who we are, aren’t the fall of Rome, they’re the ones coming up. The strength you need to cultivate is to commit to trying to face when you’re wrong, and to learn from it. That’s how we can create good times. Otherwise, you’re just another coward hiding behind something because it makes you look big.
