It makes us uncomfortable to face the reality
Edward Burmila at The Nation says we should be looking at why ABC decided to resurrect Roseanne in the first place.
The simplest, least satisfying explanation of why this happened is money. An industry reduced to mining nostalgia for an endless parade of reboots, remakes, and sequels could not resist reviving one of the essential, culture-defining sitcoms of the nineties. In this light, ABC saw the new Roseanne as no different than Fuller House—mindless, derivative, easy to churn out, and profitable.
The more complicated answer involves the media’s drive to “humanize” and explain those who see Trump as their long-awaited salvation. Like the endless journalistic forays into the Rust Belt to profile Trumpers with shuttered steel mills as a photo backdrop, the Roseanne reboot intended to show what the media kept calling the “white working class” sympathetically. The latest iteration of Roseanne Conner would demonstrate that the real-life people her character represents are not racist caricatures. This is, after all, what we would like to think about our fellow Americans—that we have differences, but we can still come together as one nation.
We would like to think that if it were true – but having differences is one thing, and being a fan of Trump is another. That’s not some little difference you can just overlook by talking about baseball instead.
But so often the actual Trump supporters ruin that narrative. Journalists and researchers are now finding that the veneer of “economic anxiety” among Trump supporters is built on a foundation of hate. Fans of Trump say little about the president’s Gilded Age economic policies, but boy do they fume over kneeling NFL players. And because this racism, xenophobia, and paranoia is not what we want to find, we go looking again and again until we find an answer that is more comforting.
Exactly. It’s not about misogyny and racism, it’s about elitism, the story goes. I wrote a Free Inquiry column about it last year:
What do we talk about when we talk about elites?
We should talk about power and money, but too much of the time we talk about snobbery, speaking French, flavored coffee drinks and similar social markers that may be psychologically wounding but do not, say, keep millions of children in inferior schools or workers in minimum wage jobs with no benefits.
In July 2016 Rod Dreher at The American Conservative asked J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a leading question about this more touchy-feely version of elitism:
I’m not a hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and career living among professional class urbanite[s], most of them on the East Coast, and the barely-banked contempt they — the professional-class whites, I mean — have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today?
It’s obvious to Rod Dreher but then he’s been primed to find it obvious, hasn’t he. We all have. It’s been a cliché of political campaigns for decades that liberals are effete snobs while conservatives are salt of the earth workin’ folks constantly wounded by the scorn of the pointy-headed intellectuals (aka the Jews). We hear about snooty consumer choices, instead of policies on unions and worker protections. Given that background I have to wonder how much Dreher really does experience professional class urbanites displaying obvious contempt for poor white people, and how much he just imagines he does because we’ve all heard about it a million times.
Back to Burmila:
Roseanne is inseparable from this quest to find evidence that Trumpers are ultimately good, kindhearted people whose fears and economic insecurity are being exploited by a charlatan. It makes us uncomfortable to face the reality that tens of millions of Americans need no encouragement at all to support authoritarian and racist politics. Try as we may to tell ourselves that the masses are tricked into supporting far-right regimes in the United States or Europe, the uncomfortable reality is that many are willing, even eager.
…
It worked briefly. The show was lauded initially for being “incredibly honest” about who Trump voters are. Conservatives loved the ratings success of a show they saw as a rebuke of leftist Hollywood. After the initial surge of interest, the show appeared to settle into a consistent ratings generator for ABC.
Ultimately, the real Roseanne undermined the fictional one. Roseanne the character could humanize the show’s white, Midwestern, salt-of-the-earth types only if Barr kept up appearances, at least well enough for viewers to suspend disbelief. She could not. Rather than celebrate the network and the show’s famous co-stars for speaking out now, it is better to reconsider their initial motives. If they did this simply for the money, they are unprincipled. If they did it to show audiences relatable and “normal” Trump-loving Americans, they are misguided.
Barr may have wanted to use a fictional version of herself to prove that white people who love Donald Trump—people like her, in short—are not racists who traffic in ludicrous conspiracy theories and detest anyone who isn’t like them. She failed because that is exactly what she is. ABC, in abetting this mess, found that even Hollywood magic can’t make sympathetic characters out of such people, although I suspect it will keep trying. The alternative is confronting the fact that the beliefs of a substantial number of Americans are malevolent and dangerous, not mere differences of opinion that can be resolved in 20 minutes, with a hug.
And it’s nothing to do with coffee.
I don’t really understand why it’s so uncomfortable… A sizable portion of the population is absolutely terrible and it’s never really been a mystery.
Just seems like “good” people wanted to live in a fantasy world.
And one thing that everyone totally misses – it isn’t the elite who have contempt. I have lived in Trump world long enough to realize that we are the ones held in contempt. They think…well, what they think is in this:
https://ofliberalintent.com/blog/2018/5/26/those-damned-coastal-elites
Strikes me as a false dilemma. Not all the (working class) characters on the show were Trump supporters. I doubt the show was ever meant to be about “Trump voters” in particular.
Artists work with characters and ideas they disagree with all the time. It’s absurd to blame Barr’s coworkers for her fuck up.
I can honestly say: the few Trump supporters I’ve met in real life were really pretty spectacularly contemptuous of just about _everyone_, once you got past the skin-deep just folks salt-of-the-earth modesty that seems to go with the role they imagine they’re to play. And iknklast’s link above rings quite true to me: that’s an attitude I’ve seen, more than a few times, and well before Trump, likewise. There’s hardly anything more obnoxious than smalltown snobbery of that flavour. Big fish in small ponds have a peculiarly venomous assholery about them, have as long as I’ve ever observed, and that’s a while, now. It’s odd. Feel like there should be a name for this, if there isn’t. The snobbery of ‘just folks’. And no, they’re not. They’re just jerks, who figure somehow they’re _better_, because they’re ‘just folks’. Didn’t go to school or didn’t go that far or stuck to one business degree and never read a damned thing that wasn’t written by a dumb as shit self-help guru, never left their hometown, and all this makes them _superior_ to them thar Hollywood phonies and academic eggheads, apparently.
And at least one of those happy to get on the Trump Vapid Hatred Express was hardly what you’d call economically anxious, either. In that case, there was this incredibly two-faced attitude: he’d scoff unreflectively at someone working construction for being too lazy to stay in school and get a better job, but happily hold up ‘working people’ as showing they know better, by supporting his ugly, xenophobic saviour. Total sucker for all the online alt-right hates, too, wild Soros conspiracy theories to scary immigrants are everywhere to ‘chain migration’ will eat the world, oh my.
So, sure, I’m probably simplifying from my limited experience, too, but _that_ is _my_ picture of a Trump supporter. No, not some steelworker frustrated the jobs are gone to Mexico. I mean, sure, those might exist, might be voting that way, but, honestly, if so, it’s a bit outside my personal experience. No, it’s more middle-tier white collar assholes, not real sharp about recognizing obvious fucking astroturf as manipulative poison it is (or maybe just not real interested in looking real hard at it, if it blows a direction they like the taste of), and happy to have their petty xenophobias validated by a larger machine.
I didn’t see it that way at the time, but looking back I’m grateful that I had an opportunity to live for a couple of years in a small town in the Midwest before everything started to go off the rails. At the time this was a bizarre and exotic culture to those of us not from there, and I learned a hell of a lot. I think the weirdest and most significant thing I came to understand was just how small each person’s ‘bubble of concern’ was. They cared what happened to their spouse and children…and that’s it. Not even their siblings, in-laws, or other family members. Everyone else in the world at best didn’t register and at worst deserved what was coming to them for, I guess, not being a part of the speaker’s nuclear family.
guest, this fits with a former associate dean I had. He was opposed to student loans and grants, because he saw no reason a single penny of his taxes should go to educate anyone but his own children. And this was an associate dean at a public school, who wouldn’t have his job if it weren’t for the fact that taxes go to educate someone other than his own children.
Voting in their own best interests? Hardly. Voting for their own hatreds and bigotry? Absolutely.
@iknklast I found the whole mindset really astonishing–the people I interacted with literally couldn’t imagine what possible reason there might be to do something for anyone besides their immediate nuclear families. And sometimes not even them–one thing I was involved with while there was setting up a monitoring programme to try to keep track of the depletion of the Oglalla Aquifer. This was absolutely refused by the ranchers involved–all we wanted to do was monitor, since they had the right to pump as much water as they wanted to for free, but they believed this was a precursor to potentially charging for the water. I explained to them that they were already at the point of losing the water they had the right to (they already knew this, it was getting more and more expensive to drill and pump deeper and deeper wells), and if they continued what they were doing the property they would be leaving to their children would be worthless. And that made no impression at all. So we could consider ourselves fortunate if their ‘bubble of concern’ even extended to their own children.
I honestly don’t understand how people can live like that–even irrespective of what we’d consider basic human charity, it just doesn’t make any practical sense, as your example demonstrates.
I guess ‘hatred and bigotry’ is a big part of this mind set, but as far as I can determine it’s not actually the principal part–the principal part, to me, is just a complete lack of imagination, basic human empathy or theory of mind. Everyone else in the world is an NPC to them. (And I’m uncharitable enough to think the pretense of caring about their nuclear families is only there because those other people ‘belong to’ them–that was certainly evident in the way most of the people I dealt with thought of and treated their children.)
guest, I’ve witnessed that same phenomenon. In the town I live, the EPA told the town they would need to build a drinking water treatment plant because of high nitrates. They didn’t want to put in the money, so the head of the utilities browbeat the EPA until they backed down (to be perfectly clear, I blame the EPA very strongly for this, as well. They should have stuck to their guns). The town considers him a hero, and some of the people have even made the jaw-droppingly bad statement “After all, nitrates only hurt infants”. By the way, the people here? Strongly Catholic, rabidly “pro-life”. Bring more babies into the world so you can damage them with nitrates.
And when I was working on a lake restoration project in Oklahoma, it was difficult to get the farmers to consider reducing the amount of phosphorus they were dumping in the water body, because the chicken manure was “value added” and they didn’t want to lose that extra money – even at the expense of having the water body they relied on damaged beyond repair (it wasn’t yet when I left, but that was 20 years ago, so…). And the expense of cleaning up the lake was enormous just to do a tiny section of the lake as a demonstration project. They couldn’t see the benefits of protecting the lake for their children. They weren’t likely to live long enough to see the total destruction, so they didn’t care.
I agree that there is a lack of imagination and empathy; but I have also witnessed a strong amount of hatred and bigotry, and not just directed at those of different race, gender, or sexuality, but those of a different socioeconomic class. The word “white trash” is operative here.
Re: the general empathy thing beyond self/maybe family
I get this, totally… Personally I don’t give a damn about anyone but myself at an emotional level and in some sense doubt that there is actually anyone in the universe but me…
Here’s the kicker though: I know I should care about other people so I conduct myself as if I did care. How morally bankrupt do you have to be to not make the effort?
That’s all that’s needed for a better society.
I agree with iknklast–understanding that being a decent person actually advances your selfish interests is actually probably a better foundation for a civil society than feeling deep empathy for everyone in the world. IIRC in one of the recent Sherlock Holmes episodes Sherlock says something like ‘I’m nice to people because I need them to do stuff for me.’ It’s a logical, sensible and practical way to behave. Not only morally bankrupt, but ‘how stupid, shortsighted, and blind to your own interests, do you have to be?’