“The Democratic message on the Republicans has gone from ‘the party of no’ to “the party of angry white men.” — Peggy Noonan in the June 12 Wall Street Journal
If you happen to be male, if you happen to be white and if you have allowed yourself to get angry over recent turns in public policy, then, like it or not, you are the last permissible stereotype — an Angry White Man.
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Worse, you are in a decided minority, perhaps less than 20 percent of the electorate according to pollsters. You may be glad to know, though, that a pony-tailed, formerly pot-smoking, ear-ringed Swede of the X generation is on your side . . . but we’ll get to that later.
The Angry White Man was personified by Michael Douglas in the 1994 film, “Falling Down.” The stereotype was dusted off earlier this month to serve as the foil for a personable Hispanic female nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
But in real life how does one get stuck with such a label?
Douglas’s movie character offers no clues. He suddenly snaps and goes on a violent rampage across Los Angeles selecting his targets by race, gender and social or political inclination. One reviewer, applying Hollywood’s version of Root Cause Analysis, suggested that he simply read the wrong books, that he had never had the chance to develop the sensitivity of, say, a Barack Obama or a Joe Biden or a Harry Reid.
Let’s go with that. I have a friend who is white, male and particularly angry about losing his retirement as a result of the government’s intrusion into the housing loan industry. And indeed, his bookshelf would seem to provide all the damning evidence that anyone would need:
- There are the writings of a Jewish Russian immigrant who named herself Ayn Rand. The book is “Atlas Shrugged,” and our man could never shake Rand’s ideas on the moral imperative of productivity and risk-taking. It illustrated the cost of self-serving politicians regulating the most productive to a point of societal ruin. It is a realization, all of us can agree, that might tip the unstable to anger.
- F.A. Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit” is there. Our Angry White Man would never again be able to read a pronouncement by a government committee or board without a spike in his blood pressure. Drilled into his head is the tragedy that occurs when the primacy of the individual is abandoned in solving a society’s problems.
- “Losing Ground” is on the shelf, a critique of The Great Society written by Charles Murray, a formerly knee-jerk liberal Peace Corps volunteer turned sociologist. His book, along with Tom Bethell’s “The Noblest Triumph,” teaches that property and wealth, to be lasting, have to be earned, that they cannot be awarded as a politically determined gift.
- Thomas Sowell is there. He worked his way from the slums of Harlem to the University of Chicago to write “A Conflict of Visions.” The book teaches that there are two types of people in history, and they are not distinguished by skin color, root causes or even economic background. The first is made up of those who value liberty, who understand that equality of opportunity is sacrificed in pursuit of equality of results. The second type, a majority as it turns out, prefers an egalitarian ideal.
Now we come to that pony-tailed, ear-ringed, (formerly) pot-smoking 41-year-old Swede — a sort of hippie Ronald Reagan. He is Anders Borg, his nation’s finance minister, a man who breaks the stereotype of the Angry White Man into smithereens from a nation whose soft socialism was the model for the Obama generation.
Anders, in fact, got into politics to legalize marijuana. Today he is the intellectual leader of Sweden’s ruling Moderate Party, guiding a reform movement that intends to dismantle his nation’s welfare state and re-instill free-market principles into its citizenry.
He argues that lowering taxes is the only way to create new motivation for Swedes to work and to find business opportunities. And in an irony of proportions that may be beyond the comprehension of our national media, this Swedish finance minister warned the White House in advance of this summer’s economic summit that America is pursuing an “untenable” agenda.
So, let’s make sure we have all of this straight: A female émigré from Russia, a Peace Corp volunteer, an inner-city black and a (formerly) pot-smoking long-hair from Sweden are the heroes of today’s Angry White Man?
Yes, and that won’t make any sense — unless, of course, we break down this last stereotype, as we have done with so many before, into real live individuals.
— Craig Ladwig
Craig Ladwig is editor of The Indiana Policy Review.
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