Will the American project survive the anger of white men? / by Carol Anderson
‘Trump has laid out an agenda that will provide the “wages of whiteness” to his male supporters but very little else.
The racist hate that undergirds Maga can only provide threadbare comfort.’
At key moments throughout US history, white male anger has been privileged over national security, progress or basic welfare
Afriend recently asked: “Do you think the United States will survive the anger of white men?”
As blunt as the question is, the core element is not so far-fetched. In fact, the majority of white men (and women) who voted in the presidential election in 2024 have rallied around a man who has called for the “termination of the constitution”, vowed to be a “dictator”, and threatened to deploy the US military against Americans.
They support a man who is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a proven liar, who has been fined nearly half a billion dollars for fraud, who incited an insurrection that injured 140 police officers, and who mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic causing hundreds of thousands to die needlessly.
The fact that Donald Trump’s candidacy was even viable, given that horrific track record, was because of the support of white men.
White men, whose anger was on full display at Madison Square Garden as they spewed racist, misogynistic venom. White men who attacked poll workers and also voters of Kamala Harris. White men who chafed at the thought that their wives and girlfriends would not vote for the man who thought it was “a beautiful thing” that reproductive rights had been destroyed.
And, as the New York Times reported, the downwardly mobile, frustrated “white men without a degree, [who] have been surpassed in income by college-educated women”.
And let’s be clear. Trump has laid out an agenda that will provide the “wages of whiteness” to his male supporters but very little else. The racist hate that undergirds Maga can only provide threadbare comfort.
The planned enormous tariffs, the rollback on workplace, food and environmental safety regulations, the dismantling of labor protections, the planned deportation of tens of millions of undocumented people and naturalized citizens, the assault on reproductive rights and alignment with dictators – all of this will destroy the economy, explode the deficit and leave the United States severely isolated and weakened.
This is nothing new. White male anger, especially at the nation’s inclusion of African Americans, has repeatedly privileged white supremacy over the viability of the United States.
During the war of independence, when the nation was fighting to become the United States, South Carolina’s government fumed at Congress’s request to arm the enslaved and give them their freedom in exchange for fending off a British force that was more than 10 times the size of what those in Charleston could muster. Government officials flat out refused and barked that they weren’t sure that the US “was a nation worth fighting for” and would rather take their chances with the king of England.
In short, enslaving those of African descent was infinitely more important than the United States.
Later on, during the subsequent battles over drafting the constitution, far too many white slaveholding men were willing to hold the United States hostage unless they got their way.
The Free 