Having now read this @mckaycoppins piece on Miller for the second time, I think I've figured out the pebble in my shoe about guys like Miller. I went through the same trollish phase. (But not as nutty.) But I've been thinking about why some of us outgrow it. /1
Miller grew up surrounded by self-righteous, hypocritical liberal orthodoxy in California; I had the same experience in Massachusetts. It *does* make you trollish, and to want to puncture the smug liberalism of people that you know are NIMBY liberals. I was that way as a teen. /2
Unlike Miller, I didn't grow up reading trashy NRA crap and Limbaugh books. I also didn't have the smarts to read stuff from Modern Age and all that, even though for some reason I kept getting it in the mail. Orwell and Aurelius affected me. As did growing up in Kennedy Land. /3
But I think some of the difference between Miller and conservative kids like me was the Age of Reagan, where we imbibed RR's sunny confidence instead of the prissy, dour bitchiness of Fox and Breitbart and Trump. But the other factor, I'm sure now, was: Affluence. /4
Simply put, you have to have a cushion of money to be a jackass and *stay* a jackass on Miller's scale. I couldn't be a full-time campus idiot - I wasn't even a part time one - because I was at what was then a working class school, and I was working two jobs. That changes you. /5
You not only have to worry about how you'll feed yourself, but you're also spending a lot of time off campus and talking to normal people for whom politics isn't some sort of leisure-time intramural activity. It's the real world, where you'd also like to have friends. /6
More than that, your social life is about more than bullshitting about politics with other privileged kids. (I have no idea whether Miller was dating, but that's another wrinkle: trollery was not, uh, a recipe for social success. You had to have other social skills. ) /7
And then, you grow up. Education, if it had an impact on you, makes you understand that the world is complicated. You realize that your anger at the hypocrisy of smug liberals is legit, sure, but that the world isn't the Model UN debate team. /8
But again, all of the permanently juvenile behavior - and this is the most unserious, juvenile White House in history - is enabled by money. Reading the Coppins piece, I keep thinking that Miller, who is clearly smart, could have been changed by a girlfriend and a real job. /9
Maybe that's unfair, since I don't know Miller, and I can only extrapolate from what I see on TV and in the Coppins piece. But every time I see him, I think of him as being about 19, and as the guy in seminar who makes you roll your eyes whenever his hand goes up. /10
There's more to this, and I'm still kind of noodling it out, but this entire administration seems full of well-off but socially maladjusted people, from the President on down, who keep playing out their anger at some sort of 7th grade gym class humiliation. /11
And it's nagged me, because I can remember being young, insecure, angry at a liberal culture that was alien to me, and responding with the kind of trolly jerkishness you see in Miller. I remember a lot of us that way. *When we were teenagers.* /12
And yes, some of it I didn't outgrow. I'm still an arrogant jerk who deals in moral absolutes more often than I should. But I don't live my life to make other people angry. I never had that luxury - and also, because it's not normal to wallow in hostility every day. /13
I think I understand guys like Bannon and Miller, because I went through a time where I felt as they did. What I don't understand is how they've stayed on that path. Maybe it's money. Maybe an absence of religion. I don't know. But seeing now them makes me glad I didn't. /14x
