A thing I’ve learned in the last 5-2 years is that a huge amount of this country’s problems boil down to a culture that celebrates being an asshole, to the extent that many Americans will act like assholes even when it hurts themselves materially.
Some of this is about power. Just as working class people will give up, say, wages in order to have more control over their workdays and lives, rich people give up material things (e.g. better health outcomes) to keep more control of society.
Two key texts on the preceding tweet: David Montgomery’s classic essay “Worker Control of Machine Production in 19th Century America” (labor disputes are about power), The Spirit Level (rich people in unequal places have worse outcomes than rich people in more equal society), and
also my own Disaster Citizenship on people giving up material disaster relief in order to preserve autonomy in their own lives.
But I’m actually no longer satisfied with that explanation. We need a bigger, grander explanation of American (North American? Anglo-Saxon?) assholery.
I now suspect that the way to think about this question is as an after-effect of slavery and of settler colonial genocide. The culture built by slavery and genocide, that is, is a culture that produces the central assholery of American culture.
Since assholery and masculinism have such overlap, one should also, I think, build into this theory what Jeanne Boydston taught us in Home and Work about how American capitalism and the very idea of work was co-constituted with modern patriarchy.
I’m also thinking about the idea I learned from @RevDrBarber at #lawcha19 that American Protestantism was deformed by being a religion of slaveowners, and that it needs to be reconstituted.
Anyway, consider this to be a call for further research.
Maybe this is just the Frontier Thesis but with more attention to slavery?
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