The Year of the Old Boys: Trump, Kavanaugh, Moonves, Epstein, etc. Childish masculinity.

[catbyte]

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which childish masculinity revealed itself in 2018 as the engine of power in America.

By LILI LOOFBOUROW

Many of us have spent 2018 trying to wrap our heads around how, exactly, the country whose slightly priggish brand was once meritocracy, competence, and moral authority has turned out to have instead nourished and enriched an elaborate network of overripe, decadent, and not particularly clever criminals. What’s confusing about that isn’t that the myth of our virtue was greatly exaggerated—that much was clear to anyone with a passing knowledge of American history. No, what’s confusing is the extent to which the fiction of decency (whether political, financial, or sexual) seems to have been unnecessary all along.

If Donald Trump has served a salutary function, it’s that he has stripped those fictions bare. 2018 has ended euphemisms and pretenses and politesse, and however much some claim to miss the country’s more decorous days, there’s something to be said for having the outsides match the insides. The myth of the great male American leader has been as robust as it’s been ruinously incomplete. It needed to be exposed, and Trump did so with a beautiful absence of care. He’s not going to behave at a funeral. He won’t sing the opening hymn or the national anthem or participate in a communal gesture unless it centers him. He’ll wander off the stage he’s sharing with the Argentine president, insult a dying senator, forget to sign things once he’s gotten his applause, publicly praise men for not snitching on him. He’ll use his Twitter account as a burn book, and what he’s most grateful for at Thanksgiving is himself. The definition of American “greatness” he has embodied is as precise as any we’ve had.

Understanding how a system broke requires taking the full measure of the leaders it produces and the qualities for which they’re embraced. Trump is valued, by his supporters, for much of the above. That’s not entirely new. In overvaluing a certain kind of masculine ethos, the United States has always glorified impoliteness; there have long been people who confuse boorishness with power and find courtesy effeminate. But what’s interesting about Trump’s conduct is that while it’s unmannerly, it’s not rude in that classic hard-nosed, stick-it-to-’em, I-got-no-time-for-niceties way. His aren’t power moves that command respect. Rather, they’re puffy and decadent—the qualities associated with the kind of bratty, spoiled boy we met when the term affluenza was first used as a legal defense on the grounds that someone so ruined by financial privilege can’t understand ethics or consequences. Trump isn’t too busy for etiquette; he has nothing but time. He spent Barbara Bush’s funeral on Twitter denying that he called Jeff Sessions “Mr. Magoo” and Rod Rosenstein “Mr. Peepers.” There’s a crusty entitlement to this species of maleness that makes it feel at least as geriatric as it is juvenile. Though Trump’s petty malice puts him in (roughly) seventh grade, it has a doddering petulance, too. He is, in effect, an old boy. And when you step back and think about it, you realize America is full of them.

That America is an old boys’ club is a boring truism. The expression exists for a reason; we’ve seen the mutually exonerating mechanisms of boys’ clubs pop out into the open in a variety of ways this year. The sulky mulishness of many a Great American Man has long been kept decorously half-secret with the invocation of code words like uncompromising and choleric. Not anymore. The Old Boy needs attention as well as power, and with this presidency, the former has finally trumped the latter. The results are disconcerting. So is the troubling scope of the problem. From Trump to Brett Kavanaugh, from Les Moonves to Jeffrey Epstein: This year we saw with startling clarity that what many of the nation’s powerful men share is less talent and vision than arbitrary cruelty, pleasure in retribution, bullying, shouting, sneering, a sense that they’re above consequences, and an unusual dependence on golf—the traits of aging manchildren.

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https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/12/old-boys-trump-kavanaugh-moonves-epstein-childish-masculinity.html

[Squinch]

1. At work, we call those kinds of men the "man babies." There are more of them than there are

actual adult men.

[llmart]

2. Well written article, full of truth.

For men like this (and they are everywhere and of all age groups), the #MeToo movement has now become their target. They like to point out how it's hypocritical to target Les Moonves after all of these years where people in the industry knew this was his m.o. I heard this at a family Christmas gathering from a 40-year old male who used to want to just rant and rave about Democrats. Now, because he's feeling the pushback about his sticking with the GOP at a time when the GOP is like dogshit on one's shoes, he's decided he'll focus on the Me Too movement.

These men still thing they own the world. The mid-terms are making them shaky.

[ProfessorGAC]

3. Wow. That's Quite A Read

Author had the thesaurus out for that one too. But, i enjoyed the whole thing.

Thanks for posting.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

4. needs to be read!

It looks like Lili Loofbourow has sufficiently described the Old Boys to warrant someone naming this subspecies. Or maybe psychiatry needs a new name for an old syndrome.

The Old Boy doesn’t quite have the large adult son’s air of goofy ineffectiveness. In part that’s because his father is at least symbolically dead—powerless enough, anyway, that said father’s habit of keeping calendars can inspire nostalgic tears even though he’s alive. It may be that large adult sons like Don Jr. and David Huckabee grow up into Old Boys. But whereas both figures are spiteful, lumpy, appetitive, status-obsessed, entitled, ill-tempered, conniving, and at best semicompetent, the Old Boy—however absurd he first seems—has real power.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

5. a good companion to this article

The Old Boys exploit people. The following article helps explain how they get away with it.

Psychological analysis reveals 14 key traits that explain the president's die-hard supporters.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211594437

[Cha]

6. It really is "hard to overstate

the extent to which childish masculinity revealed itself in 2018 as the engine of power in America."

It's been the perfect storm for it and they devolved to the lowliest depths for the occasion.