The Sore Winners

The Sore Winners: Will America's Super Minority Sink Us All?
By Tom Junod

Last summer — long before Bill O'Reilly reminded Whoopi Goldberg that "Muslims killed us on 9/11," well before Jan Brewer reminded the Arizona police what identity politics mean today, and certainly before an election that's less a referendum than a migration toward some irascible and irreconcilable extreme — I visited a friend I hadn't seen in a half-dozen years. He was doing well, and I was happy to see it. He had gotten into some trouble when we were in school — trouble that I had participated in, without paying much of a price — and he had never gotten a chance to graduate from college. Now he radiated the brusque confidence of the self-made man. He was making money and he was spending money. He had a 26-foot fishing boat in his driveway, and a 45-foot boat in a nearby harbor. His house was recently renovated and expanded, as was his swimming pool. And the oldest of his children — a son — was just about to go off to college, fulfilling his father's dream. The school was a Catholic university, and although it was expensive, the boy was able to get a partial scholarship and a job. It wasn't going to be easy, but he would probably make it through without bankrupting his parents.

I figured that my friend would be proud of his son and of himself. I figured that he would be pleased by how far he had come. And he was, stridently so. But he wasn't as happy for himself as I was for him. Indeed, he wasn't as happy for himself as he was pissed off at everybody else. He was pissed off at President Obama, for the health care bill and for the promise of higher taxes. But mostly he was pissed off at a system that he believed to be rigged, in favor of... well, President Obama, but also illegal immigrants. Those taxes he was paying? Illegals didn't pay any of them. That health-care bill he hated? Illegals were going to benefit from it. That school his son was going to attend in the fall? He'd be going to a better one, if his last name was Gonzalez. That trouble that he had gotten into when he was a kid? It would be enough to keep him out of politics, but if Obama had gotten into the same kind of fix, "the media" would have agreed to ignore it, the same way they agreed to ignore Jeremiah Wright. ("There's a memo!", he claimed.) And those four children who were doing so well in sports and in school? They were doing well because they worked hard, and they worked hard because their parents reminded them that they had to — "I tell my kids all the time, You're not going to get the breaks some other kids get," my friend's wife said. "They might be able to make mistakes, but you can't, because of who you are."

It is what poor black folk used to tell their children. Now it is what wealthy white folk tell theirs. Because of who you are, you are not getting a fair shake. Because of who you are, you are lacking in opportunity. Because of who you are, they don't like you — and because of who they are, they stand to take all you stand to lose.

Republicans, who once decried the rise of identity politics, now practice it so relentlessly, so ruthlessly, and above all so successfully that they've created a beleaguered minority where only a cosseted majority stood before. It is a kind of super minority, its material well-being encroached upon by the swelling ranks of the shiftless poor and its spiritual well-being encroached upon by shadowy "elites" whose figurehead is in the White House. And the odd hallmark of the new identity politics is that it requires a denial of identity: because of who you are, you can't even say who you are. You can't say you're a Republican; you have to say what my friend says, which is that he's "more Libertarian these days." You can't say that or say that you're wealthy or, God forbid, rich; you have to say that you "do all right," and "make good money," but that's only because you work hard. And you can't ever say that you're white, because, as my friend insists, "skin color is irrelevant. C'mon, you know me. You know I'm no racist."

Now, my friend is right: I know who he is, and I know what he's not. But I also know that an identity politics that requires a denial of identity also requires a response to the denial of identity — and the response is rage. Because of who they are, you can't say who you are, and it is by this dynamic that yesterday's Silent Majority becomes today's Tea Party, gaudy and loud in its discontent, and that my friend becomes part of a privileged majority that perceives itself as an underprivileged minority — one of the Sore Winners.

The Sore Winners are easy to find. They are most visible at their flagship, Fox News, which dominates both cable news and the political conversaton and yet is always embattled, defending itself against the heathen. They are loudest not only on secular talk radio, but also in Christian broadcasting, which tells its listeners that a nation that remains a nation of Christians rather than a Christian nation is a nation that has turned against them. This is not to say, however, that the Sore Winners are strictly a political phenomenon, manipulated, as some would have it, by their masters in the media or by the money men from Wall Street. No, what makes the Sore Winners such a force in American politics is that their anger is so personal.

It is one thing to listen to Sean Hannity tell his listeners, day in and day out, that they look down on you, and they think you're stupid. It is quite another to enter into a Facebook debate with an evangelical preacher of your acquaintance about the presence of God in the world — as I did a few weeks ago — and read this comment: "You and I believe many of the same things. The big difference is that you think I'm stupid." You could say that the preacher listens to too much Hannity, or too much O'Reilly, or Limbaugh, or what have you; but you'd be missing the point, which is that somewhere along the line of me having hurt his feelings. This is what you hear again and again from the Sore Winners, whether you hear it from the professional Sore Winners or the Sore Winners who happen to be your friends: the conviction that no amount of financial success, political domination, religious hegemony or cultural currency is sufficient to take away the sting of being looked down upon.

It is one of the biggest dividing lines between liberals and conservatives: sensitivity. Liberals are supposed to be the sensitive ones, but even the liberals who worked themselves into a froth over George W. Bush never really cared very much about what he thought of them. But conservatives care what President Obama thinks. They care to the point of imagining what he thinks. I get the same feeling listening to them that I've gotten living in the South and listening to Southerners tell me about Yankees and the War of Northern Aggression. Well, although I've lived in the South nearly 30 years I'm a Yankee born and raised, and I can tell you with reasonable authority that no one in North thinks or talks about the Civil War. Nor do they talk about SEC football. Nor do they worry about what Southerners think of them, whereas I've heard many Southerners explain the football prowess of SEC schools in terms of self-esteem — i.e., that success on the football field is what allows Southerners to feel they're "just as good" as everyone else, even though everyone else is blessedly unaware of the outcome of the Iron Bowl, or even where it's played.

Worrying about what someone who doesn't think about you thinks about you: this is the essence of Sore Winnerdom, and it is no accident that it also the essence of the Republican animus. The Republican party was small and hidebound — the party of country-club corporatists, and the range-war West — until, with the Reagan Revolution, it began grafting unto itself the legions of the disaffected: the Christianists, the Southerners, the blue-collar workers displaced by the collapse of America's industrial base and estranged from the unions that failed them. The Tea Party, in this sense, is not a new development so much as it is part of an ongoing migration of the perpetually petulant, a political phenomenon grounded in a demographic one: the creation of a class of baby-boom retirees who have been deprived of meaningful work but given personal computers as Christmas presents. The skin on the Republican Party's "Big Tent" is by definition thin, and under it gathers a volatile throng of people with nothing in common but the fear that outside its environs someone is laughing at them — or simply having a better time.

Yes, I know: There have been countless articles and blog posts that attempt to puzzle out the inexplicable anger of the American electorate, when an even cursory scan of the unemployment numbers provides all the explanation you'll ever need. But, as has been pointed out and proven elsewhere, Tea Partiers tend to be quite well-off (how else would they afford all those trips to DC in their RVs?), and much of the populist rage at Obama has been fomented by the captains of American finance and industry: the Sore Winners. And once you've spent time with a Sore Winner, or entered into a debate with one, you feel that there's something afoot in America — something that's reflected in debates about policy but is never quite stated in them, and is still unnamed. It is convenient to call it racism, but when my friend tells me he's no racist, I take him at his word. After all, as he protested, I know him. And so when we were sitting outside, on his renovated deck, by his expanded pool, talking about the massive outdoor grilling apparatus he'd just installed, and I mentioned Obama's name and he responded with a visible tremor of disgust and said, in a description that was half-accurate and hence oxymoronic, "God, I hate that elitist bastard" — well, I didn't necessarily conclude that his disgust had its wellsprings in prejudice. But I didn't think that it had much to do with health care either. Indeed, it was not the kind of anger — or hatred — that finds redress in changing policy at all, but rather in making the people who've made you suffer for reasons that go beyond reason suffer in return.

And that's what scares me.