Bonus if any can explain the mobster/bully/toxic masculinity/manosphere movement and their rise to popularity. Also the seemingly deeper divisions happening between the traditional genders. Also, anything about why the act of lying seems so much more acceptable now than in the past.
by burning-lad
8 Comments
I’d suggest that you’re gonna have a lot of trouble finding one book to address this in any depth, because there are a lot of contributing factors, most of which have existed for decades.
Recent reads I found interesting on this front were:
*The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory* by Tim Alberta
*White Robes and Broken Badges* by Joe Moore
*Homegrown* by Jeffrey Toobin
None of which really explain it comprehensively, and most kind of stretch their actual subject to draw either more recent connections or stronger ones. One is a memoir, and one is a guy investigating something that touches him personally, so objectivity may not be 100% (objectivity is kind of nonsense anyway, except as an ideal to strive for). That said, I think where they’re slipping into conjecture, they usually back it up with reasoning and examples that made sense to me.
Shameless, The Power Worshippers, Jesus and John Wayne, Men Who Hate Women, Black Pill, Antisocial, Culture Warlords, those all get at what you’re talking about. Big picture, it’s a culmination of a decades-long Christian Nationalist project combined and allied with some very specific subcultures that now have disproportionate political influence. Probably also Kill All Normies and It Came From Something Awful.
Somewhat less related but still part of the story are things like When the Clock Broke about the early 90s, very good read.
Black Pill by Elle Reeves has a lot of this. Also a lot of the books I’ve been reading about fascism mention the tactic of lying and sowing distrust of experts/the truth like How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, which also mentions the patriarchy and how that factors into fascism.
I found this informative.
https://therationalleague.substack.com/p/why-maga-defends-everything-trump
The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche!
How Democracies Die. Anti trump book published in 2018
*Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History* by Kurt Andersen.
How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley