Costanza's Revenge

The White Male Everyman isn't Laughing Anymore

At the time, it’s hard to pinpoint the little ripples indicating what’s to come. In an era where hamster-level attention spans are given to the countless outrages and debates happening on the public square, controversies are quickly put into the memory hole, a past curiosity no one brings any more attention to. Sometimes, looking back at seemingly innocuous conflicts, a new understanding is reached of how much the writing was on the wall. Such is an incident regarding an Everyman by the name of Tom Burtell.

During February 2020, President Trump was moving into the campaign phase of his lackluster first term. There was a dark unease in the air, a simmering tension in America slowly reaching its boiling point. Revolutionary fervor was at a fever pitch. Within a couple months, the Covid lockdowns will happen and soon afterwards the George Floyd riots would see cities burn for months. All the anger and frustration regarding the Trump phenomenon would be unleashed on the general population. And this simmering rage wasn’t cordoned to just the progressive left.

In the Michigan town of Saline, an Instagram group chat between local male student-athletes was leaked to the public. As would be expected, it contained all sorts of edgy in-jokes and banter common to young men shooting the breeze. Unfortunately for the students, throwing out racial slurs, even in a private chat, would make their entire community congregate in a mass moral panic. Marches were planned, hysterical statements made, and tense school meetings were planned. In this atmosphere of outrage and panic, a dissenter emerged.

During a school meeting Adrian Iraola, an Hispanic man and recent immigrant, was lamenting his son’s treatment at school. The parent complained of constant bullying and the hostile environment the boy had to deal with. Watching the video, you can tell he planned this speech for a while. Every syllable was practiced for maximum effect, every word carefully chosen. Tom Burtell, a middle-aged white man, likely smelled a liar. With cutting precision, he interjected with a simple question “why didn’t you stay in Mexico?”

Gasps were heard. Pearls were clutched. Dainty ladies fell on fainting couches. An angry woman interjected “you need to leave.” He didn’t care, putting his hands up and shrugging, like asking her what was wrong.

If this video looks practically like a Church meeting to you, it’s because it was. Saline is next door to Ann Arbor, a stronghold of progressivism. In some ways Saline is even crazier. These are True Believers. From the Hispanic man trying to whip the crowd into a frenzy to the hectoring ladies in the crowd to the black man acting “above it all”, you would likely see the same archetypes at every evangelical revival.

During the kerfuffle, he took the mic and asked how “a white guy feels walking in a black neighborhood” and scolded the parent for making demands as a newcomer for everyone to accommodate him. The internet exploded along expected lines. The progressives lamented the rise of racism, crying how the outburst of this man showed how much bigotry still existed. For many on the right, the man simply said what everyone else was thinking. The reality that progressives and conservatives live in two different narratives was never clearer.

In this environment, for a guy to walk in and lay down such a rhetorical bomb was the equivalent of the Doolittle bombing raid in Tokyo. It might be performative, but the psychological damage was devastating. The impact was even worse when the guy didn’t buckle even after his own son condemned him. I couldn’t find anything online saying if he was still married or where he worked but if either of those were impacted, local media will gleefully report it. It looks like the guy was bulletproof and went away unscathed.

Tom’s performance isn’t particularly good. There’s little eloquence in his short rant, nor is there a plan of what he wanted to accomplish. He was just a white guy sick of hearing the same crap day in and day out. He’s probably the only person within a mile radius who was willing to say out loud what many others were thinking, browbeat and cowed into silence by the overbearing orthodoxy of the town. His redeeming quality was the bluntness of his response, disrupting the guy clearly playing for the crowd, and his stubborn refusal to back down. This was new, and this was dangerous. This wasn’t some right-wing edgelord in some angry, dark section of the internet. This was a guy with something to lose.

He was an average Joe, who lived an average life in an average neighborhood. The story he was told as a youth does not match what he saw in his day-to-day life. If this type of guy was sick of the crap, things were looking bad. He even looked like an everyman from another, fondly-remembered age of television, George Constanza.

For those not oldheads like me, George Constanza was a main character in the popular 1990’s T.V. show “Seinfeld”. He was a buffoonish New Yorker bumbling through life while getting into embarrassing hijinks with the rest of the crew. He was mildly slow-witted, self-loathing, incredibly passive, and prone to pathetic overreactions to perceived slights. He was a poor a model of a man, making ridiculous outbursts while remaining too timid to stand up for himself when it mattered, facilitating his self-inflicted plight.

While all sides got a laugh out of him in the 90’s, a George Constanza character today would not get the same universal applause. White men have become embittered and feel they’re the constant butt of the joke. George’s oafish character represents the final form of the modern weak man.

I’ve seen some argue that the Costanza character was set up from the start with a negative racial angle that we’ve only recently noticed. This revisionism has no real basis other than certain groups who want to blame little hats for everything. The Jewish creator of Seinfeld, Larry David, portrayed himself as even more pathetic and neurotic in his subsequent hit “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. The political climate of modern times has put issues in the forefront at a scale that simply didn’t exist thirty years ago.

There used to be a balance of the more loser-like archetype of characters like Costanza with action heroes and witty protagonists in dramas. White men today don’t see that balance in media, constantly seeing themselves depicted as either the enemy or playing second fiddle to their female or minority moral superior. While there was a degree of separation from viewers’ experiences in earlier times, the mockery and humiliation impotent modern men are expected to endure now hits too close to home to be funny.

In the twenty-plus years since the show ran, you could easily imagine such a character giving a good hard look at his life and make long-overdue changes. Even though he wasted most of his youth and is reaching middle age, he finds a respectable career, marries a nice woman, and has six children. He’s far happier and has accomplished far more with his once directionless life than he thought possible, but he can’t overcome a lingering bitterness at his past life. He’s furious at himself for being a sap, a punchline.

Tom Burtell likely had nothing like this life turn, but that didn’t matter. He looked like Constanza and acted like an older, more jaded version of the character. He became a symbol of every Average Joe with refused to delve into self-loathing, clap for performative politics, and submit to what the new male was supposed to embody. He’s the Everyman who refuses to smile to get along as the new show writers want to write his future into oblivion. There were countless George Constanzas walking the streets of America pre-covid until something snapped. Tom Burtell was the primer of what was coming.

These Everymen were told a story. Get your life together, be useful to society, treat everyone equally, be blind to sex and race, don’t cause trouble, and you will have a comfortable life. Respect other people’s interests and your interests would be respected. This was the core of the liberal project taught to them. On the surface, the story matched reality for much of their youth. While there was bubbling resentment under the surface, there was enough consistency for the Average Joe to go along with it. Recently, the story has changed. The story turned from colorblindness and egalitarianism to a racial hierarchy and matriarchy. The narrative of blind meritocracy has been replaced with presumption of guilt. Whether this is true or not is immaterial. Perspective is everything, and a critical mass of average guys see it the same way.

One can see this in social circles, the once tepid passivity of wife-dads melting away and something darker taking its place. While manosphere discourse has been here a while, now it’s practically the norm of male spaces. The gender discourse has dissolved into pissed-off guys with no dating prospects and angry, sex-starved husbands bashing women. Gentle ribbing about the differences in the sexes has been replaced with something nastier, colder, and confrontational. And it hasn’t improved anyone’s lot or improved anyone's condition.

Resentment regarding gender relations in previous generations often took the form of “Take my wife, please” jokes or the resignation of “happy wife, happy life”. Both have always been the coping mechanism of unsatisfied men. Every relationship has lingering dissatisfactions, and mild frustrations are often smoothed out by light jokes. There’s always that tension between the life were told you would achieve and reality. No one’s laughing anymore. The disconnect is too wide.

The political sphere has seen the same hardening. All the emotional tricks, all the scolding that would usually make this everyman bend to a “compromise” has turned into grim resolve. No matter how many children taped crying as they’re deported, no matter how many photos of smiling teens shot by cops during a robbery are shown to elicit sympathy, mainstream news sources are coming to the disturbing conclusion that white men don’t care anymore. They have complained for a decade that they are second-class citizens, being passed over in favor of preferential treatment for minorities and women. Seeing their interests derided and determining their adversaries are arguing in bad faith, they have ignored discourse with their adversaries.

A classic indicator of relationships in previous generations was the husband taking a hard-line stance and the wife, while respecting his intentions, gently cajoling him to take a milder approach. There was a healthy back-and-forth, a mutual respect that works at a solution that, while not completely satisfying, can be tolerated. This is true of healthy marriages as much as culture when dealing with an angry and unsatisfied faction. They want to know their role is valued. They want to know their interests are valid.

While such demands to "be heard" sound pathetic, as such demands are often manipulative ways to be unreasonable and disruptive, it's the first step necessary in any good-faith negotiation. Even most hard-boiled men would prefer going to the negotiating table first before declaring a costly war. No two businesses can get together and cut a deal without knowing what the interest of the other party is. Whether these complaints are considered valid is what determines whether any useful conversation can even happen. Our political leaders decided for a decade they were not. They were told, justifiably or not, that this was the new way of things. The social dynamics of the past were simply privilege that was no longer acceptable, and they needed to get on board. Negotiation was thrown off the table and replaced with an ultimatum. “This is your new story, and you will get on board with your role in it.”

When one gets such an ultimatum, one is stuck with four options:

• Submission: Accept the new story your superiors issue and give yourself a new personal narrative. Fulfill your diminished role.

• Checking-out: Refuse internal buy-in of new story. Work within new system with minimal effort. Complain on an online hugbox and build a victim narrative.

• Malicious Compliance: Work the new narrative to your own advantage. Use external compliance while twisting its underlying rules to your advantage.

• Rebellion: Declare war on the new narrative and the people that issued them.

How he reacts depends on leverage, risk aversion, and what he has to lose. A man on the lower tier seeing the new economic and marriage game, but with a reasonably steady job and a couple kids might decide to cut his losses and submit, likely justifying it under the premise of “keeping the peace” and “being the bigger man”. Those with nothing in the game and seeing little benefit will likely check out with distractions like video games and pornography. For those in a lousy marriage, they will likely minimize their effort in maintaining it. These types will also often whine to equally disenfranchised people in their life.

Malicious compliance is when things get interesting. This tactic is effectively used by high agency but deeply cynical men in all walks of life. Think the guy who owns a business paying a stipend to a black man to be its “president” so he can get the “minority owned business” benefits. Think of the callous chads who, instead of ghosting a girl he had a fling with, just tells her he is having a “mental health break” from relationships. Think the corporate climber who knows the exact phrases and insinuations to use to destroy an opponent. These men aren’t committed to fulfilling a personal story outside of acquiring power and prestige for themselves. The story is just a weapon to be wielded for compliance.

The rebels are the true idealists, the ones who truly believe in a deeper spiritual meaning to the life they live. Any demand to act in contradiction to those principles is an existential crisis. These are the ones who break from the dominant cultural narrative and have aspirations for something more personal. These are the ones who craft new stories.

When Donald Trump entered the political arena, he was seen by his enemies as the avatar of angry white men. They weren’t wrong. The everyman is angry that the story he was told fell apart, but make lousy rebels. They can complain loudly about their mistreatment but are scattered and hopeless without a banner to flock to. What the average man lacks is creating an alternative narrative to base his world upon. Trump gave them that new narrative. Even if it was largely rehashed 1990’s values, it was an alternative to rally around. While the lonely average man asks permission hoping for clemency, a powerful man takes what he wants, and his followers share the spoils.

The Coming Narrative Disillusionment

Hope is a dangerous thing, and many of these angry white men that expected their frustrations and struggles to be relieved are coming to terms with the grim reality that being mad and understanding your situation doesn’t mean you’re going to be saved. Donald Trump is not giving you a government issued girlfriend. Your online friends aren’t going to be able to save you from logging twenty years in a dead-end career path. Loud, impotent outbursts are not going to stem the suffocating social codes that exist.

A lot of anger is directed towards elders who still recite the bootstraps speech, while elders find the whining and anger of youth to be off-putting and counterproductive. Unfortunately, these two are from the same cloth far more than they realize. If the situation was reversed, they would be on the other side being the exact person they despise. The reason is obvious. One group followed the story like a good boy and got rewarded, the other followed a similar story but it took a hard turn into a different genre midway through. They both followed the script, and only one group got rewarded for it. They’re both the cohort of a reliable cohort of Everymen that keeps the lights on.

Many people following political discourse have come to a dark conclusion, one that spells the demise of classical liberalism. The conflicting narratives have become so disconnected, the fights so existential to one’s sense of self, that communication is meaningless. There is no compromise between a cadre of radical men who want a society straight out of the Gor novels and women who want to castrate, both metaphorically and literally, the male sex. There is no constructive discussion between radicals who want mandatory racial crossbreeding and white nationalists. Any complaining or public displays of anger is simply begging your existential enemy to show mercy.

Liberalism, for all its talk of open discussion and compromise, always had at its root a core mechanism of soft-power, narrative control. As liberal democracies lose their legitimacy, and with it the ability to write a coherent story, the power void will continue to be filled with increasingly radical ideologies as it also loses its ability to be a moral arbiter of what views are acceptable. As the unified story dissipates, new storytellers will its place, and their success will not be through negotiation, but force projection. This can take many forms.

The radical Islamic revolutions brought relatively westernized nations into traditional Islamic rule in short order. Communist revolutions are famous for punching way above their weight due to the fanaticism of its core leaders. All it takes is a small cadre of true believers and a ruthless show of force to bring a relatively facile population to accept a new narrative.

Most people understand that your average guy is not able to change his life by himself. Everyone knows that guy who hates his job, could get paid far better, but has that easy comfort and risk-free life he refuses to abandon. Just about every middle-aged guy could get more in shape, but few follow through. There needs to be a drastic change, a cataclysmic event that pulls him out of his stupor. When something forms outside the control of the existing social order, he will enlist. And others will follow. They stop negotiating and start conquering; they end soft diplomacy and demand terms of surrender.

The frustrated everyman is ineffective individually, but get a critical mass angry enough, place them under a strong command structure, and they’ll gleefully commit war crimes.

When Laughter Dies

What’s left behind is cheerier times, when you could laugh at an overweight guy in glasses getting into hijinks in New York. You see a man do silly things and no longer see yourself in it and chuckle, but watch stone-faced and unmoved. Nothing can release the tension.

As Dave Greene wrote

Men are generally willing to accept regimes where the bottom 30 percent of their sex is functionally left behind economically and socially; they will even accept 50 percent in a pinch. However, put men under the heel of a ruling class that defames them across the board, crows about its superiority, and then locks them out of critical opportunities, and you have the beginnings of a rebellion on your hands.

Such a situation is a tinderbox. Entropy increases, and society eventually uncovers the reality of total war. And total war is where the Buck stops…

Still, even if there’s plenty of kindle, sometimes the fire never starts. History is full of people who found their people becoming downwardly mobile, the reins of power stolen without a chance of return. While it’s an appealing story to argue that the pendulum will swing back, oftentimes it doesn’t. Total war requires discipline, hierarchy and sacrifice. I’m not convinced most won’t be sold off for a pittance.

Oftentimes you see a once proud people develop a new identity over past glories to deflect from their sad conditions in the present. They will find futile ways to show their anger that, while cathartic, does nothing to regain power or improve their life. The news elites in charge, seeing the impotent rage of the new underclass, will yawn as this underclass checks out of history.

Any sort of revival will take far more than even a President of the most powerful country in the world to bring to light. New religious leaders are rising but are quickly being stymied by older pastors that are supposed to be their ally. New economic arrangements are being challenged by what should be a friendly state government. The tech elites that gave the voices of disenfranchised white men a reprieve are a fickle bunch, their loyalties shifting on a dime.

It’s fully possible that a new leader can break through, take these neglected voices, and mold them into a political force, bringing a new era of peace and stability to America. A radical could also rise that takes that anger and burns everything to the ground. It could be too late as foreigners collude to crush the White underclasses permanently, or some compromise can be reached between the factions after a long cold war and freedom of association is reinstated. Nothing is inevitable, and anger in itself will not bring change. It needs to be directed, focused on a tangible goal. Most of all, it needs a story, not based on victimhood or past glory, but a war cry to enter the new era.

Maybe the next age will be filled with only e-grifters and unserious people, and everyone just whines as their future evaporates. Maybe someone great will rise and become a Great Man of History. Whatever story awaits us in the future, I hope it’s a good one. I hope that the story of my progeny is not one of angst and cope over a long-gone golden era. I wish, most of all, to live in a time where we can laugh at ourselves again.

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