"We might call this problem Tony Soprano Syndrome, after the patron saint of flawed antihero protagonists. One undecided voter told a New York Times focus group earlier this year that Trump is “the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents
Almost every single thing here is wrong, but it’s wrong in a way that illustrates the illiteracy that I am talking about. The Sopranos is by any measure one of the greatest television series of all time, focusing on the daily travails of a mob boss who tries to balance his mental health with keeping his marriage together and raising his children. But Tony is a murderer whose greed and ambition harm the people he claims to love. He is not a moral exemplar, nor is he intended to be; his selfishness helps no one else and is destructive to all around him. The same is true of Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, who at one point in the show literally looks at the camera and says of his crimes, “I did it for me.”
Reminds me of this early '90s paleo-conservative big think piece I recently read about portraying The Godfather film trilogy as an epic story of "Geimenschaft" (family and community) making a last stand against "Gesellschaft" (society and impersonal bureaucratic rules). Really? And here I thought it was something about how family businesses based on criminal violence end in destruction of the family and the fraticidal paranoia and isolation that results?! Any victory for family in The Godfather is at best pyrrhic or tragic, suggesting that assimilation, wealth and success, Gesellschaft, requires the ultimate destruction of Geimenschaft bonds, or that's my distant memory of those films anyway. What strikes me here isn't how republicans get the Tony Soprano story wrong, mistaking bad guys for good guys, so much as they recognize Tony Soprano and Grump as bad guys but identify with them as bad guys, outlaws, fighting for a noble cause, family, America, Christian Nationalism, or non-liberal elites like them, and might even recognize this conflict as more or less a lost cause but identify most with the macho nobility of the idea of not going out without a fight. It's falling on your sword machismo, basically. This is how they delude themselves about their own selfish toxic masculinity. And this is the animus that will drive the revenge of Grump 2. Deaths of despair revenge aided and abetted by corporate elite panic about coming antitrust and democratic reforms. Any credible or effective opposition will be people who believe in a future talking people who don't off the ledge or coaxing them into putting down their guns. And then people making the clear case for how we get to a better future. It's going to be exhausting.
Serwer is The Cruelty is the Point guy. One of our most insightful critics of the Grump Era.
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