[May 17, 2022]
Back in December 2012, Adam Lanza strapped on his Kevlar and taped extra ammunition to his Bushmaster AR so he could slaughter 20 children in Newton, CT, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Three days ago, on May 14, 2022, Payton Gendron donned his new body armor and took his Bushmaster to a Tops in East Buffalo, NY, where he murdered 10 black people.
You may not remember Adam Lanza’s exploits. I almost didn’t, even though I wrote about them for Jacobin, because these massacres tend to bleed—as it were—into one another, so that my memory begins to find them out of order, to treat them as interchangeable parts in a time without a through line. They look and feel the same, as if read from a single script, a master text that includes instructions: by now they’re dutiful reiterations, almost rituals that must be repeated word for word, deed to deed, to become meaningful.
But there’s a seemingly new twist in the recent spate of massacres, in Charleston, Christ Church, El Paso, Pittsburgh, and now Buffalo, which differentiates them from Columbine, Sandy Hook, Stoneman, and Santa Fe. That twist is clearly the new obsession with race that saturates the minds and animates the bodies of the shooters. Where once upon a time the killers stalked children in school parking lots, hallways, and classrooms, now they target people of color—or their sponsors, the Jews, of course—wherever they congregate, in border towns, churches, theaters, and food deserts.
What’s behind that? Nothing. It’s all out front, in social media, most importantly on the air, most conspicuously at FOX News, where Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, et al., entertain and galvanize their millions of viewers by verifying the demographic reality of our time—the US is becoming a minority majority nation—and turning it into a cause of racist fear, anger, and hatred, thus inciting the kind of violence visited upon the African-American inhabitants of Buffalo, NY on Saturday, May 14, 2022.
This alchemy is accomplished with a new edition of “great replacement theory,” a doctrine that goes back at least as far as Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race (1915), whose findings were amplified by Theodore Bilbo, perhaps the most notorious racist of the 20th century, in his rantings of the 1930s and 40s (Bilbo was, not incidentally, a two-term governor of and US Senator from Mississippi who was satirized in song by Andrew Tibbs [“Bilbo is Dead”] on the radio by Jack Webb [!] and in film by the Coen Brothers [“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”]).
By “great replacement,” the old and new purveyors of the doctrine mean the displacement of God-fearing Caucasians from their demographic, social, political, and cultural dominance in the US—and elsewhere, of course, notably in France, Sweden, Denmark, and the Commonwealth nations—by immigrants from the global South, that is, from “shithole countries,” as Donald Trump put it. But, so conceived, these “invaders” from the underside of the world aren’t only migrants from other countries, they’re also usurpers from the backside, the underworld, the bottom of the homeland itself, African-Americans, for example, native-born people whose phenotype, language, habits. families, work ethic, clothing, music, and living conditions nonetheless mark them as excremental excess, as foreigners to “classical” American ways of life, which is to say the ways established and enforced by white Christian folk over four centuries.
The “fear of woman”—of feminism, the “end of men,” the decline of fatherhood and stable families, the eclipse of manhood and the masculine virtues—is bound up with, and indeed is inseparable from “great replacement” rhetoric and programs. Witness Tucker’s laughable but utterly serious studies of testosterone and fertility decline in American males, the remedy for which seems to be tanning salons for scrotums.
This primal fear is in fact foundational to every modern form of racism, including those intrinsic to the fascist personality type as rendered by Klaus Theweleit in the seminal 2 volumes of Male Fantasies, where he shows that the “fear of woman” is a metonymical compression of many other fears, all of which pertain to the dissolution and reconstruction of ego boundaries in an age of profound gender confusion, deepening class conflict, bitter political strife, and troubled racial reckoning.**
So it’s white, Christian, male supremacy that the self-styled fascist Payton Gendron was defending at the Tops in East Buffalo on Saturday afternoon, May 14, 2022, against the encroachments of black folk, Jews, and women, conceived not as real, live human beings but as abstract forces made flesh only then, at the wrong end of a gun. And so I can stand by my portrait of Adam Lanza as written in 2012.
One more thing. On May 13, 2022, just last Friday, I attended a fancy dinner party on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, 16 people in all from finance, publishing, various schools and departments at Columbia, Northwestern, Rutgers, NYU, and Harvard. I sat between a law school professor from NYU and a business school administrator from Columbia. This professor, a former prosecutor, a staunch liberal, and, she insisted, a good feminist, said several times that she worried Democrats are thinking that immigrants enabled by “open borders” can replace—her word—their traditional base among white working-class citizens. I finally turned to her and said, “You know, that’s what Tucker Carlson is saying over at FOX News, and not just him, the Republican Party is run by people who peddle the same crap. You’ve heard of this thing, this ‘great replacement’ theory, right?”
“Well,” she said, “You don’t have to watch FOX News to believe it.”
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**Male Fantasies, 2 vols., trans. Erica Carter, Chris Hunter, Stephen Conway (1987, 1989), esp. 1: 63-221, 2: 213-61. See also Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (1986), pp. 44-62; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct (1985), pp. 245-96; Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), esp. chaps. 4-7; and James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy (2001), chaps. 1, 5-6.
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[2012, for Jacobin]
I
Start here. Adam Lanza can’t be accused or convicted of “unconscionable evil,” not in the court of public opinion and not by the criteria of moral philosophy. He wasn’t making a moral choice when he shot his mother in the face with her own gun, and then killed 20 defenseless children. So individual responsibility and culpability aren’t at issue, as they have not been and cannot be since Columbine.
It follows that the NRA’s slogan, to the effect that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” is moot at best—the killers in every case were sentient beings, but not one was a person at the law or anywhere else in the landscape of possibility most of us can take for granted. Not one was an individual who came to the scene of the crime equipped with a conscience, thus able to make moral choices.
It also follows, logically at least, that better regulation of access to guns is actually consistent with the NRA’s stupid slogan: the man who slaughtered those 20 children was not an individual, a person able to distinguish between right and wrong. So let us hereafter make sure that the people who want to kill other people are persons who can make moral choices—screen them thoroughly when they buy guns, or send them to the State Department with fair warning to all concerned at home and abroad.
By all means, then, let us ban assault weapons, and make it a lot harder to buy 9 mm Glocks. And let us make sure that people suffering from mental illness can get treatment—that they’re not thrown back on the meager resources of their families. Expand Affordable Care, to begin with.
II
But still. Let us also ask the obvious question. Why do these young white male people whom we routinely characterize as crazy—as exceptions to the rules of civilized comportment and moral choice—always rehearse and recite the same script? If each killer is so deviant, so inexplicable, so exceptional, why does the apocalyptic ending never vary?
The answer is equally obvious. Because American culture makes this script—as against suicide, exile, incarceration, or oblivion—not just available but plausible, actionable, and pleasurable. Semiautomatic, you might say.
But mainly to young white male people who want to kill many other white people with sophisticated weapons. Their apocalyptic endings make their deeply private states of mental anguish and illness very public. These gunmen don’t understand their mission in these terms, but they do tell us that they represent something beyond their own lives and families when they take innocents with them rather than just killing themselves—when they behave like terrorists without a political cause. They’re mute symptoms in search of a social disease, a cultural diagnosis, and a political cure.
Adam Lanza dressed the part for his first and final shootout as a man without a calling: all black, all military. He wore a Kevlar vest, he taped extra magazines to his weapons, he moved and he killed systematically; he was ready for anything in his theater of war, an elementary school. He knew how he would die that day—he knew the SWAT team would arrive soon after he started shooting—but not exactly when. He was armed against his own fear, and he was desperate to make it known.
III
William James saw him coming in 1910. In a Protestant culture that had defined manhood and character as the result of real work—a calling—what would happen, he asked, when such work became elusive if not altogether unavailable? Would manhood survive? Or would war then become the principal means of rehabilitating the “masculine virtues”?
James correlated the impending demise of those virtues with “pacific cosmopolitan industrialism”—a stage of development in which an older “pain economy” organized by the emotional austerity of necessary labor was giving way to a “pleasure economy” animated by the emotional surplus of consumer culture. This new economy, according to James, was a world without producers, “a world of clerks and teachers, of co-educators and zoophily, of ‘consumer’s leagues’ and ‘associated charities,’ of industrialism unlimited and feminism unabashed.”
From the standpoint of that correlation, the decline of necessary labor or productive callings, and the consequent confusion of male and female spheres—“feminism unabashed”—became the elements of an identity crisis for every man; for they threatened to dissolve the ego boundaries hitherto determined by the sanctions of scarcity, both economic and emotional.
Here’s how James put it: “The transition to a ‘pleasure economy’ may be fatal to a being wielding no powers of defence against its disintegrative influences. If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase: fear regarding ourselves now taking place of the ancient fear of the enemy.”
He worried that this fear of emancipation from the older “pain economy” would take a regressively masculine form; he knew the manly virtues could be reinstated by the violent means of war, by militarism unabashed, and he designed his moral equivalent—real work with a social purpose—with that possibility in mind.
IV
The diary of a superfluous man doesn’t get written by a nobody. Adam Lanza couldn’t have told us what made him unimportant as a person, or a man. He lived forward without understanding backward, so he needed a template, a blueprint, a script he didn’t author. He found it in the insane militarism of American political culture—that’s why he dressed up like a commando and stormed an elementary school as if it were a fortified bunker. He played his part.
The unabashed hyper-masculine militarism he performed was, as William James suggested, a hysterical reaction formation against the “pleasure economy” we have created but denied—as if we could still locate the source of manhood in the demands of necessary labor, in the rigors of military discipline, in the sacrifice of war.
So this reaction formation is a social disease, and Adam Lanza is both symptom and attempted cure of it. Manhood need not be a function of extreme necessity, denial, and sacrifice, as enacted on a field of battle. War is a drug only where the meaning of masculinity is reduced to mere survival, and when power derives from the barrel of a gun.
But that where and when is already here and now. End there.