The Walking Dad: Masochism, Martyrdom, and Apocalyptic Longing in White Patriarchy's Current Crisis

I want to bring everything crashing down.

—Steve Bannon, qtd. in Radosh

For some decades now, late capitalist deindustrialization, together with various social movements that together constitute what Andreas Huyssen has termed a "postmodernism of resistance," have precipitated a crisis in white masculinity in the United States (220). Unsurprisingly, from the beginnings of second-wave feminism to this day, feminism and its consequences have drawn forth especially anxious and angry defensiveness on behalf of traditional masculinity and patriarchy.¹ The 2016 US election made it clear that the crisis and defensiveness are again in a particularly acute phase, characterized by a rage extreme enough to lend widespread support for the program suggested in my epigraph from President Donald Trump's first chief strategist: "to bring everything crashing down" (qtd. in Radosh par. 5). What follows is an attempt to understand that impulse through a contextualized reading of certain recent post-apocalyptic texts, notably Cormac McCarthy's The Road and AMC's television series, The Walking Dead. Ultimately, I will argue that such texts express a (sometimes masochistic) wish for apocalypse as a state of exception in which the white patriarch is (re-)installed as the sovereign. Once the trappings of the state, and of civilization itself, are stripped away, it will (ostensibly) become clear that only the heroic father can save the world.

The desire to bring it all crashing down is fueled by white working-class men's feeling that their part of "it"—of the economy, the society, and the culture—has already been brought down. The results of the 2016 presidential election may be seen as symptomatic both of this resentment and of the resulting desire for widespread destruction of the established order. Hence it may be worthwhile to begin with a brief commentary on why the election went as it did. There are many explanations for Trump's win and for the failure of Clinton to maintain the coalition that twice elected President Barack Obama, but demographically, there seem to have been two major factors. The first is a reduction in African-American turnout and support (which could have reasonably been anticipated since African Americans, of course, had particularly intense reasons for supporting Obama).² The other factor was a surprisingly large shift to Trump by white, non-college-educated, middle- and working-class voters across the postindustrial rust belt from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin.³ In hindsight, this dramatic shift seems explicable. This demographic had voted for Obama largely because he promised real change from the status quo and because he managed to paint Mitt Romney as an elitist out of touch with these men's concerns. Having promised change, Obama's performance was mixed—but the mix was particularly unappealing to the group in question. The economy slowly strengthened, and many who had found themselves unemployed during the Great Recession did find work. But the new wealth generated by the recovery did not go to the middle and working classes; overwhelmingly it went to the top. As of election time, the work that middle- and working-class men had found was largely minimum-wage service jobs (often two jobs with almost no benefits) offering much lower pay than the manufacturing jobs with which they or their fathers had been able to support a family. The change these men were looking for, as Trump recognized, was a change back to a time when the promise of the American Dream actually seemed relevant to their lives.

At the same time, even though Obama was and is more popular than Trump, the latter managed to make Clinton seem more like Mitt Romney than like Obama. She was portrayed (and at times—as with her unfortunate "deplorables" remark—enabled her own portrayal) as a member of the governing elite who, like Romney, did not understand, like, or care about the white male working-class demographic.⁴ Trump's reprehensible appeals to racism, xenophobia, and misogyny not only separated him from the political elite but effectively channeled white men's rage toward scapegoats. However, the argument that Clinton's...