“We'll Put a Boot in Your Ass, It's the American Way”: Selling Chauvinism in the South

Background

The commercial successes of what might in past decades have been dismissed as pure fantasy is a microcosm of the broader intellectual, political economic– in short, cultural – context in which we now live. Daniel Rodgers argues, this “age of fracture” can be analyzed if we pay attention to certain “acts of mind and imagination and the way in which they changed America” (2011, p. 10). While the importance of popular culture’s relationship to, and effect on, politics writ large is established (Anderson, 2006; Grossberg, 2010; Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007; Protevi, 2009; Zizek, 2017). This chapter analyzes the precise theoretical coordinates of a relatively new phenomenon, and within the geographic coordinates of the southern United States. Such geographizing and temporalizing allows for maximum theoretical rigor relating to the construction of a new politics of reaction. That is, it is clear enough what political work popular culture does, but to go beyond Althusser’s “aleatory conjecture,” and the “embarrassingly neutral yet omnipresent term context” (Jameson, 2016, p. 434); this chapter shows how that work is carried out, its theoretical underpinnings, and its implications for better understanding the interrelationship between current events, the ideological, and the cultural. Indeed, specific elements of popular culture are used here as a theoretical vehicle that may elucidate the broader implications for politics and policies of violence internationally.

Kurt Anderson has convincingly shown that, in America today, we live in what might fairly be termed, “fantasyland” (2017). Lawrence Grossberg (1992) has illustrated popular culture’s tempestuous relationship with the Right, whether attacked or applauded, censured or celebrated, the music/film/TV industry is never ignored by the political. We contend that a useful way to understand what is happening here is to follow Fredric Jameson’s (2016, p. 432) advice to utilize a three-pronged analytical matrix, paying due attention to the current, the ideological, and the cultural.

The affective emphasis on the strong, brutal, bullying, white male carrying out his duties to his country, and his sex drive, is clear and has been discussed in other contexts by scholars such as Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott (1987), Jeremy Packer (et al. 2009), and Roddey Reid (2009). And one can go back to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” to grasp the American penchant for acting, or failing to act, based on fear. The communist menace of the Cold War has in many ways simply been replaced today by the never ending story of “terrorism.”

How to make sense of this? What is “this”? To answer the former question first, in this chapter we argue that what we are seeing here can best be understood by leveraging affect theory and applying it to crucial empirical examples representative of the relevant politico-cultural mechanics and machinations at work. We then explore these phenomena further, examining the research on variation in psychological and physiological individual traits and applying it to the examples, allowing us to better understand possible mechanisms for the aforementioned geographic and demographic coordinates.