Angry White Guys Don't Need Another Rebrand
Whether you're calling them Barstool Republicans or South Park Republicans, there's one common denominator
jezebel.com
The Republican Party has long been the safe space for aggrieved white men, the only thing that has changed is our collective name for them.
For Politico Magazine over the weekend, Derek Robertson wrote a sprawling piece about the so-called “Barstool Republican,” and how Barstool Sports founder and shitposter, David Portnoy, neatly positioned himself as a voice for white men whose entire personality and political compass is dedicated to being “anti-woke.” Robertson argues that while the nomination and subsequent election of former president Donald Trump gave these men legitimacy, there have been other iterations of them before. For example, the “South Park Republican” whose “anti-P.C., socially libertarian” politics found a home in the Republican Party even during its most neoconservative iteration in the early 2000s.
And now there’s the Barstool Republican, named after Portnoy’s Barstool media empire, which was once described by Boston Magazine as the “bastard child of ESPN and Girls Gone Wild.” That’s a far kinder description than it deserves, but nevertheless...
From Politico (emphasis mine):
G/O Media may get a commission
He isn’t wrong, of course. Contemporary Republicanism is less about adherence to conservative values and more about labeling Democrats as gutless babies who are as afraid of offending people as they are of their own shadow. But Robertson spends much of the piece nibbling around the edges of what’s actually going on here. And here’s one of the biggest tells:
Does anyone else see the big white elephant in the room?
These are all various stand-ins and rebrands of Angry White Men, who have long believed their grievances are best suited for the Republican party, a party that has championed itself on making white men feel safe.
Somehow, the word “white” doesn’t show up in this piece, not once. Not even upon mentioning Reagan Democrats, a phrase that specifically refers to white working-class voters who drank the Reagan-flavored Republican Party Kool-Aid in the ’80s and never looked back. While there are certainly non-white men who have allied themselves to such a group, their solidarity usually relies on how good of a sport they are about racism and xenophobia; they want to make sure the Portnoys of the world—boldly antagonistic, and racist, and sexist, with a devil may care approach to just about everything—don’t regard them as soft and humorless like the Democratic party or the weirdoes with pronouns in their Twitter bios.
In the ’90s they may have been the South Park Republicans, in the 2000s the Ron Paul weirdos, in the 2010s the Gamergate to semi-unironic Kek flag pipeline... Now, it’s the 2020s, and they’re Barstool Republicans. Is Rogan Republican next? But much of their driving force is still very much the same: sticking it to the woke police who are determined to ruin the cruelty that passes in their word for fun.
