What can “Adolescence” tell us about our country?
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One more week, a hundred more catastrophes. So it goes. But to anyone who still has the capacity to think and feel amid the maelstrom of this administration, the catastrophes seem inexplicable — logically inexplicable, morally inexplicable, and even politically inexplicable, given the fact that Trump’s shenanigans are far less likely to gain adherents than to lose them.
The tariffs that have threatened to destroy the world economy make no sense.
The abandonment of Ukraine and other American allies and the concomitant embrace of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin makes no sense.
The veneration of Adolf Hitler by large segments of the president’s support group — and by the president himself — makes no sense.
The destruction of the American government by Elon Musk’s DOGE makes no sense.
The list could go on and on. Virtually everything this administration does cannot pass the rationality test.
We continue to scratch our heads, to fumble, to jump from one theory to another in the hope of solving the puzzle and determining how a moderately tolerant society transmogrified virtually overnight into a police state that resembles North Korea. And the sensible among us are perplexed by how little resistance there has been to the transformation — indeed, how much capitulation there has been. Inexplicably.
The real question, however, is not how America lost its way. We know the mechanics of it. It lost its way in large measure because Donald Trump, a Pied Piper of malice, led it astray, though one can’t lay all of that or even most of it on Trump. The American people, nearly half of those who voted, in their infinite wisdom empowered Trump to do so. They were looking for a Trump, yearning for a Trump, to do so.
They wanted a Trump to destroy the nation. They hoped he would destroy the nation both by sowing chaos and discord and by supervising a demolition of our institutions and values. So the real question we should be asking is why so many of our fellow Americans desired this, and what deep proclivities Trump drew upon to prompt the nation, at least a good part of it, to self-immolate. What does Trump give them?
There is doubtless no single answer for the kind of hold that Trump, a man with a thousand pathologies and the morals of a sewer rat, has over his supporters and facilitators, the noxious bond that unites them. I have a feeling that historians will be wrestling with this for years, decades, to come, until some would-be Gibbons gives us The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. But I think there is an answer, or at least the hint of one, and it is not in social science but in art, and in a highly unlikely work of art, no less.
A Troubled Young Man, a Troubled Old Country
The popular and much-discussed Netflix series by way of Britain, Adolescence, seemingly has little to do with America, much less with politics or Donald Trump. In four one-hour parts, it follows a 13-year-old boy, ostensibly a normal kid from a normal middle-class family, accused of a gruesome and incomprehensible act: having knifed to death a female classmate. The question the program chips away at is why: If he did do it, what might have prompted him to have done it.
It is complicated. Adolescence no more deals in neat explanations than Trump’s America lends itself to them.
The boy is the product of many forces, many pressures, but what emerges primarily is his sense of resentment and self-hatred; his desperate longing for the validation of his masculinity by his father; his self-involvement and lack of empathy; his baleful idea that the world, particularly the world of women, is arrayed against him; that he is ugly (he isn’t) and worthless; that he is a victim of the “80/20” rule (80 percent of girls want 20 percent of boys, and discard the rest); that he is disrespected by women and hopeless in having a relationship with them; that even his attempted kindnesses are rejected — that, basically, he is a loser in the game of life because he has been culturally castrated.
All of this simmering rage is then raised to boiling by the internet, by social media, by pornography, and presumably by the so-called “manosphere” generally, where podcasts by disaffected “bros” promulgate misogynistic fantasies of retribution. And more specifically in the chat rooms and organizations of “incel” culture, the violently anti-woman movement of men who are involuntarily celibate and who believe women must be punished for it.
By their reckoning, women disempower men. Women emasculate men. And men feel they shouldn’t take it. Men need to assert themselves, avenge themselves. They need to show who’s boss. First resentment and then reprisal. That is the motive force of the manosphere. It is also, as the title of the series suggests, the motive force behind a fairly large segment of contemporary male adolescents. I think it may be one of the most powerful motive forces of America as well.
We know there is a tidal wave of resentment against women and a terror of emasculation not only because the manosphere is now enormously popular, a hub for millions upon millions of miserable men (four of the top podcasts on Spotify are dedicated to machismo and women-hating), but also because young men tell us so. Surveys show that men, especially young men, feel lonely, adrift, rejected, disdained, disconnected, and, above all, discontented.
One survey linked their sense of powerlessness to their impulse to raze society. In their view, in their lament, women challenged the patriarchy. And men lost. Once white men ruled America, and it was good. Now they don’t. And it is excruciating.
But it isn’t only young white men who feel the humiliating sting of disempowerment. Older working-class white men do too — the men who lost their pride and sense of self not only to women but also to globalization and de-industrialization and the great educational divide between the college-educated and the non-college-educated.
And it isn’t only working-class men. Businessmen flocked to Trump in the last election, not just because of his promises to deregulate their businesses and lower their taxes, though those were their ostensible reasons, but because he promised to free them from the restraints of a liberalizing culture that prized them less and constrained them more. As the Financial Times quoted one banker, this magnate’s great sense of liberation after the election is that he could now use the word “retard” without censure — that is, that he could be a dick.
And it isn’t only white men. Young Black men and Hispanics gave their votes to Trump in 2024 in unprecedented numbers, Trump’s naked racism notwithstanding, demonstrating that when it came to the grievances of the manosphere, gender counted for more than race. (In fact, by some accounts, minority men accounted for Trump’s victory with young men more than white men did.)
And it isn’t only men. White women chose Trump over Kamala Harris, notwithstanding Trump’s misogyny, the credible accusation of rape against him, his infidelities, the Dobbs decision that robbed women of choice in abortion and for which his Supreme Court nominees were responsible, and his peacocking — a preference that suggested white women, notably including white married women, felt some nostalgia for the good old days of patriarchy when they were consigned to servitude.
It Wasn’t the Eggs
What does any of this male hatefulness have to do with Donald Trump? A lot, I think.
I am not saying that the entire Trump movement with all its perversions can be attributed to the disaffection of women-hating men. The manosphere is only one cohort of the reprehensible Trump coalition. But it is a large cohort, and I think its attraction to Trump begins to provide an explanation of the Trump phenomenon because it shares a common denominator with so many of Trump’s appeals; because it is now bound up inextricably with right-wing extremism; and because it feeds, I believe, upon the same malign forces as those primal right-wing, Trumpian appeals: resentments and revenge.
To the extent that Adolescence examines these animosities, then, it points to a national calamity — an international calamity — that pervades our politics.
They didn’t really give a damn about the price of eggs, the lazy pundit’s explanation for Trump’s election victory in 2024. Does anyone really think that nearly half the voters turned the world topsy-turvy because of relatively mild inflation?
In the manosphere, and in Trumpland generally, there is a premium on revenge, like that the boy wreaks on his classmate — revenge against anything and anyone who contributed to the Trumpistas’ perceived demise. They wanted their pride back. They wanted their power back. They wanted their status back. They wanted their country back.
They didn’t really give a damn about the price of eggs, the lazy pundit’s explanation for Trump’s election victory in 2024. Does anyone really think that nearly half the voters turned the world topsy-turvy because of relatively mild inflation?
They gave a damn not about how prices had risen but about how they themselves had shrunk — about how a changing America seemed to wither them. Trumpian men had lost their manhood, Trumpian women their “white” hood and their womanhood. They were isolated and lonely. They were angry. They wanted to call people “retards” again, and “fags” and “n*****s” and “bitches.”
The men and women who stormed the Capitol didn’t vote with their wallets. They voted with their hostility. They yelled about people taking the nation away from them — and, not at all incidentally, away from their avatar, Donald Trump.
So, again, why Trump? This is why: If resentment and reprisal, especially white male resentment, are the essence of disaffected Americans who want their power back, they are also, I now believe, the primary predicate of Trumpism itself. Whatever led to Trumpism wasn’t policy or even politics as it had generally been practiced in America. Trump was neither ideologue nor technocrat. His wasn’t a promise of good government or one that better served the interests of ordinary Americans. His was a politics of attitude.
Related: Donald Trump’s Simpering Superpower
Dowsing for Rage and Revenge
In effect, Trump was much more a psychologist, a ham-handed one, than a politician, which meant he was operating in an entirely different theater from any of his predecessors or any of his opponents. His skill was twisting the knobs on the American psyche, in finding the weaknesses, the grievances, the dissatisfactions that would, indeed, cause them to turn on their own society and tear it apart.
And what he discovered, I think, is that many, probably most, Americans — nearly all of whom had been weaned on and inculcated with the American Dream, the idea of success — were disappointed. More than disappointed — angry. More than angry — ferocious. More than ferocious — vengeful. More than vengeful — sadistic.
Sadistic enough to welcome a man who offered to tear down the country for them and reconstruct it as it had been before they had been disempowered: a country where women, Blacks, Hispanics, gays, immigrants, intellectuals, experts, liberals knew their places and stayed there. Either stayed there or risked the wrath of MAGA.
So it was never just a matter of turning back the clock to the 1950s, although it was certainly that. It was also a matter of the MAGA red hats flaunting their triumph after several decades of feeling they had had to bow to the concessions of a more diverse, equal, and inclusive society — basically after several decades of emasculation. (No wonder Trump invokes those words as an incantation of the way the world is not supposed to be: they are touchstones for male anger.)
They wanted to hurt those who had taken the country away from them. They wanted to see them suffer as they felt they had had to suffer watching the civil rights movement and feminism and gays win acceptance, and watching the better educated have so much more financial success than they did. Trump understood their suffering, and he exploited it. He found this American nerve and struck it. And he knew what they wanted. They wanted to inflict pain — terrible pain.
So did he.
The MAGA red hats didn’t yowl just because they thought if they caterwauled loud enough they would get their country back. At Trump’s rallies, they shook with paroxysms of ecstasy, something very close to religious possession, because they believed that Trump would let them exact their revenge.
This is why Trump’s declarations of retribution were and are so powerful and so appealing. He promised not only to restore the old social and moral (or immoral) order, but also to punish those responsible for having changed those orders.
This is a nuanced but nevertheless important distinction. The MAGA red hats didn’t yowl just because they thought if they caterwauled loud enough they would get their country back. At Trump’s rallies, they shook with paroxysms of ecstasy, something very close to religious possession, because they believed that Trump would let them exact their revenge.
They wouldn’t just beat the opposition. They would beat them, grind them into the dirt, make them pay for what they had done. Trump was their hero who would crush his supporters’ opponents and, naturally, his own. He would make himself and his supporters kings again. He would be their swagger, their bravado, their muscle, their testosterone, their balls. That was the promise: not just victory but vengeance, not just success but sadism. He promised that he would push people around for them, hurt people for them.
If elected, he would turn America into the manosphere.
It was, and is, an irresistible proposition for nearly half the nation. And now it may very well be, as I think it is, the central proposition of America itself, until and unless we can change it. (The silver lining of bullyism? You can slap a bully, the way Harvard slapped Trump, and he is likely to crumple, providing that the schoolyard monitors, in this case the Supreme Court, don’t race to the bully’s rescue.)
Adolescence shows how one angry, misguided, emotionally-stunted boy gets his retribution. Donald Trump shows how a half-nation of the angry and misguided and emotionally-stunted get theirs.
Trump’s Great Accomplishment
What Trump has accomplished, then, is to turn the entire purpose of the government into showing how tough he and his supporters are. How he, and vicariously they, can reduce anyone, even make them snivel at his — their — feet.
He showed them how their government could compensate for what he, and they, lacked in their own sense of strength and masculinity. Forget about making America great again. He would make them strong again, masculine again. (Not incidentally, Republicans for decades have derided — sometimes quietly, sometimes not — the Democrats as weak and womanish.)
Or to put it another way, he provided and continues to provide a form of domestic abuse — inflicting suffering upon people because doing so makes him and his supporters and, incidentally, his nation seem bigger.
Make no mistake. This is all about mean-spiritedness, or what Joe Biden recently and accurately called “deliberate cruelty.” Trump is a psychological cripple who has enlisted all of us to join him in harm. And half of us have.
So now we are the Bully Nation.
The American Psychological Association defines bullying as “a form of aggressive behavior in which someone intentionally and repeatedly causes another person injury or discomfort. Bullying can take the form of physical contact, words, or more subtle actions.” I can’t think of any more fitting description of Trump’s temperament. He lives to cause injury. (I should mention in passing, should you have forgotten, that Melania Trump’s original “portfolio” as first lady was bullying, which shows that our very own beady-eyed Eva Braun actually has a sense of irony; of course, she never acted on it to the best of my knowledge.)
This is where the inexplicable becomes explicable. Bullying is the whole point.
Trump’s tariffs serve no real function other than to bully other nations who, as Trump boasted, must “kiss my ass.”
Trump’s deportations serve no real function other than to make a show of how heartless he can be to the most vulnerable.
Trump’s dismantling of the government and his wholesale firing of the civil service serve no real function other than to torment individuals, a good many of whom have devoted their lives to public service.
Trump’s termination of scientific grants serves no function other than to assert his superiority over experts who refused to bow to our “very stable genius.”
Trump’s badgering of our universities, on the flimsy pretext that he is fighting antisemitism (the man who fraternizes with holocaust deniers!) serves no function other than to demonstrate that he can make intellectuals, most of whom despise him, quake.
Trump’s draconian orders on the nation’s largest law firms serve no function other than to provide a vivid demonstration of how he can take any institution and break it, and Trump’s hectoring of the judiciary serves no function other than showing he can destroy the very system that in ordinary times and with an ordinary president would rein him in.
The Means Are the End
In short, every exercise of his power — every exercise — is in the service of one thing and one thing only: his bullying. Which is to say, basically in the service of showering the entire world with his testosterone.
And, crucially, this isn’t really about power as we have come to know it in politics — a means to a larger end, whatever that end might be. (To compare this government to the mafia, as some have done, does a grave injustice to the mob.) This is about an ego boost and brutality — about the awful conflation of kindness with weakness. It is a means to a smaller end.
In the fourth and final episode of Adolescence, the boy’s parents ruminate on where they went wrong, what they failed to see and teach, how they might have saved their boy — and, more, his victim — from the horrible murder.
As I have been saying here, it isn’t too far a leap to say that they could just as easily have been talking about America. But — and this is the hardest part to process and swallow — there are really no solutions — not for them, not for us.
The boy lives at the interface of adolescent impulse and resentment. He is tossed by that toxic jumble of self-hatred, insufficiency, disempowerment, victimization, misogyny, and anger. His only empathy is for himself.
In this, he is fully a boy of these times and a chip off the Trumpian block. We live at the interface of Trump’s resentment and bullying, and we, too, are tossed in a toxic jumble very much like the boy’s, and one that, like his, can only lead to destruction.
Adolescence begins with that seemingly ordinary boy in his ordinary bedroom. It ends with his father, bewildered and distraught, in that bedroom, weeping for the son he has lost, as so many of us now weep for the nation we have lost to the same ugly provocations.
What a sad, sad nation we have become and what a pitiless one. Saddest of all, we are unlikely to get our nation back from the bullies because there may now be just too many of them and their grievances can be neither quelled nor vanquished.
Adapted, with permission, from Neal Gabler’s substack, Farewell, America.
