On Tuesday, Eminem stood at a podium in Detroit to introduce Barack Obama at a rally for Kamala Harris. Wearing a khaki Tigers hat, the rapper read some prepared remarks. “People shouldn’t be afraid to express their opinions, and I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution or what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think Vice President Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld,” he said.
Obama casually rapping a few bars of “Lose Yourself” got a lot more attention than Eminem’s brief speech. But in this tight election that could be decided by a few swing states — including Michigan — I wonder if Eminem’s endorsement, and the way he made it, will be the most consequential one that Vice President Harris receives. Gen X has always been an ironizing generation that distrusts norms and corporations, and Trump has so far been more successful than Democrats in capturing that countercultural feel.
Eminem’s fellow Gen X white men have become some of Donald Trump’s staunchest celebrity allies — think Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and Kid Rock — and they make up a deeply devoted chunk of his voters. According to the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll of the likely electorate, Trump is leading Harris 51 percent to 44 percent among Americans 45 to 64 — that roughly constitutes Gen X, and it’s the only age group he leads with.
Though Gen X-er Joe Rogan is not dependably pro-Trump (he endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020, but also said that he preferred Trump to Joe Biden that year), a lot of his podcast listeners are, and that is probably why Trump is going on his show in the last lap of his presidential campaign. What Rogan has in common with Musk and Carlson, though, is they are all fixated on the idea of cancel culture and “free speech.”
An NPR article from December argued that Gen X is the most Republican generation because of its high disapproval rates of then-candidate Biden and its instinctive disdain for what used to be called political correctness. Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, described Gen-Xers’ attitude toward free speech as “almost like a cultural libertarianism.” They were primed for that message from Trump and his mouthpieces that Democrats are censorious scolds.
I have been trying to figure out why so many Gen X white men, who were the creators of the culture I was ingesting as an ancient millennial teenager, are relatively conservative, when millennial white men are less so. And the shorthand I have come up with is that I want the male cultural legacy of the 1990s to be Kurt Cobain — who was angry, but also a feminist artistic genius who had a more fluid idea of masculinity. Because of his early death, he reached icon status but was fixed in amber as his 27-year-old self.
But to my chagrin, the more influential male cultural legacy of the 1990s might have been Woodstock ’99 where, among others, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock and Creed played. In a review of a 2021 HBO documentary about that disastrous music festival, The Times’s Elisabeth Vincentelli described what went down this way:
Much of the footage is hair-raising, especially the women being groped and the mobs of young white men whipping themselves into a frenzy of aggressive stupidity, aimless anger and turbo-boosted misogyny. This is these dudes’ coming of age as an aggrieved demographic, and it’s frightening.
(It should be mentioned here that Michigan’s own Insane Clown Posse, which performed at Woodstock ’99, seems to be behind Harris. Violent J, one half of the rap duo, told Troy Iwata on “The Daily Show” that he hates Donald Trump because of his build-that-wall message and he is happy about paying a lot of taxes. He said he wants Kamala Harris to win “because she’s a Democrat and I love my mom.”)
The primary emotion that Trump’s celebrity avatars like Musk and Kid Rock channel isn’t freedom but anger, though it’s often peppered with a sprinkling of rank misogyny, racism and whatever the hell Tucker Carlson was talking about on Wednesday when he said that Donald Trump was America’s daddy. (“When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”) Because “owning the libs” is a primary goal of many Trumpites, it effectively neutralizes any criticism of truly disgusting speech.
Though Eminem has never been a Trump fan and endorsed Biden in 2020, I think his decades-long bona fides as a free speech champion matter. I’m old enough to remember that complaining about — and attempting to curb — Eminem’s lyrics used to be a bipartisan activity, one that infuriated him and that he found hypocritical.
Focusing on the idea that, actually, Harris, not Trump, is the candidate who will allow you to say and do what you want is a message that is perfectly tailored to the middle-aged, white audience that Harris needs to do a better job reaching. Eminem also cares about his daughters and future grandchildren having the freedom to choose — in 2022, he wrote on X, “As a father it pisses me off that women have fewer rights 2day than just a few days ago” — but in general, abortion rights are less galvanizing for male voters.
The message of freedom may be uniquely appealing to Gen X men, because they are more individualistic than the generations that came before (boomers) or after them (millennials) said Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute. He explains that Gen X men are particularly likely to “believe that men are increasingly disadvantaged in American society. Nearly half (45 percent) of Gen X men agree that ‘women have an easier time getting ahead than men’ in American society today. This opinion is held by only 30 percent of Americans overall and only 18 percent of Gen X women.” For this group, Beyoncé’s idea of “Freedom,” which has been Harris’s campaign anthem, is not appealing — it’s threatening. Same with Taylor Swift and her reclaiming JD Vance’s “childless cat lady” insult as a compliment.
As a Gen X white guy with a history of pushing back against government censorship who clearly isn’t afraid to say what he wants, Eminem can walk the line of speaking to the Woodstock ’99 legacy without quite being of it. He said it well in a documentary last year: “I know rappers were always getting attacked by politicians, though. A lot of it was just to push buttons regardless. And for you to take a lot of these lyrics seriously it’s like, you’re a [expletive] idiot.” Tipper Gore might not like it, but it’s the message Democrats need right now.
The post Could Eminem Snap Gen X Voters Back to Reality? appeared first on New York Times.
