Beyond Angry White Men: a progressive sociological imagination as an alternative to aggrieved entitlement

ABSTRACT

Michael Kimmel, in his book Angry White Men, argues a sense of aggrieved entitlement is central to the experiences of white American men drawn to the far-right. The concept captures both a sense of relative deprivation and rage at having something valuable snatched away. Rather than viewing wealth inequality, insecure work, or being locked out of the housing market as outcomes triggered by neoliberal capitalism, aggrieved entitlement misdirects rage to typical scapegoats – women and minority groups – perceived to be advancing at one’s expense. Some participants in our qualitative study of white Australian men’s political attitudes/experiences demonstrated aggrieved entitlement. Significantly, findings also revealed a counter to aggrieved entitlement, described here as a progressive sociological imagination. Despite significant experiences of relative deprivation, some participants cultivated an awareness of their privilege and blamed neoliberal capitalism for their hardships. Fostering a (progressive) sociological imagination, particularly among younger white men, may be important in undermining the appeal of far-right politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Aggrieved entitlement
• far-right politics
• sociological imagination

Introduction

Support for right-wing populism (RWP) has surged in recent years, and the Trump presidency in the United States and the United Kingdom’s Brexit are two prominent examples in the Anglosphere (Oswald 2022). Various explanations have been advanced to account for the success of RWP parties and leaders. One line of research highlights the negative impacts of globalisation on large sections of the industrial working-class (e.g. Kitschelt 1995; Mughan, Bean, and McAllister 2003), but this approach typically overlooks the significance of race, especially whiteness, in support for RWP (Bhambra 2017). Another line argues we are witnessing a cultural backlash against the economic dislocation caused by globalisation; leading the backlash are older, socially conservative cohorts who are (currently) electorally dominant (Norris and Inglehart 2019). However, this account also highlights broad secular trends towards more progressive cultural values and processes of generational replacement as eroding constituencies adherent to conservative ideology – indicating we are in the last throes of ascendant RWP. This paper takes a third approach, drawing inspiration from Michael Kimmel’s (2017) notion of aggrieved entitlement, as it specifically addresses white men’s sense of entitlement and feelings of relative deprivation and victimisation.

Kimmel argues a sense of aggrieved entitlement is central to the experiences of white American men drawn to the far-right. The concept captures both a sense of relative deprivation and rage at having something valuable snatched away. Rather than viewing wealth inequality, chronic insecure work, or being locked out of the housing market as outcomes triggered by neoliberal capitalism, aggrieved entitlement misdirects rage to typical scapegoats – women and minority groups – who are understood to be advancing at one’s expense. Our in-depth interviews with white Australian men identified feelings consistent with Kimmel’s aggrieved entitlement, with participants blaming a sense of relative deprivation on ‘the maggots in government’ or migrants who ‘just want to come here for housing and benefits’.

But we also found an alternative response not covered by Kimmel. Some participants explained their deprivation as a consequence of neoliberal policies while readily acknowledging that, as white men, they did not suffer from the prejudice and discrimination that women and minority groups face. Experiences of relative deprivation led them to question the prevailing socio-economic order, but unlike Kimmel’s account, it seemed possible to eschew RWP, develop structural explanations, and avoid the self-blame characteristic of neoliberalism (e.g. Bauman 2000) and the other-blame of RWP narratives. Drawing on C. Wright Mills ([1959] 2000), we describe the ability of these participants to locate their own biographies within wider social structures and processes as a ‘progressive sociological imagination’. Their systemic critique, coupled with an understanding of their own privileges, allowed these men to identify the structural disadvantage of different Others (women, ethnic and sexual minorities), with the potential for solidarity across lines of social difference.

Our qualitative study of white Australian men’s political attitudes and experiences included a number of participants with experiences of relative deprivation who questioned the prevailing socio-economic order. As Kimmel’s work would predict, some developed feelings of aggrieved entitlement, but others did not. In this paper, we pay particular attention to these alternative progressive responses, and ask how it is that some white men who have experienced forms of relative deprivation eschewed aggrieved entitlement and instead developed progressive structural critiques of a social system which brought misery into their lives.

The paper proceeds in four parts. The following section outlines some key approaches to explaining support for RWP. The limitations of these approaches lead us to a discussion of Kimmel’s work on aggrieved entitlement. We then describe the study’s methods, present our findings, and discuss their implications.

Drivers of support for RWP

In recent years, RWP has been resurgent in many established democracies (Henley 2023; Oswald 2022). RWP ideology asserts a ‘moral distinction’ between ‘pure people’ and the ‘corrupt elite’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, 16). A ‘corrupt elite’ has ‘lost touch’ with the ‘pure people’; it favours alien minorities and promotes culturally ‘degenerate’ ideas, denying the nation’s ‘glorious’ history and subverting ‘normal’ gender roles. However, ‘pure people’, who have retained ‘common sense’ and morality, can be ‘awakened’ by RWP, break the chains of ‘political correctness’, and restore ‘national greatness’. In addition to dividing the world into two antagonistic groups, we note the significance of White male victimhood for right-wing populism (Isom et al. 2022)

This upsurge in support for RWP is often understood as based in economic inequalities and interpreted as the ‘revenge’ of people ‘forgotten’ or ‘left behind’ in the wake of globalisation. Studies find men, the very young or very old, and those without university education more likely to vote for the far-right (Arzheimer and Carter 2006). For example, older whites with low educational attainment and low satisfaction were more likely to vote for Brexit in 2016 (Alabrese et al. 2019, 138). White Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 were less likely to have a college degree than those who voted for Clinton (Smith and Hanley 2018), and successful appeal to white working-class voters was crucial for Trump's victory (Morgan and Lee 2018)

Some suggest European electorates are undergoing a long-term realignment, with RWP becoming the new party of a major section of the working-class (Veugelers 2000). Others argue the deterioration of unions and other sections of civil society has atomised the working-class (Kitschelt 1995; Norris 2005). Manual workers are left without strong unions to link them to a leftist political culture, while social democrats have become fiscal conservatives – less willing to spend on welfare and more concerned about controlling deficit/inflation. Under these conditions, as Lipset (1960) predicted, blue-collar authoritarian intolerance, presumably related to lower levels of education, can be mobilised by RWP (Andersen and Bjørklund 2000). Judis (2016) argues the 2008 Great Recession, followed by severe neoliberal austerity policies – often implemented by nominally social democratic parties – profoundly discredited not only centre-left and centre-right parties, but also the neoliberal economic model itself, thereby leading to a surge of populism.

However, as Bhambra (2017) observes, it makes no sense to assume white working-class support for RWP is simply caused by economic deprivation. Across the Global North, non-whites are over-represented in the working-class and are more likely to suffer in terms of health, education, and unemployment. Yet non-whites are overwhelmingly not supporting RWP. Significant RWP support comes from the white middle-class (Bhambra 2017; Mondon and Winter 2019); indeed, the majority of Trump's 2016 voters were not white working-class (Morgan and Lee 2018). As Bhambra (2017) notes, RWP aims to strengthen white privilege over non-whites, and for RWP supporters, whiteness may very well trump class position.

In contrast to accounts focusing on the economic drivers of support for RWP, Norris and Inglehart (2019) have developed a highly influential explanation which emphasises the role of generational changes in cultural values. Their cultural backlash thesis builds on earlier work identifying a silent revolution towards post-materialist values which has been under way for decades (Inglehart 1977). In particular, they point to long-term increases in rates of university education, increasing gender equality, urbanisation, and ethnic diversity as large-scale secular processes which gradually increase the numbers of people with socially liberal attitudes and post-materialist values. The surge in populist support arises from those older cohorts still holding more socially conservative views gradually becoming aware that they are shifting from a numerical majority to a minority. Feeling their dominant status recede, to be replaced by marginalisation and vulnerability, an authoritarian reflex is triggered, and this translates into votes and seats for populist parties. Significantly, while older social conservatives are no longer a numerical majority, they vote at higher rates than younger cohorts and hence can disproportionately affect elections and political decisions. Nonetheless, Norris and Inglehart are clear that while social conservatives may be ascendant at the moment, the wider secular trends towards progressive cultural values are continuing, as are processes of generational replacement, reducing social segments adhering to conservative ideology.

The cultural backlash thesis has been criticised on a number of fronts (e.g. Schäfer 2022). For our purposes, it is significant that younger cohorts, particularly younger men, are still drawn to RWP (Belchior and Teixeira 2023; Schäfer 2022). Contra Norris and Inglehart’s account, material drivers of RWP support – like insecure work and economic decline – remain salient (Rodríguez-Pose, Terrero-Davila, and Lee 2023; Zagórski, Rama, and Cordero 2021). Indeed, while university participation has increased for Australian youth (as elsewhere in the Global North), it is no longer a sure path to middle-class financial security – many graduates do not secure fulltime work (Jackson and Li 2022, 1523) and underemployment and insecure work is widespread (Chesters and Cuervo 2019). Moreover, if the main driver of post-materialist values is a sense of economic security (Norris and Inglehart 2019, 13–14, 342), we would expect Baby Boomers to be considerably more post-materialistic than Millennials or younger generations, given their often-advantaged position in terms of wealth, home ownership and access to secure employment (e.g. Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020; Bessant, Farthing, and Watts 2017).

Aggrieved entitlement, masculinity, and support for RWP

Kimmel's prescient book Angry White Men ([2013] 2017) provides an interesting alternative to the cultural backlash thesis. According to Kimmel, feelings of aggrieved entitlement – the fusion of a sense of entitlement with victimisation – is the source of anger among many white men, and a wellspring for RWP support. Kimmel states:

It is that sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful. You feel yourself to be the heir to a great promise, the American Dream, which has turned into an impossible fantasy for the very people who were supposed to inherit it. (2017, 18; emphasis in original)

Men experiencing aggrieved entitlement desire to ‘take back’ what is ‘rightfully theirs’, to restore the ‘natural’ order, and to make their countries ‘great again’ (at least for people like them).

Kimmel argues that while white working-class men have some very legitimate reasons to feel frustrated, the RWP ideology misdirects their frustration and rage towards women and minorities: ‘Was it immigrants who issued those predatory loans that lost them their homes? Was it feminist women who outsourced their jobs and created deals that let billionaires pay no taxes? Did the LGBTQ people embark on ruinous trade deals?’ (Kimmel 2017, xiv) While the neoliberal economic model created obscenely wealthy oligarchs, a heavily indebted middle-class, and youth unable to achieve their parents’ standard of living, the right-wing media foster aggrieved entitlement and help shift the anger towards the supposedly inferior Others, as men ‘cast their eyes down for enemies but their allegiances upward at fictive allies’ (Kimmel 2017, 13).

Kimmel's aggrieved entitlement argument usefully highlights the significance of masculinity and feelings of relative deprivation as drivers of support for RWP. It provides a convincing account of some white men’s support for RWP, and via feelings of relative deprivation is applicable to middle-class groups of men. It is also supported by empirical analyses finding prejudice against immigrants predicts voting for Trump, but economic distress alone does not (Mutz 2018, 359). Using data from multiple established democracies, other research has also demonstrated that white men with low education and a sense of status decline are more likely to support the populist right (Gidron and Hall 2017, 57–58, 78). Nonetheless, we are attuned to Roberts and Elliott’s (2020) critique of Kimmel’s assumption that the only response available to marginalised men is to seek greater power. A limitation of Kimmel's analysis is that some white men who experience subjective status decline or relative deprivation do not respond with aggrieved entitlement and seek power over women and minority groups. Just as a white working-class social position does not account for the rise of RWP, so too the spread of relative deprivation/status decline among white men does not automatically lead to support for RWP.

Our qualitative study of white Australian men’s political attitudes and experiences included a number of participants with experiences of relative deprivation who questioned the prevailing socio-economic order. As Kimmel’s work would predict, some developed feelings of aggrieved entitlement, but others did not. In this paper, we pay particular attention to these alternative progressive responses, and ask how it is that some white men who have experienced forms of relative deprivation eschewed aggrieved entitlement and instead developed progressive structural critiques of a social system which brought misery into their lives.

Methods

The data analysed for this paper were generated in a pilot study of the role of university education in making students/graduates less likely to support far-right politics (Manning and Stefanovic 2023). Our exploratory, qualitative research design gave us the flexibility to pursue empirically grounded lines of inquiry whilst allowing interviewees to raise pertinent and unanticipated dimensions of experience (Berg 2001).

Ethics approval was granted by the authors’ university. All names are pseudonyms. A purposefully constructed sample was assembled to include white men with diverse political views, different class backgrounds, and varying levels of educational attainment. Eighteen men took part in the study. Interviews were conducted by both authors, audio recorded and transcribed, varying in length from 60 to 100 min. Interviews covered a range of topics (e.g. opinions on minority rights and immigration) and focused on participants’ biographies, political socialisation, and their sense-making around politics and social issues. Most interviews were conducted face-to-face, but several were video calls, and one was completed via a messaging service. One interviewee did not want to be recorded, so notes were taken instead. The interviews were semi-structured, permitting us to include questions about political developments (e.g. Black Lives Matter protests).

We have included a broad marker of class background in Table 1 to indicate the range participants’ socio-economic backgrounds. When allocating participants to class groups, we considered parents’/participant’s level of education/occupation, neighbourhood, and public/private education. We faced real difficulty in recruiting younger white men without university education and right-wing socio-political views. Ultimately, we chose to include two older men who otherwise met these criteria. One such participant is briefly discussed as his views encapsulate the notion of aggrieved entitlement and further support the applicability of the concept to an Australian context.

Table 1. Summary of research participants’ key characteristics.

Participant name	Age	Class background	Academic discipline/occupation
University educated
Adam	29	Lower middle-class	Psychology post grad
Callum	20	Middle-class	Sciences
Eric	20	Middle-class	Social sciences
Jack	19	Working-class	Social sciences
Jed	18	Working-class	Criminology/Law
Michael	24	Working-class	Sciences post-grad
Robert	24	Middle-class	Engineering
Sam	24	Middle-class	Engineering
Thomas	19	Working-class	Social sciences
Tony	26	Middle-class	Engineering
Non-university
Ben	27	Lower middle-class	Electrician
Daniel	27	Lower middle-class	Plumber
Geoff	57	Working-class	Mining & Transport
Ian	29	Working-class	Software programmer
Luke	20	Middle class	Unemployed
Matthew	29	Lower middle-class	Audio-visual
Paul	58	Working-class	Truck driver
Sebastian	27	Lower middle-class	Electrician

A preliminary analysis of the in-depth interviews led to three distinct groupings of participants: those who saw a future for themselves in the status quo; those who perceived themselves as having experienced deprivation and who overtly expressed aggrieved entitlement in line with Kimmel’s work; those who had experienced deprivation, but did not interpret their experiences in line with aggrieved entitlement. After preliminary analysis, we reinterviewed two participants in the third group, with the aim of further accessing their understanding of how they eschewed aggrieved entitlement and instead developed a progressive sociological imagination to account for their experiences of relative deprivation.

Analysis involved an interpretive iterative process wherein transcripts were read by both authors to gain familiarity and look for initial similarities and divergences between accounts. Using frameworks of thematic analysis (Braun and Clark 2006), we developed preliminary codes during the second reading. These were refined and related to themes in subsequent readings and in light of the authors’ discussions.

The rich in-depth interviews generated data on a range of themes. We focus here on a subset of six participants: two had no sense of deprivation; two illustrated aspects of Kimmel’s aggrieved entitlement; two confounded his model by developing a progressive sociological imagination.

Findings

Among interviewees, we found three ways of making sense of the impact of social forces on their lives. First, those with no sense of deprivation expressed either no particular interest in politics or support for the status quo with minor improvements, along the general lines of the neoliberal consensus. Second, those with a sense of deprivation but also opposed to the idea of white and male privilege, expressed aggrieved entitlement. Part of this aggrieved entitlement was a feeling that their lives had not turned out in the ways they felt entitled to expect, and the social order was not as it should be – feeling under threat and victimised by others. In line with Kimmel’s thesis, they blamed woke elitists, women, and minorities for their suffering. A third group had experienced deprivation, but also showed an awareness of white male privilege (Pease 2012) and expressed a progressive sociological imagination: they blamed neoliberal policies for their suffering and hoped for universal recognition and protection of social rights – e.g. decent and secure jobs and good housing – for all Australians.

No sense of deprivation: accepting the neoliberal consensus

Generally, the men who reported no sense of deprivation had no particular interest in politics or supported the neoliberal status quo, with minor improvements. Two participants, Sam and Jack, were not ideologically aligned with neoliberalism; their ‘centre left’ views (Sam’s words) did not entail a systemic rejection of the neoliberal order. Despite different fields of study and different class backgrounds, Jack and Sam felt they would have sound prospects after university. In short, both saw a future for themselves within the neoliberal order, even though they would like it to be more just and take account of issues like ‘worsening economic inequality’ (Jack).

Others in this group were less sure about their future in the current order. Thomas, Callum, Jed, and Ben made comments about tough economic conditions and were particularly concerned about an out-of-reach housing market. However, they may not have fully experienced these conditions, as they were still studying when interviewed, and Ben felt homeownership was desirable but questioned its necessity.

Aggrieved entitlement

Two participants, Geoff and Luke, in different ways exemplified Kimmel’s notion of aggrieved entitlement.

Geoff was in his late fifties; he left school at 16, completed an apprenticeship, and then worked in mining and transport. He expressed a deep sense of betrayal by elites, particularly politicians and the media. He spent many years off the electoral roll and had only recently started voting again. He referred to politicians as ‘traitors’, who ‘only care about making themselves rich and fuck Australia and her people’. He thought ‘our elections are rigged’ and described mainstream media as ‘the leftwing Marxist fascist media’. He was scathing about immigration and Australia’s multiculturalism: ‘I fucken hate that disgusting policy of multiculturalism’.¹ In his view, successive Australian governments had denied the public a say on immigration, and in the process, the country had become ‘NOTHING like the country i grew up in’. Geoff said, ‘I feel like a foreigner walking down the street these day[s]’. He claimed that ‘there’s one culture in this country the culture our fathers built and defended in 2 world wars’, but he felt this culture was threatened by governments who ‘turn[ed] OUR country in to the UN’s SEPTIC TANK’. During the course of the interview, he used racist slurs, and claimed that unlike Indigenous Australians, ‘I work hard for everything I own I don't stand there with my hand out like a beggar thinking people owe me something because my race haven't achieved a lot in the past 40,000 years’.

In comments like these, Geoff very clearly reflects the sense of entitlement characteristic of Kimmel’s aggrieved entitlement. In terms of his class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, he was aligned with those often referred to as the ‘left behind’ or ‘forgotten people’. Notably, Geoff’s sense of aggrievement had a cultural rather than a material focus. He thought Australia’s immigration policies had undermined the dominance of ‘the culture our fathers built;’ he mentioned concern over changing demographic profiles and no longer saw the Australia of his childhood in contemporary Australia.² However, he did not mention concern over jobs, housing, or access to welfare. Geoff feels betrayed and as though all that was good and admirable about Australia has been smashed or stolen by various elites – the ‘maggots in government’ – or migrants, and he is openly enraged.

In contrast to Geoff, Luke’s aggrieved entitlement was grounded in his experiences of relative material deprivation and demonstrate the applicability of this concept for younger groups of white Australian men. Although he had a middle-class background, with highly-educated professional parents, he had experienced homelessness and extended periods of unemployment. He shared some of Geoff’s political views in that he voted for RWP parties and ‘despise[d] all the main parties’. He felt the government was ‘more concerned about billionaires than they are about your average person’ and was critical of Australia’s immigration policy. He thought Australia was ‘swamped by people from China and India and Muslim and African countries’, many of whom he claimed did not want to integrate into Australian society and/or ‘just want to come here for housing and benefits’.

His opinions had much to do with his experience of homelessness. Unlike refugees, Luke felt people in his situation were not prioritised for social housing. Referring to his time in a homeless refuge, he said: ‘I was in a struggling situation, and all the other people were in struggling situations, but then, all of a sudden, you’re getting all these fucking people who rock over from fucking Sudan or whatever, and they’re suddenly being housed’. Although Luke had moved to Australia from England with his family as a child, he felt that as someone who had ‘lived here practically my whole life’, he was more deserving of access to housing than ‘some guy who’s just come over from Whoop Whoop.³’ He grouped himself with others he knew who were born in Australia, ‘even Aboriginal people I know’, whose needs were put ‘below other people’s needs’. Referring to others in the refuge where he lived, he said, ‘We all got pretty angry about that’.

The Black Lives Matter movement served as another focus for Luke’s sense of marginalisation as a white man. Like many others on the right, Luke interpreted it as prioritising Black lives and concerns at the expense of white lives (Isom et al. 2022). He thought the protesters were ‘hypocrites’. If the movement really was ‘protesting against racism and discrimination [they] should be saying All Lives Matter;’ otherwise, ‘it does imply Black people are better than us’. Luke felt there is ‘anti-white racism and it’s not acknowledged, because everyone’s too scared to speak up’. He thought this discrimination was evident in the labour market, saying companies ‘always want to hire minorities or whatever, cos they feel it makes them look good’. He said he had ‘been rejected from my job for being white’ (Sharples and Blair 2021).

Clearly, feelings of aggrieved entitlement remain relevant for some younger white men experiencing deprivation. Nonetheless, as discussed below, our research also identified men with experiences of deprivation who did not develop aggrieved entitlement.

Progressive sociological imaginations

We identified a third group of men with experiences of deprivation who did not blame minorities or political elites for life not turning out as they expected. Instead, they developed an understanding of neoliberal capitalism which linked their biographies to wider social processes that explained their disadvantage in systemic ways, while also recognising their privilege as white men. In other words, they showed the ability to link their personal troubles to wider structural issues. Following Mills, we refer to this ‘quality of mind’ (Mills 2000, 13) as a progressive sociological imagination.⁴

Matthew was one of these participants. An audio-visual worker with post-secondary training in media arts, he described his parents as ‘artists, in one respect or another’ and said, ‘We did not have a lot of money growing up’. He called his parents ‘progressive’ and remembered them being ‘really outraged’ by the conservative Howard government’s treatment of asylum seekers in the early 2000s. Matthew interpreted his family’s socio-economic position as meaning they were ‘vulnerable enough to be affected by policy quite quickly, but still had the education and political literacy to see what was happening, and articulate it’. In addition, his parents were Christians and attended a ‘quite conservative’ church; wherein he developed ‘puritanical kind of ideas’ and was ‘taught to interpret the Bible in a very literal kind of way’.

After completing secondary school, Matthew experienced over 12 months of continuous unemployment. He was annoyed by the general assumptions people made about why he was unemployed: ‘I’ve been on the receiving end of people assuming that I’m lazy, and that I’m not trying hard enough, and […] “if you just did this”, and “you just did that”’. He had struggled with bouts of depression during secondary school, but his depression worsened while unemployed, as he was ‘feeling like everything was very difficult for me, and not being able to tell anyone and have them believe me’. Indeed, Matthew said this gave him an appreciation for ‘what it’s like to be actually marginalised. Like, because I knew what it was like to be poor, because I grew up poor, but I hadn’t been poor and marginalised’.

Even after finding employment, Matthew spent years ‘severely underemployed’ and continued to need income support via Centrelink⁵, which, he said, ‘was its own nightmare’. He had been married for several years and felt: ‘there’s been a lot of feeling like a failure as a provider and all this stuff’. His in-laws subsidised their housing costs; Matthew described this as ‘obviously incredibly generous, but like, there can be a lot of shame attached to that’. Asked whether he thought he would have a standard of living similar to that of his parents, Matthew said, ‘Only because my parents had nothing’. Beyond his specific circumstances, he thought standards of living had declined for successive generations after the Baby Boomers: ‘Gen Z will be lucky if they get a habitable planet’.

Matthew’s depression, self-blame, and feelings of shame and failure as a provider/husband seemed to feature in his sense-making processes. He first blamed himself and then blamed individual employers who would not ‘give him a chance’. Nonetheless, he ultimately started to blame ‘the system’. He attempted to stop ‘judging myself by capitalistic standards’ and claimed that he eventually ‘got the language and framework’ to understand his long struggle for adequate employment as a structural issue. He said, ‘The economic system that we live in at the moment has kind of let me down so thoroughly over the course of my life that I’m kind of finally giving up on it, and I feel a lot happier for it’. He rejected scapegoating others: ‘We want to know who we can tie to a stake and burn, and systemic issues don't work like that’. There was no sense in which he blamed migrants; indeed, he described himself as ‘pro-open borders’ and thought if money and corporations can move across borders, ‘surely human beings should be able to cross borders’. And unlike some men in Kimmel’s research, Matthew was not homophobic, indeed, one of his ‘closest friends’ was gay. He discussed supporting this friend through the coming out process and was pleased that his friend was married: ‘His husband is absolutely amazing’.

Another participant in this category was Adam. After working for several years as a secondary school teacher, Adam had returned to university to pursue a change in career. He understood teaching as a ‘vocation’ that would provide a livelihood somewhat removed from capitalism. In practice, he found education was animated by a capitalist ‘mindset’. The focus, he said, was on ‘where do we cut costs, and how do we make a profit, and not on ‘Is the product we are creating of value?’’ According to Adam this had devalued education; teachers ‘tick checkboxes, and make sure that they’ve [students] met certain criteria, regardless of whether or not they’ve met those criteria, or whether those criteria are useful’. For Adam, education had become something ‘that can be bought and exchanged’, and he said parents now think, ‘I’m paying for this, so I expect you to give my kid good grades’.

Adam also found the conditions of his employment as a teacher intolerable. He described a situation of endemic insecure work for early career teachers and unmanageable workloads. He was aware that the first few years of being a teacher were ‘the hardest, because you’ve got to set everything up’, but by his account, ‘Every year got harder and harder and harder, and the workload just increased’. Adam spoke of working 15-hour days and weekends: ‘I used to go to a coffee shop, I’d leave my phone at home and I’d basically work Saturdays from about nine o’clock to five, and Sundays nine o’clock to five’. No doubt part of the difficulty was that in seven years, he taught at six different schools. As he said, it was ‘not because I didn’t work hard enough;’ rather, permanent staff were placed ahead of him, forcing him and other contract staff to move on. Adam was clear about the effect of these working conditions, particularly on his health: ‘Teaching was killing me. Literally – like, I have anxiety and depression’. Beyond the physical and mental health effects, this experience smashed Adam’s basic understanding of how life worked: ‘My parents taught me, you work hard, you do a good job and you should get stable employment, you can buy a house, have kids, yada, yada, yada. That didn’t happen’. Adam still loved teaching but knew he could not function in the system: ‘It is a great job: it’s great in the classroom. Everything else sucks’.

Adam felt he had been cheated out of his vocation as a teacher, and his experience shattered his familial belief in hard work leading to a decent life. At times, he felt the difficulties were due to his own shortcomings, but he ultimately critiqued ‘neoliberal capitalism’, which he saw as the ideology pushing for greater marketisation of ‘products’ like education and producing widespread endemic insecure work. His systemic critique helped him appreciate that ‘it’s not just me’, but a wider problem which he felt was ‘knackering us’. Unlike Geoff and Luke, he did not blame migrants but thought ‘higher immigration generally leads to better economic outcomes for everyone involved, not just the people who are immigrating’. And as we will see below, he used social media to seek out and learn from feminists and people of diverse sexual and gender orientations.

It could be argued that Matthew and Adam’s post-secondary education means their progressive views and rejection of aggrieved entitlement is unsurprising. As noted above, those without university education are more likely to support RWP (e.g. Arzheimer and Carter 2006; Smith and Hanley 2018), but middle class and educated voters clearly are also drawn to RWP, particularly when they perceive themselves as experiencing relative deprivation (Bhambra 2017; Mondon and Winter 2019). Indeed, our previous findings also identified university educated men expressing views consistent with RWP (Manning and Stefanovic 2023). Tertiary education does seem to weaken support for RWP, but does not make citizens immune to the appeal of RWP discourse. This highlights the importance of further investigation of why some university educated white men who experience deprivation take up RWP ideas while others do not.

Accounting for the development of progressive sociological imaginations

Having set out these alternative responses to experiences of relative deprivation, we now suggest possible explanations for how Matthew and Adam developed a progressive interpretation of their circumstances, when others in similar circumstances turned to RWP explanations.

At the outset it is worthwhile noting their shared background characteristics. Both men had lower middle-class backgrounds; their families were religious and socially conservative, but left-leaning on economic issues. Matthew commented, ‘I was probably surrounded by a fair amount of political discourse’, and he described his parents as ‘progressive’. As part of ‘the educated poor’, he felt his family was ‘vulnerable’ to changing government policy, ‘but still had the education and political literacy to be able to see what was happening and articulate it’. Matthew still identified as a Christian and linked his faith with his political views: ‘I’m a big fan of […] the Jesus who stands up for the poor and the oppressed […] that spends time hanging around with prostitutes’. Adam described his parents as ‘quite devout Catholics’ and socially conservative, but economically progressive Australian Labor Party voters. When he was growing up, political discussion at home was focused around elections, and ‘mum and dad would voice their disdain for right-wing politics in general’. It is noteworthy that Adam had developed a sophisticated critique of capitalism which was likely kindled in the family home. He experienced Catholicism as ‘very big on this whole social justice’ and notions of treating others as you want to be treated; as he explained, ‘the maxim: to each according to his needs’ continued to inform his beliefs and actions. Clearly, the familial backgrounds of these two men provided some access to progressive interpretations and offered grounds for critiquing RWP (Sieben and de Graaf 2004).

In addition, both men used the Internet in ways which exposed them to a wide range of ideas and experiences, thus underscoring their pluralist and open orientation to others (Manning and Stefanovic 2023). Of course, the Internet and social media serve as key sites for the radicalisation and recruitment of some white men to far-right politics and the manosphere (Ging 2017; Nilan 2021). Nonetheless, such technologies are a routine part of young people’s political socialisation (Ekström and Shehata 2018), and do not inherently lead to radicalisation. Indeed, Adam and Matthew’s experiences highlight the underappreciated ways in which such technologies might beneficially support a pluralistic and inclusive political socialisation for young people. When he was unemployed, Matthew used philosophy channels on YouTube to develop his worldview. As he ‘exposed [himself] to more and more ideas’, he said he began to see ‘parallels between different things’ and to bring ‘different ideas together, and different schools of thought, to try and figure out exactly how I thought I saw the world’. Adam discussed using the Internet in a wider variety of ways: he directly and purposefully engaged with those holding opposing views. He described more collective use of the Internet, joining groups aligned with his political views and posting and sharing resources, and he saw it as a tool for learning from social Others. For example, he joined ‘intersectional groups’ where he encountered ethnic, sexual, and gender diversity, as well as ‘vocal feminists’. He said, ‘I don’t really comment, I just take the time to read and listen’. He was not always comfortable with the views expressed in these fora, but he felt it was important to engage with other ‘valid experience[s]’. This led to self-reflection and challenged some of his ‘gut reactions’, and he subsequently tried to change some of his behaviour. This was particularly notable given Adam’s devout Catholic background, his Catholic schooling, and social network. Overall, both men used digital communication tools to encounter forms of difference – philosophical, ideological, and social.

Self-reflection was perhaps more pronounced in Matthew’s case. He described a process beginning in high school that involved a gradual ‘erosion of the conservative’ religious ‘doctrine’ he was raised with. This process occurred over several years and in telling this story, Matthew emphasised the robustness of the arguments and critiques he encountered. During high school, ‘atheist friends’ challenged his conservative and literal interpretations of the Bible; rather than dismiss these critiques, his response was ‘Okay, maybe I don’t have the whole picture then’. Matthew placed great emphasis on developing sound arguments and getting ‘to the bottom of things to know exactly what I think, exactly what I feel, exactly what I think is true, and to be able to articulate that to other people’. This process of encountering the views of others and rethinking his religious views was largely self-directed, as he said his Christian friends were too conservative to workshop counter-arguments. Later in life when his close long-term friend came out as gay, he challenged the homophobic religious beliefs he had taken on from his church and supported his friend to be ‘openly who they are’. He described this as ‘a process of de-othering’, wherein one comes to appreciate others in greater complexity as human beings, rather than caricatures which might offend one’s views/beliefs.

In sum, both men had access to various resources (familial, ideological, technological) upon which they could draw to interpret their hardships and struggles in ways that did not apportion blame to marginalised Others. Both men also demonstrated a willingness to learn from others. Significantly, they engaged in high levels of self-reflection as they encountered and sought out new information and the perspectives of others.

One might argue that the key reason Matthew and Adam differ from those who embrace aggrieved entitlement is the difference between adopting a left-wing or right-wing form of populism. Afterall, Matthew and Adam show signs of left-wing populism in their criticism of neoliberal capitalism and economic elites, while at the same time have inclusive views toward outgroups targeted by right-wing populism, like migrants, sexual minorities, and feminists (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014). A case can be made for Adam and Matthew’s views being defined as left-wing populism, but for our purposes this only partially explains the significance of their views. For white heterosexual men like Matthew and Adam, holding views consistent with left-wing populism may entail an awareness of one’s privilege or structural advantages, but this is not necessarily the case. For example, research shows that left-wing populist parties may reaffirm patriarchal values through a dominant masculine party culture (Caravantes 2019). Research on progressive social movements reveals the reproduction of gendered inequalities, hostility to feminism, and sexual violence (Eschle 2018). What is particularly significant in the accounts of Matthew and Adam is the way they link their biographical experiences to wider social processes and history. This ‘quality of mind’ (Mills 2000, 13) is not necessarily left-wing, as it is a central component of sociological practice. In the same way that aggrieved entitlement is not equivalent to right-wing populism, having an awareness of structural privilege or advantage is not reducible to left-wing populism. Adam and Matthew’s ability to locate their struggles within the context of wider social processes – like neoliberal capitalism – is part of how they learnt that, ‘it’s not just me’ (Adam), and to move beyond feelings of shame, failure and depression. It also allowed them to appreciate the systemic nature of their predicaments, rather than seek out someone ‘we can tie to a stake and burn’, as Matthew described it. In these ways, developing their sociological imaginations were significant for Matthew and Adam in moving beyond the individualised feelings of self-blame so characteristic of neoliberalism (Sofritti et al. 2020) but this form of analysis is also central to how they developed an understanding of the ways in which they might hold forms of privilege or structural advantage over others too (e.g. women, migrants and sexual minorities).

Implications and concluding remarks

Clearly, findings from this exploratory study are preliminary and should be used to inform the development of future research drawing upon a wider evidence base. That is, our findings can only be seen as empirically informed, plausible explanations, whose generalisability cannot be assumed, but should be systematically tested, ideally with a large-scale survey using nationally representative samples. The study offers in-depth analysis and rich and new insights into the experiences of white men from a range of social backgrounds, but no claims for representativeness or generalisability can be sustained.

Our findings indicate that RWP support is neither a simple by-product of a working-class social position nor a consequence of deprivation. While we found support for Kimmel's (2017) argument that aggrieved entitlement is a major ideological and emotional driver of Angry White Men, we also found relative deprivation does not necessarily lead to a sense of aggrieved entitlement. Clearly, the evidence base we used makes our findings exploratory and preliminary. However, the data offer a rich description of the socio-political views of young white Australian men, in particular, the life experiences and alternative paths taken by Adam and Matthew who could have otherwise been drawn to feelings of aggrieved entitlement. Future research should expand our work by drawing upon a large-scale representative sample to provide more comprehensive answers and explore key group differences.

In line with Mills’ observations on ‘psychologism’ ([1959] 2000), our findings suggest those who do not feel deprived generally discuss life outcomes in terms of psychological makeup or individual morals and choices (Edmiston 2018), rather than structurally influenced inequalities. Our participants who did not understand themselves as having experienced relative deprivation generally saw a future within the neoliberal order. Even if they wanted a world with less social inequality, this was not understood as requiring large-scale social change to be corrected. In contrast, a number of our participants had experienced forms of deprivation and this led them towards structural critiques.

Echoing Kimmel’s aggrieved entitlement thesis, a number of white men in our sample who experienced relative deprivation blamed minorities and political elites for their troubles. Geoff articulated a patriarchal and racialised claim to dominant Australian culture as the only legitimate culture. Like Geoff, Luke was concerned about immigration and migrants who refuse to ‘assimilate into our culture’. Despite being an immigrant himself, Luke expressed welfare chauvinism, thinking he was more deserving of welfare than other (non-white and non-Christian) recent migrants. He said he had been disadvantaged in the labour market and cited ‘anti-white racism’ as a cause.

In contrast, even though Adam and Matthew suffered deprivation and had a sense of unjust failure in their endeavours and life projects, neither blamed the usual RWP scapegoats. Instead, they did exactly what Kimmel (2017) suggests victimised and frustrated white men should do – they blamed the inhumanity of neoliberal policies, which have scarred the lives of so many in Australia and elsewhere. We have suggested a number of resources (personal, familial, ideological, technological) that Adam and Matthew had access to which were important in their ability to develop progressive sociological imaginations and resist the worldview of RWP. In addition to having these resources, both men understood themselves as possessing a set of advantages others did not. That is, they could see that although they struggled and suffered, many minorities and women were in an even worse social situation. Even when they felt the pain of injustice, these men did not articulate a sense of entitlement; they did not claim that such bad things should not happen to white men like them, only to those who are ‘undeserving’. Their ability to identify the structural disadvantages of different Others (women, ethnic and sexual minorities) suggests an important potential to develop solidarity across lines of social difference.

Kimmel’s work has been criticised for assuming the only option available to marginalised men is to pursue more power (Roberts and Elliott 2020). Strikingly, instead of claiming entitlement over those in structurally disadvantaged positions or making claims about privileges ‘owed’ to them, Adam and Matthew developed progressive structural critiques of the social system which, in quite different ways, had brought misery into their lives. Their avoidance of aggrieved entitlement had two steps. The first involved thinking about social structures and being aware of some level of structural privilege associated with their position as white, heterosexual men, thereby shifting away from the individual level towards the structural, and curtailing the common focus on individual psychology, morals, or choices. This structural approach also seemed to help them overcome self-blame and feelings of failure and inadequacy. They could see – or in Adam’s case actively investigate – the experiences of Others who did not benefit from some of the same structural advantages as themselves. This first step of recognising one’s structural privilege, even amidst personal hardships, seems essential if men experiencing relative deprivation are to avoid taking up aggrieved entitlement. Understanding oneself as having some social advantages that women and ethnic/sexual minority groups do not have may be a robust bulwark against feelings of aggrieved entitlement. The second step involved the development of convincing alternative accounts of their social predicaments and systemic explanations of why their life projects may have failed. The ability to sustain such convincing structural accounts may be essential if men are to fend off the many invitations to feelings of aggrieved entitlement and avoid being mobilised in support of right-wing politics.

The progressive response to socioeconomic hardship exhibited by Matthew and Adam is encouraging, but the evidence-base for these findings demands caution. The qualitative methods used in this study provide rich insights, but it may simply be that our research identified two discrete cases of a progressive alternative to aggrieved entitlement. In addition, this research identified only a select range of resources used in developing a progressive sociological imagination, others may exist. Future large-scale research is required to estimate the prevalence of progressive sociological imaginations among younger groups of men. Such work is also necessary to better understand the resources and characteristics which support young men developing structural critiques and an awareness of their privilege. Insights from this study will be useful for future work addressing these new lines of inquiry.

In a way that we did not anticipate at the start of our study, it appears that a sociological imagination – which leads to an awareness of structural dis/advantages – can help young white men avoid aggrieved entitlement and scapegoating of minorities and women. As noted, Adam and Matthew had access to various resources which supported them in recognising their privilege and developing their progressive sociological imaginations. This raises two key questions. First, how can more white men become aware of their structural privilege? Second, if experiences of deprivation are a spur to structural critique and the development of a sociological imagination, how might we cultivate a progressive sociological imagination without the need to experience such deprivation? Specific courses aimed at assisting men to recognise their forms of privilege and facilitate gender transformation have existed for many years and may be effective (e.g. Keddie et al. 2023; Pease 2012). More generally – we know that by studying sociology – students learn about structural dis/advantage and cultivate a sociological imagination (Howard and Butler 2018; Spalter-Roth et al. 2010). This helps them to reflect on privilege and to locate their biographies within broader social structures and processes. More widespread engagement with a sociological perspective throughout secondary and tertiary education could provide some of the resources young people, especially younger white men, need to avoid a stance of aggrieved entitlement and exclusionary forms of politics more generally.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank all the participants of this research who generously shared their time and experiences for this project. We also thank Rachel De Haas for her assistance with this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Geoff’s interview took place through a messaging service; his text is faithfully reproduced here.

2 For a wider discussion of this idea and its mainstreaming in political discourse, see Ekman (2022).

3 Antipodean slang for a place far from anywhere.

4 Arguably, we could see aggrieved entitlement as a form of RWP sociological imagination, as it portrays personal troubles as a consequence of social structure (political correctness, woke policies, reverse discrimination etc). However, it would be difficult to argue that this form of imagination is an empirically accurate explanation of these men's life conditions. Therefore, presenting aggrieved entitlement as RWP sociological imagination would violate how the term sociological imagination is generally used by sociologists (e.g., Edmiston 2018; Brewer 2004, 320).

5 Centrelink is the organisation responsible for disbursement of social security payments in Australia.