Navigating America's Outrage Culture

Since it is obsessed with unreliability, meta-narratives, and publicity, it is perhaps most appropriate to begin discussing Brett Easton Ellis' new collection of essays, White, by examining its reception. In this, his first book of non-fiction, Ellis, who authored American Psycho and Less than Zero, describes a culture driven mad by Donald Trump. Ellis is less interested in Trump's policies or behavior than the outraged obsessed, anti-artistic, speech-chilling reaction to his presidency—an approach that has spurred his critics' indignation. Isaac Chotiner, in his widely read New Yorker piece, “Brett Easton Ellis Thinks You're Overreacting to Donald Trump”, interrogates Ellis almost exclusively on Trump. The Daily Beast calls Ellis a “MAGA Grifter” who is “trolling Hollywood liberals.” And Bookforum likens Ellis to Patrick Bateman, the murderous protagonist in his American Psycho, because they “both admire Donald Trump.”
 
Though Trump looms, White is only interested in politics from a cultural vantage point. In episode after episode, Ellis describes conversations with long-time friends that turn into hostile arguments at the very mention of Trump. What, Ellis wonders, motivates this rage even amongst intelligent people? When the New York Times ran a front-page, headline story on Trump's remark that Fox anchor Megyn Kelly “was bleeding from her eyes” and “her wherever,” Ellis wondered if the mainstream media had lost its sense of proportion, and worse, its ability to put themselves in the shoes of those who supported Trump.

For Ellis, the political arena is really only one manifestation of a more fundamental and personal problem. He begins White by exploring the sense that everyone in the social media era must live a public life disconnected from their authentic self. A successful author in his early twenties, Ellis learned early on that on that his public persona was a media creation beyond his control. More than politics, White is about the challenge of being an imperfect individual in an unforgiving and outrage prone culture. The impossibility of expressing a nuanced opinion about Trump is just the most extreme example of our culture's refusal to tolerate different perspectives.