Consumers are placing increasing importance on morality in the perceived costs and benefits of a marketplace transaction. This chapter considers the moral decisions consumers make, focusing on three key areas of marketplace morality: (1) how company morality or immorality influences consumer perceptions and decisions, (2) how consumers’ morality is expressed in their prosocial and sustainable decisions, and (3) how consumers’ immorality influences companies and other consumers. Finally, we identify areas for future research that we hope will lead to advancement of the literature on marketplace morality.

Angry White Men forecast the twilight of aggrieved entitlement in 2013. By the 2017 edition, Kimmel admitted that we might be in for a longer wait, but sundown would eventually come. Don't worry, in other words. The end game hasn't changed.

Hasn't it? Aggrieved masculinity has only intensified since then. This chapter examines how it is multiplying ever more furiously when it was supposed to fizzle out. The short answer is something called the “manosphere,” but the longer version is worth our while.

You may recall (from Chapter 15) that Angry White Men recounts the “outrage media” ecology of the late 20th century through which aggrieved masculinity took off. In that era of media deregulation and convergence, the explosion of talk radio and cable news understandably commands most of Kimmel's attention. He says little about how this ecology drastically transformed in the 2000s, with the rise of user-generated content and socially curated forums like 4chan and Reddit. Missing this is how Kimmel miscalculated the trajectory of aggrieved masculinity.

You may also remember (from Chapter 7) that students of New Populism stress precisely what Kimmel does not—the role of the internet and, specifically, participatory platforms in hastening audience democracy and the worldwide populist surge. So, you might think they’d notice that manly anger mushroomed globally on these platforms, right alongside the rise of New Populisms. Few do, however. Most seem to prefer offline to online cultural politics, the real world over the virtual. The Great Recession: a more potent explanation than inane internet scuffles. Ah there it is, serious economics versus frivolous identity politics all over again. You know where this is going, hard versus soft.

Ignoring or downplaying the online culture wars is how most analysts of populism land on class-forward accounts and neglect the gender energy source of New Populism. Chapter 11 reviewed these explanations and refuted them in turn. Here's a quick review. Why New Populism?

• • Take 1: Economic inequality (not really)

• • Take 2: Class inequality includes cultural marginalization (not quite)

• • Take 3: Class inequality meets racial and religious resentment (closer, but not yet)

It's time for a new take, but please hear this caution before we get into it. This chapter does not argue that the internet itself, certain online events, and/ or the changing media landscape launched New Populism—that is, caused it in some linear sense.

Class-forward accounts of cause succumb to the gender intentions of New Populism, no matter how gender-progressive the analyst may be. Here's a remarkable case in point.

Strangers’ danger: ‘class’ sympathy, misplaced

Arlie Hochschild is a renowned sociologist of gender who, for decades, has given us powerful insight into emotion, work, and family. In her impressive foray into politics, the award-winning Strangers, she drops numerous observations about gender.

The most telling is that women are among the cheaters who sneak into line before their turn. There's our first clue that women are not the protagonists in this “deep story.” If they are, then how are they cutting in front of … themselves? Sure, women are pitted against each other all the time, but something is off here. Apparently, women are pissed off about moving ahead in the queue, infuriated at the feminists who enabled their advance? The only way that makes sense is if they’re angry on behalf of someone who, thanks to feminism, can no longer move ahead due to gender, namely a man.

It turns out that behind every angry woman is an angrier man, as Hochschild seems well aware. Several times, she acknowledges that the deep story envelops “white men and their wives,” and that most women who relate to the deep story do so through men in their lives. She even traces the deep story directly to the “fires of history” ignited by movements for gender, race, and sexuality justice, which many white men experienced cumulatively as attacks on them. She recognizes that “Trump was the identity politics candidate for white men.” Undoubtedly, Hochschild gets that the good guy here is a guy indeed.

And still, she does not put aggrieved masculinity squarely at the heart of a story that is spilling it. Instead, she relegates gender to qualifiers and asides, barely mentioning masculinity. She puts class forward. She validates the class complaint and mostly keeps a lid on the gendered odor it covers up. She asks us to scale the “empathy wall” to meet it.

If someone as attuned to gender as Arlie Hochschild—an indisputable expert on the subject—can back away from gendered cause like this, essentially calling for sympathy with aggrieved masculinity, I can certainly see how the rest of us do it. All I am asking is that we do it no more.

Increasingly, aggrieved entitlement is running the world, and not just in the sense of anger run rampant. I mean something more official here too: that the feeling now occupies positional status, increasingly charged with governing the world and backed with all the resources entailed. It is here that I think a common interest—dare I say, a universal investment in immobilizing New Populism—arises.

Before we can articulate this shared concern, some review is in order. Part II set out to explore contemporary populism and its signature feeling, which is the escalating sense of aggrieved entitlement. These things we’ve established thus far:

• • By the time COVID-19 struck, another pandemic was well underway. The worldwide spread of New Populism preceded COVID-19 by a good decade.

• • Its many global variants are bound not by shared ideology, but by a signature feeling profile, an escalating sensation of aggrieved entitlement.

• • Most analysts emphasize the repercussions of New Populism for democracy. Some of these accounts prompt democracy panic, a classic anti-populist tactic that ironically proves the populist case in the act of decrying it. It does so by implying that democracy must be saved from ‘them,’ which is precisely what New Populists say of the elite—for this reason!

• • We can avoid the vicious cycle to which anti-populism contributes by examining the full field of complicity (including anti-populism), rather than heaping disgrace on the base. Abridged, we can analyze New Populism as a downrising rather than an uprising.

• • Downrising better captures the highly dispersed agency of New Populist feeling, across the political spectrum and a complex web of actors and contributions. This kind of agency calls us to follow spiraling momentum, not map linear cause and effect. Participation can be direct and indirect, inadvertent or diversely intentional, immediate and accumulating over time, human and non-human (as with weapons, t-shirts and flags, or information and communication technologies).

• • Anti-populism—for example, rendering the base as ‘white trash’—is also part of the downrising. If we let go of this attachment to feeling horrified by the base, we could start to ask more promising questions about the feeling that animates them. Like, how does aggrieved entitlement move, and (how) am I part of that? One thing's for sure: It is on the move.

To make the case for gender as any kind of cause, we have first to unravel the case against it. The negative case rests in a set of denials and deflections repeated so often, they are received as obvious points and rarely met with challenge. These defenses show up all over public and private conversation as well as scholarly discourse. They lie on the tip of our tongues, and they amount to collective denial of what is right in front of us. The goal of this chapter is to dismantle them.

In Part I, I sought to disarm gender, to defuse it as a political weapon so we could begin to appreciate how it operates politically at a deeper level, through sociophysical sensation. Here, I seek to carry that purpose through, further exposing the political operation of gender by disarming our reflexes to deny it.

These defenses too are sociophysical—habits of argument that condition the senses to absorb and process New Populism in certain ways and not others. Our work here is not simply to refute the arguments, but to recondition the senses accordingly. We can build capacity to spot these habits as they arise, bring them into awareness, and activate different responses. Practice, as in rehearsing new reflexes, is how we will dismantle our defenses against the relevance of gender.

Let's try a more embodied, playful spin that might help to shake these habits loose. Think of this chapter as a game show, where the challenge is something like, Top Seven Reasons You Know New Populism is Not about Gender. As you read on, start each section by chanting the phrase, “It can't be gender because …”

It is uncontroversial to observe that men and masculinity have been the dominant force of populist movements, then and now. Scholars of populism acknowledge this at all levels, from top leadership to supporters on the ground. New Populism is no exception. For starters, just roll through the profiles of those global populist strongmen discussed earlier. New Populism overwhelmingly appeals to men in the voting booth as well.

But wait, you might reply. Even if New Populism leans toward men, and masculinity is part of its appeal, aren't there plenty of women involved from top to bottom? Well, I don't know that I’d say plenty at the top.

The irony should be lost on no one by this point: Aggrieved masculinity—that definitive feeling of entitlement to impermeability—spreads through porous bodies. What would it look like to approach the culture wars this way, as if virus mitigation were the charge?

That's an honest question. If I’m being real, I’m not sure how to answer it. So I took to verse while I pondered, inspired by recent laughter with a friend over an old American ode to the pelican. I suppose my amateur limerick is as good a place as any to begin our conclusion. Consider it a call to arms for a new kind of cultural warfare.

Parting with the pufferfish (is no easy task)

This book began by slowing down the usual read of New Populism as a socioeconomic symptom. We took our time with the spirit of the symptom, rather than take it at its word. By staying curious about what it does more than says, we discovered that the symptom is about something else.

New Populisms share a signature move, and their global rise to power as anger management (government by—not of—anger) brings that move to a whole new scale of consequence. Were this a dance, it would be called ‘the pufferfish.’ At any threat to your strength, blow up. Literally inflate the body: Puff up the mouth, voice, chest, limbs, and gait, whatever defense is on offer. Arm yourself in barbs (no masks, please) and release deadly venom. To prove your strength, perform “deimatic” display (biology's term for puffing, bluffing behavior) that makes everyone, including yourself, more vulnerable.

‘Doing the pufferfish’ tells a different story about populism, one that points to gender instead of class as a starting place. Leading with gender, we are better equipped to identify the feeling of endangered manhood that animates the symptom, the manosphere that propels it around the world, and the regional variants by which it claims ever more hosts.

New Populism looks quite different in this light—less like a genuine socioeconomic uprising and more like a gender-laundering service, a political front for manly grievance. Through New Populism, aggrieved masculinity hijacks class inequality for its own bidding.

To what end? Or what does the pufferfish want, beyond the escalation of anger? To avenge wrong done to manly right. To restore his rightful place at the head of the line. To retrieve the gender binary, so he alone can reign as universal subject, put the Others in their place, and rest assured of self-containment.