"We Love You, But You Are Not Serious People"
How Logan Roy's One-Liner from "Succession" Captures Our Political Moment In America
If there is any one line of dialogue from HBO’s “Succession” that will remain in our culture’s collective memory for years to come, it will be of Logan Roy telling his four children, “I love you, but you are not…serious people.” One does not need to have watched the hit TV show to understand how its deeper meaning can be applicable outside of its use in a work of fiction. In fact, the line became an instant cultural sensation as an Internet meme after viewers heard it in February of 2023.
If you haven’t watched “Succession”, I’ll provide you with a sprinkle of context: Logan Roy, who is inspired chiefly by Rupert Murdoch, has been in control of his multi-billion-dollar corporation, known as “Waystar Royco” that includes a right-wing news channel called “ATN” (a fictional equivalent to Fox News). But Logan has grown old, and needs to find an adequate successor to run his company. Logan has four children, three of whom are the permanent main characters in the story: Kendall, Shiv, and Roman (the fourth child, Connor, was from a different marriage, and is not as prominent in the story). Logan had long groomed them from childhood to be business-minded, so that they could one day take over his company and rule with his iron-grip on power. But Logan, having been an abusive father, has damaged his children so terribly that they have no real capability of running his storied company.
Over the course of the show, the children continue to question whether their father truly loves them at all - as he continues to push them away from leading his company. At long last, Logan finally gives them a straight answer: He is their father, and because they are his only real source of adoration, he does care about them and loves them, but they are such unserious and incompetent characters, he simply cannot trust them with taking the reins of a multi-billion-dollar company.
It reminds me a lot of Trump supporters.
When I hear commentary from outlets like CNN or the New York Times Editorial page complaining that liberals spend too much time shaming people who support Donald Trump, I am often caught between agreeing with their arguments, but at the same time, unwilling to accept such an ignorant and negligent-of-fact analysis that desires to place more blame on those of us trying to stop the extremists and not the people actually voting for them.
For example, just recently, on Jon King’s (in my opinion, one of the most respectable anchors on the network) CNN show, he played clips of himself interviewing Republican voters in Iowa, and the things they said will make your brain tremble:
JON KING: If you think the United States should be supporting Ukraine in the fight against Putin, raise your hand.
IOWA VOTERS: [silence]
KING: Nobody?
IOWA VOTER: You don't have to be that smart to connect the dots, right? So is the war to cover up sins committed, so you can cover your tracks? There's too much money that has been thrown over there.
KING: You think all the NATO countries would do what Biden told them to do because he's trying to cover up some Hunter Biden business deal?
IOWA VOTER: It all depends on Zelensky, how much dirt he has on Biden to keep the money coming.
KING: That's pretty out there.
IOWA VOTER TWO: How do you trust when you know the government has shut down Facebook and Twitter and told them not to show certain news stories?
This kind of stuff amounts to complete lunacy, but mainstream media outlets, in their years-long Sisyphean effort to play both sides, spend more blaming so-called narcissistic, educated liberals for mocking these tin-foiled delusions instead of telling their audience the cold, hard truth. For people like David Brooks (whose latest opinion piece, linked here, we will be dissecting), it’s easier to mock and ridicule a class of people who are perceived as being the “coastal elite” for being too scornful than it is to tell the truth about an entire class of ideologically hijacked Trump voters who are too often portrayed as being part of “real America.”
It’s more acceptable within the media ecosystem to endlessly criticize Hillary Clinton and Democrats who rightfully (but not wisely, at least politically) state that a significant portion of people who support Donald Trump are part of a deplorable group of folks that seek to make America a white, Christian nationalist country that, by any means necessary, flushes out racial, religious, and LGBT minorities. But any time a Republican voter claims that Nancy Pelosi is part of a secret Chinese cabal of child sex-traffickers, we’re supposed to feel “sorry for them.” Liberals simply can’t win the argument with the both-sides media, because conservatives are awarded a participation trophy for simply acknowledging that a fact exists. But any Democrat who even so dares to scrape within 100 miles of casting elitist scorn upon the pro-Trump electorate will earn themselves an immediate nuclear attack from half of the New York Times Editorial columnists.
This is the essence of the media’s complete and total lack of understanding of what liberals like us really think abut Trump voters. Yes, we recognize that of the 74 million Americans that voted for Donald Trump, some of those individuals may be, as Jon King stated, “hardworking people…good people” that “go to church” [and] “raise money for the girl scouts.” Yes, we believe that Trump supporters are just as American as apple pie (or avocado toast), and that’s why we firmly believe in their right to have their voice heard at the polls. Yes, they are our neighbors, our co-workers, and the parents of the kids we send to school. But when millions of people try to argue that 2 + 2 = 5, or that “Pelosi + Transgenders = Deep State Consthpiracie” the media’s job is not to heckle at us from the peanut gallery because we rightfully say, “these people have completely lost their marbles.”
Yes, we love these people; we take them in as our neighbors and as fellow Americans, but they are not serious people.
This situation reminds me of a hilarious video produced by The Onion in 2009 called “New Live Poll Lets Pundits Pander to Viewers In Real Time.” In the 3-minute spoof skit, four different news commentators debate their take on America’s economic situation, but the live audience is supposed to continually provide their opinion on each of the talking-heads. As the pundits interact over the course of 3 minutes, they pay closer and closer attention to the opinion graphic, and begin tailoring their remarks in favor of a strong economy to appease their audience, instead of telling them the correct answer, which is that the economy is unwell. This is the same thing that happens too often in our media. They believe, cynically, that they can attract a larger audience of disgruntled and politically uneducated independent voters who are fed up with our political system by telling them “both sides are equally at fault,” rather than stating the obvious truth that conservatives are so clearly at fault.
Liberals like me are not ignorant of the fact that many of the people who support Donald Trump are not racist neo-Nazis who want to lynch gay people and overthrow the government. Some of these people have been unlucky victims of an ever-globalizing world, and feel left behind as their midwestern factory towns slowly hallow away, or their Appalachian coal communities die off. Some feel threatened by America’s wave of changing culture, and feel that they are walking on eggshells in a world where it is no acceptable to demean racial minorities and gay couples. A lot of Trump supporters, unfortunately, are just long-time members of the Republican Party who fundamentally do not care if they elect a racist, misogynistic clown to the White House, because they put a higher value on tax cuts and deregulation than the health of our representative democracy.
In a perfect world, Barack Obama’s famous line from his 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention that, “The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States” but “[w]e are one people” would ring true. But it is just as equally true that for a lot of Americans who live in towns whose jobs have been gone for 40 years and are never coming back - when things don’t go their way, “[t]hey get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It is not the fault of so-called “snobby liberals” that these people refuse time and time again to leave their right-wing conspiracy bubble and accept reality. There is no climate change hoax, there is no secret “deep state homosexual agenda”, and yes, you have been self-immolating by voting against your own economic self-interest for an entire two decades because you were gullible enough to believe propaganda from a multinational, multi-billion-dollar media corporation. Sorry. I wasn’t the one getting my information from Russian trolls on Facebook. You were. So when you continue to support Donald Trump after an entire eight years of this garbage, don’t get mad when we call you out for it. Ultimately, you cannot put a crown on a clown, and expect him to turn into a King. The palace will simply become a circus. We did not crown Donald Trump. You did. Therefore, you are the circus. We love you, but you are not serious people.
American liberals are far from perfect, but we are the first to admit our mistakes. We made mistakes in the 1960s and 1970s - some of the social programs within the Great Society still stand today as magnificent accomplishments, but some of them really did not work in practice. And liberals received a decade and a half of electoral punishment for it - losing twice to Nixon and three times to Reagan and Bush. But what did we do? We didn’t turn around and claim that Ronald Reagan had used hacked voting machines from Venezuela to steal the 1984 election - we accepted that we had to (temporarily) give in on issues like the national debt and crime to keep conservatives away from winning elections forever.
Liberals make mistakes today, too. Sometimes, we demand too much cultural change from ordinary people for them to keep up with. They often feel like they’re always walking on eggshells. We get unreasonably angry at Grandpa because he called his gay neighbor “a queer.” Instead of taking a step back, and realizing that Grandpa is actually good friends with his neighbor, and helps walk his neighbor’s dog when he’s on vacation, and thinks being “a queer” is completely okay - instead, we’re upset because he didn’t keep up with the correct terminology. Liberals can often make people feel invaded by forcing new cultural norms down their throats, like the frequent use of asking people what their pronouns are. It’s a fact - those kinds of things can turn people away, and make them severely prone to venting their anger through outlets like Fox News and even worse places like The Daily Wire and Breitbart.
But I would note - Democrats didn’t nominate a flamethrower who forces an uber-liberal cultural agenda down the country’s throats. For God’s sake, we nominated a white boomer (technically, older than the baby boomers) from a backwater town in northeast Pennsylvania who turned 18 when President Eisenhower was still in office. And we’re about to re-nominate him in a landslide. What gives? Hell, Republicans are the ones who nominated the guy who force-fed the conservative cultural agenda (i.e. illegal abortion) down America’s throat, and they’re about to do it for the third time in a row. And when it comes to admitting mistakes? Republicans can’t even admit they lost the election!
People like David Brooks will forever scream from the rooftops that college-educated liberals are responsible for ripping the country apart by the seams, but will forever refuse to look at the policies they prescribed upon our economy. He says “middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work.” He’s right about the problem, except that he uses his entire editorial to cherry-pick every possible reason for why the problem exists - as long as it doesn’t implicate himself. He says that college-educated liberals use “language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others.” They “change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others.” He claims they supposedly forced a culture of having children out of wedlock and therefore kept children in a cycle of poverty. In an effort to appease his own world view, David Brooks regurgitates 50 years of baseless Moral Majority talking points and then has the audacity to think of himself as an original thinker. It’s as if a wandering traveler from the 1100s peed on the ruins of the Colosseum and claimed to have conquered Rome. As one comment in response to Brooks’ editorial put it, “Sounds like Critical Rat Race Theory. The Culpable Educated. I guess I owe the party of MTG & Bobert [sic] reparations.”
People like David Brooks have all the blood on their hands for America’s crisis of democracy because they falsely claimed for decades that cutting taxes for millionaires and billionaires would magically trickle down to the rest of us. And if you ever questioned their motives, you didn’t believe enough in the “freedum” of American business; you were a tax-and-spend socialist; you were just concerned about giving handouts, and you just didn’t care enough about promoting “personal responsibility.” And when their economic theory imploded on itself (as it always does), and turned the country’s lower classes against each other, people like Brooks are so unwilling to accept they were wrong that they now blame this crisis on the people who knew for years that supply-side economics was a farce. It’s sick. Truly sick.
As I have said many times, those who support Donald Trump are still our fellow Americans, and someday, I hope we will be able to invite them back in with open arms and open hearts. Many of these people really do belong in the Democratic Party - a party that supports higher wages, better healthcare, taxing the rich, funding Social Security, and creating new jobs for working people, not Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers. But pretending that “both sides” are equally at fault in this crisis is just dead wrong. If you voted for Donald Trump, you are a part of the problem. Trump supporters - we love you, but you are not serious people.