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.