What does affirmative action backlash have to do with 90s alt rock & today's alt right?

Some Sunday in 1992 or 1993 high school freshman Robin confused the heck out of her Presbyterian Sunday School class when she made a presentation about Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 single “Head Like a Hole.” She argued the song’s critique of materialism (a.k.a. “God Money”) had something philosophically and ethically in common with Christian theological commitments to the spiritual over the material. Though my audience really struggled to separate the song’s then-countercultural aesthetics from the lyrics’ possible philosophical commitments, reflecting back upon this incident today I see that baby Robin may have stumbled on the beginnings of something whose significance was not something anybody could have really anticipated in the “End of History” early 90s. 

Pretty Hate Machine gives voice to a sense of personal aggrievement and wounded entitlement that chimes with the one that has come to define the 21st century American conservative movement increasingly dominated by Christian nationalism. In Daphne Carr’s 33 ⅓ volume on that album, she argues its songs “focus almost exclusively on the personal tragedy of the people and institutions that fail one individual: Trent Reznor. NIN’s lyrics explore the repressions of religion, family, and society, but only as they pertain to one life” (21). Whereas industrial music traditionally rages against the machine both literally and figuratively, Carr argues that Reznor reframes industrial’s heaviness as an expression of private individual aggrievement. For example, the line in this paper’s title comes from the pre-chorus to “Head Like a Hole.” Whereas bands like Ministry and KMFDM sample George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order” line or encourage “black man white man rip the system” to frame the issue as precisely a systemic one, “Head Like A Hole” narrates the perspective of an individual experiencing some sort of personal injury. And here I mean personal injury in the sense used in American civil law, i.e., as lost property right. 

From incels raging about women owing them sex to Moms for Liberty griping that the presence of LGBTQ+ people and media interferes with their property rights in their children, contemporary alt-right movements use claims of personal injury to go viral and create media spectacles drawing disproportionate attention to their causes. This paper traces the genealogy of this affect of wounded entitlement backwards from 2020s alt right media through 1990s alternative rock to 80s and 90s affirmative action backlash. Returning to Cheryl Harris’s landmark 1993 article “whiteness as property,” I show ...