One of the biggest headlines to come out of the recent election is that Gen X—hardly nationalist or populist—broke for Trump. Broke hard—backing him by 10 points. (Boomers, by contrast, split their vote between Trump and Kamala Harris.) Maybe part of it was that we had grown up in a distinctly unpolitical moment, when there were no wars to protest and no civil rights to champion. There was, about us, an all-pervasive don’t-give-a-shit quality, and it was reflected in our Ray-Bans, our irony, our apathy. Mostly, we wanted to be left alone—by our parents, by the sex ed counselors preaching abstinence, by Nancy Reagan telling us to “Just say no.” We were, for the most part, ideologically committed to nothing.
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, Bateman told me when we spoke last week via Zoom, she never gave politics much thought. It was “like one tiny part of you, one grain of sand on a huge beach.”
She said she started to notice a change in the political climate around 2012. Although she initially felt that Black Lives Matter and #MeToo “were important movements,” she concluded that eventually, “there was an overgrowth of people wanting to be part of it, wanting to qualify, and the qualifications for these particular hashtags became wider and wider, and more diluted.”
In other words, it went too far, became too extreme—especially the #MeToo movement, “with people going, ‘Oh, I want to be part of that, but I don’t know that I qualify,’ and then other women talking you into it, saying, ‘No, you have been sexually assaulted, you just repressed it.’ ”
Then came 2020: the pandemic, George Floyd, the riots, the groupthink—“these people necessitating that I think like them, and policing what people say, and what they tweet, and what they like on a social media post.”
She hated the rise of the progressive mob. It was antithetical to everything she believed in. “The only way you get that kind of momentum behind destroying peoples’ lives is when you have a mob mentality,” Bateman said. “I felt like the fact that Trump won cut the momentum of that mob mentality.”
When I asked Bateman why she had “come out,” as it were, on X, why she’d decided to make herself something of a pariah in uber-progressive Hollywood, she said: “Everyone should be able to live their life the way they want to, without infringing on somebody else’s ability to freely live their life the way they want, and that’s the whole thing. You follow that within a society, and you’re golden—you know what I mean? You can’t fail.”
She didn’t want to say whether she’d voted for Trump. “I’m just not playing that game. I don’t want to participate in that, like, ‘Okay, here we go, we can put you in this box.’ ” Nor did she want to say what her brother, the star of the Emmy-winning series Ozark, thought of his sister coming out of the “political closet.”
