The cultural problem of ‘treatlerism’

Treatlerism describes a reactionary entitlement rooted in exploitation. From selfish SUV drivers to aggression aimed at gig-economy workers, the treatlerite demands indulgence at the expense of others, weaponising resentment. But what if we reclaimed entitlement?

A new term is emerging to describe a particular kind of cultural reactionary: the treatlerite. It denotes a person who, perhaps unwittingly, embodies and promotes a right-wing worldview – through a deeply ingrained sense of entitlement and hostility towards others. The word, a portmanteau of ‘treat’ and ‘Hitlerite’, ferries criticism of a reactionary sentiment: a misplaced sense of entitlement to pleasure. How far does it go?

If culture functions to encourage and discourage certain types of behaviour, then naming this impulse matters and treatlerism should be considered a cultural event. Our online and offline lives blend into each other. The words, phrases, opinions, stories and discourses we find online become enmeshed into our IRL world and culture. Treatlerism arose from an online discussion about the morality of using app-based delivery services, where users’ expectations of seamless, subservient convenience often clash with the reality of precarious gig work. But its reach extends far beyond that. 

Treatlerites generally don’t talk about things like political states, policies or ballots. Though this dynamic is particularly relevant now, as Donald Trump and his wing of capital position themselves once again to leverage resentment into creating a popular base of power. Their political views are articulated out of a political unconscious, submerged within stories that demonstrate hostile attitudes towards others. They see themselves as victims of an unjust world, because their expectations of ease and indulgence are often thwarted. They are a spate of people complaining viciously in public about a service improperly rendered unto them by a gig-economy worker. We might spot a treatlerite when they throw a strop at bored desk clerks or grass on knackered delivery drivers. They are, in effect, scabs in the field of consumption, demanding their due at the expense of those who labour to provide it. 

Consider this driver of an SUV who cannot fully enjoy his expensive death machine, who fumes at the traffic congestion charges, all the while failing to see how the fines he racks up for speeding in school districts amount to a greater monetary loss. They’re like the title character in BS Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry who invents a form of double-entry bookkeeping to log every setback and inconvenience that befalls him so he can extract duty fees from society in the form of permissions to satisfy anti-social urges. They are angry, wanting to be somewhere else, and are unable to sense the disproportionality of the suffering they unknowingly endorse. 

In Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2024), the family of Rudolph Höss, the Auschwitz concentration camp commandant, muse dreamily about an Italian holiday while Höss administers the murders of thousands of people each week. One perceptive commenter notes, ‘all fascism is, at its core, Treatlerism really’. The behaviours deemed ‘treatlerite’ are possibly recognisable (and so nameable) now because of the way that service platforms have incentivised consumer appraisals of a worker’s conduct as part of the product. The turning of everyone into a mini-manager – combined with the inherent, against-the-odds, democracy of social media apps, has made something rather ugly rather visible. We might also want to acknowledge cadences with an earlier term like ‘authoritarian personality’. 

Is a ‘treatlerite’ not just a ‘Karen’? 

You may recall ‘Karen’, the casually white supremacist everywoman who frequently wants to speak to the manager and call the police? ‘Treatler’ helpfully communicates much the same character type, only with an emphasis that is less open to politically conservative interpretation. It is a marked improvement. 

‘Karen’, astute readers may have noticed, emphasised women. It codes the character trait of being indiscreetly complicit in exploitation and oppression as feminine. As if to suggest that women could not be trusted with serious business, their shrill irrational minds being a liability to the masculine racial capitalist system. 

This was a weak point in the progressive case for ‘Karen’ as a term of discouragement. Although Karen most obviously indexed unsolidaristic behaviour generally, (becoming much more namable when seen through the content of Black Lives Matter uprisings), it maintained a misplaced undertone of opprobrium towards women. To compound this problem, rightwing trolls like Julie Bindel were able to exploit the slip, in diatribes against the entire left wing background and content to the phrase. ‘Whenever a woman dares to speak out about our rights, you can be sure men pretending to be progressive will be there to put them down’, wrote Bindel for the Telegraph. As Julie Carrie Wong wrote, such complaints frustratingly ‘re-enacted the Karen dynamic’.  

Such turning of arguments about gender discrimination against broader progressive values is a development that demands our vigilance. As Richard Seymour recently observed, an overtly reactionary wing of the political establishment has developed ‘a deeply opportunistic relationship to identity’, becoming competent in this ‘appropriation of the woke idiom’ all the while supporting and enacting policies when in power that undercut the cultural discourse. 

Antinomies of ‘entitlement’ 

The problem apparently at the heart of the treatlerite phenomenon is entitlement. Amidst the generation that has learned rhetorical techniques of dismissal grounded in a notion of ‘privilege’, being entitled is a damning mistake. However, the problem with this particular type of entitlement, is its consistent mobilisation against workers and the dispossessed. 

Entitlement as a feeling, however, is not to be dismissed. Capitalism short-changes a lot of us. Directed against our managers and landlords, the people who take or withhold from us the means of life, entitlement comes as a correctly rationalised expression of indignation. 

There is a type of left-wing morality that gives ground to ascetic lifestyles rather than abundance, saying to the indignant consumer: ‘want less’. This is well-meaning but wrong, because what does it grant apart from the bitter tang of morality, in the grand scheme of things? Rather, James Connolly’s line ‘for our demands most moderate are, we only want the earth’, directed towards the ‘tyrant’ and ‘oppressor’, gets the sentiment where it should be.

Winning on our own terms

What does all this mean anyway? Maybe treatlerism is just a joke, likely forgotten within the year. But the problem it names will be with us much longer and the terms we assign it matter. Our ideology must contain connotative innovations adequate to criticise new forms of bad thinking. 

In a recent article about anti-fascism, community organiser Reuben of Haringey, writes that a certain type of online discourse and meme culture has worn thin. He notes that the left should use the cultural advantages they hold over the far-right when it comes to engaging in constructive, patient, community-building political work. At the same time, however, some of the left’s most creative acts might still occur in the unique conditions made by online communities.

Jonas Marvin points to a growing far-right culture that is successfully presenting itself as antagonistic to the status quo, generating new material for reactionary subjectivities. He highlights that as a response, we must facilitate ‘a strategy which intervenes in politics, organises on the ground, and takes culture – the physical and digital spaces where people define and recreate themselves – very seriously.’ This accompanies pertinent questions around political vehicles and platforms for this task. 

It feels as though the social media platforms we use are changing in ways hostile to the creative work of forging a common culture in solidarity with one another. But if new words, phrases, stories and archetypes are being made on these websites, in spite of everything, I think we would do well to keep posting on them. 

Send treat

Trump and Musk need workers to produce the surpluses that fuel and legitimate their domination, the success of their business depends on this exploitation. They also need workers to be at each other’s throats, and seem to be aware of it. Political power and cultural influence are aligned to produce a class fraction of little white race supremacists, motivated by ‘treats’ as disproportionate compensation for the moral wounds inflicted upon themselves through performing their function in the organisation of atrocity. 

A 21st century characteristic may be the feeling of entitlement to the fruits of hyper-exploitative employers like Uber and Deliveroo. The relationship between pleasure and exploitation has been explored by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who  states that exploitation has always served the purpose of producing extra pleasure for a class of masters, and that with the development of capitalism this  ‘surplus jouissance’ historically emerged in the form of ‘surplus value’. What if instead of feeling entitled to more pleasure through exploitation, we taught ourselves to bring this feeling of entitlement to bear on our managers, our governors, and landlords? 

You are certainly entitled to pleasure! You should have a little treat! You must act like your boss owes it to you! This is the common sense that will beat fascism. Let’s have our pleasure at the expense of Trump and Musk’s hideous class. As said Marx, ‘expropriate the expropriators’.