The system is failing even for those well positioned to ride the success of (but not hold stake in) the general market. The first upper-middle class runners are coming across the line to find nothing there. How does that effect the tipping point? Is this a marker of a Late Stage?
Does anyone even subscribe to the American Dream anymore? Maybe there isn’t a big pack running behind these first place white men to find a cliff at the finish line.
Is it the last remnants of an experiment burning out, or is it just the first car to crest the rollercoaster?
Or is the suicide stat meaningless and the power structure still favors inherited white male privilege so significantly that it’s dumb to grasp at minor perceived cracks forming? If this then what’s the stat about?
You're conflating "white male" with "upper-middle-class," which is inaccurate. (I'm a lazy bitch and unwilling to look up the stats, but significantly more white men are poor or working-class than upper-middle, especially depending on geographical region. Think Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the former Confederacy - any deindustrialized area.)
Anyway. White men's life expectancy has been falling since 1999. In fact, white men kill themselves at twice the rate of every other ethnic group, excepting Native Americans. There's two scripts here: the "traditional" psychoanalytic approach of why men kill themselves in middle age, versus the post-2000 rise in suicides.
The reasons ascribed for the "traditional" suicides are maybe sufficient for that type. The motivating factors ascribed to the "newer" type, which has driven the massive increases post-2000, are quibbled over but in some rough hierarchy it's agreed that they're economic (loss of industrial jobs), substance abuse (esp. opioids - think Sackler), and interpersonal (as neoliberalism drags on, their family structure continues to disintegrate).
TL;DR It's a bit of a misnomer to think that the epidemic is among the PMC - rather, as always, it's a massive and growing problem among working-class whites. The stat isn't meaningless: as you say, it's the canary in the coal mine. The takeaway is that neoliberal economic governance levels any liberal assumptions of racial "privilege" in a classed manner, to such an extent that more whites of the working class commit suicide, year after year. You're right in thinking this is a crack in the foundation.
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This is absolutely true, good point. They have no social bonds to fall back on, at least not healthy ones, which exacerbates the ruinous effects of their worsening material conditions.