Jon McNaughton

published in Memo No.5, Melbourne, 2026

Jon McNaughton's The Forgotten Man (2015)

excerpt

I first encountered Jon McNaughton’s oil painting The Forgotten Man (2011) in 2012 while writing a piece for my Audiovision column in Real Time magazine on a 2012 pro-Obama ad. It featured Samuel Jackson haranguing white middle-class America to “Wake the fuck up!” and register to vote. At the time, people in general were so thrilled with the prospect of Obama and the Democrats winning that little heed was paid to the sizable proportion of Americans who were incensed by a Black American physically occupying the Oval Office. To me, McNaughton’s painting was a clear twenty-first-century sign in the US of the undyingly blind and resoundingly mute racism that afflicts both political sides’ denial of racialisation: the progressive left, whose positivity leads them to focus on change alone, and the conservative right, who fear change itself as an apocalypse. My unsupported view: that the absolute fear of Black America at that Obama moment—as archaic as that felt under a metric of contemporaneity—sowed the seed for hysterical, emotional, and religious reactionaryism that created the groundswell for conservative activism, which grew to accept the desperate deal for Donald J. Trump to ascend to power with evangelistic heft.

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Text © Philip Brophy. Image © Jon McNaughton.