The right gets weirder
Digby posted Friday on Graham Gallagher’s observations at TNR of how the right has grown not just righter but weirder. From testicle tanning to vaccine hesitancy, the fringiest of the right (including Tucker Carlson) have embraced “pseudoscience, tantric spiritualism, and self-help.”
I’ve long described the left’s embrace of New Age spirituality as a reaction to feeling adrift in a world stripped of myths that supply meaning, as an attempt to reconstruct the interior landscape from a pastiche of mystical icons. As usual, the right is a couple of decades late to the party.
Thus has the right moved from wearing their patriotism on the sleeves (figuratively) to outright rejection of Americanness (except as a cheap flag pin) and embrace of rule by strongmen if not full-on, medieval-style monarchy. Peasants want democracy, not aristocrats.
Allen West, the kookie former Texas Republican Party chair, has joined a self-styled Knights Templar, for heaven’s sake. The real ones disbanded in 1312, Gallagher writes.
“John Gibbs, a Republican nominee for a Michigan swing seat founded a think tank that argued for overturning the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote,” Gallagher observes:
Perhaps the most pernicious element of right-wing weirdness occurs at the intersection of standard traditionalist opposition to equal gender roles and an online youth subculture that has sought to make women’s disempowerment trendy. The idea of the “trad wife”—women who embrace subservient roles as homemakers and mothers, eschewing political leadership and careers—stands, like many of the weird right’s shibboleths, at the crossroads of internet meme, sociological critique, and political program. Trad wives are a pastiche of the idyll of the 1950s housewife and the imagined premodern agrarian mother, realities that only fully existed in advertisements and storybooks. They usually espouse complete submissiveness to husbands and a totalizing dedication to raising children.
That paragraph stood out because I’d just seen this TikTok video by Rebecca Larsen. She warns conservative women that their perceptions of being superior to others blinds them to the fact that conservative men with their manly tanned testicles view them as inferiors, as accessories.
There was more:
Trad wife aesthetics are partly a result of right-wing influencers’ embrace of traditionalist religious attitudes. The embrace of traditionalist Catholicism and the rise of integralists like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule—who espouses a quasi-theocracy that even the conservative stalwart George Will has said is “un-American”—are critical pieces of the aesthetic and moral revanchism now in vogue on the right.
The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—is, according to one critic, indicative of the educated and activist right’s “admiration for the [European] aristocratic past” and a longing for a new elite to which it feels it belongs. This segment of the right has, both programmatically and aesthetically, lost interest in conserving that which is American and moved on to mine its influences from stranger sources. Constitutionalism, Enlightenment rationality, religious freedom, and republicanism are out. European aristocracy, crusading holy orders, and mysticism are in. Mr. West may still make the usual overtures to Americana in press releases, but the Knights Templar (so far as I know) never made it to Texas.
That idealization of the European right has led not just to the fetishization of historical monarchism—cheerled by figures like the reactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin—but to more immediate fascination with contemporary autocrats, especially Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
It was just Thursday that I reminded yet again:
The royalist strain is as persistent in American culture and politics as the paranoid style. Loyalists made up about 20 percent of the population during the Revolution. That figure reflects a similar proportion of those sentiments extant today.
Conservatives keep confirming that assessment. The only thing American about them beside their boasting is their birth certificates.