What We're Really Arguing About

Commentator

Dear Friends,

I’ll soon post some more close-in political pieces about what Trump is up to. This is an attempt to zoom out a bit and to think about the real psychological content of some of our more insuperable political divisions. Things are really happening at partner sites of Castalia! At the shiny new

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Țara Isabella Burton

writes on Gabriel Bump and

Alex Perez

on the equally unlikely-named Rita Bullwinkel. At

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Joshua Doležal

writes on ‘newspreneurship.’

Best,

Sam

WHAT WE’RE REALLY ARGUING ABOUT

You may at some point or other have had the slightly funhouse effect of hearing people talk about politics and having the sense that what they’re discussing is not at all what they really mean. People talk about tariffs or monetary policy or, for that matter, abortion and unisex bathrooms, and they talk around whatever the emotional content really is. To some degree, the real business of politics is the operation of the state, which is pretty dry and technical, but the actual psychological content of political discussion tends to be something very different — and this article is a schematic trying to get at where the fault lines in the political culture are really drawn.

• Gender. This has become, in some ways, the really defining issue in modern political life. It’s become a tenet of progressivism that gender is, in some vital way, fluid — that a person’s expression and decision-making affect their gender identity (or, in the language of progressivism) the performance of their gender. To conservatives — or those on the other side of the debate — this idea is at best naive and unscientific and at worst corrosive to the psychic well-being of the society. It’s been the subject of much derision on the right to see left-leaning institutions tie themselves in knots trying to find compatibility between their professed adherence to science and their repudiation of the apparently inarguable biologic bifurcation of sexes. For those on the left, the point about gender fluidity — even if the political application of it is sometimes elusive — is nonetheless non-negotiable. It aligns with trans solidarity and it aligns with a narrative of choice, as opposed to biological determinism, that threads through discussions of abortion, same-sex love, female empowerment, etc, etc.

• Shape of a woman’s life. There’s a good argument to be made — certainly, the opinion page of The New York Times is forever making this argument — that the really salient issue in politics is the degree of external control and influence over the arc of a woman’s life. The narrative on the left has settled on women being able to craft their lives in any way that they wish, but with a certain emphasis (the ‘lean in’) on professional accomplishment and on making up for centuries if not millennia of workforce inequality. The narrative on the right — this certainly settled into place in JD Vance’s pungent “childless cat ladies” comment — isn’t necessarily to reassert patriarchy or to exclude women from their rightful place in the workforce and power structure (although that would certainly be the left’s gloss on it) but to argue that something incalculable is lost in deemphasizing the maternal aspects of a woman’s life, whether that results in not having children at all, in privileging work over child rearing, or in treating an embryo as essentially a disposable entity in the decision to have an abortion.

• Shape of a Man’s Life. This has, for a while, been less of an overt public issue than the endless litigation of the shape of a woman’s life. It shows up in coded forms in various degrees of hand-wringing over the the demilitarization of society (the abolition of the draft, for instance) or the breakdown of the nuclear family structure or the acceptance of same-sex marriage, but, with figures like Jordan Peterson and Richard Reeves, it’s become possible to talk about the ‘male crisis’ — the idea that feminism and the integration of the workforce have produced knock-on effects in undoing the organizing integrity of a man’s life. For the left, this is pretty much just karma for millennia of patriarchy and misogyny. Men are encouraged to get over themselves, and to adapt to a new world in which the workforce is fully integrated, in which they may well have female bosses or have to compete against women, in which a viable role for a man is to be a ‘fellow traveler’ or ‘ally,’ to listen to the needs of women as they navigate the new system, and to sub in to domestic roles in more or less the ways that women determine them. For an energized right — and this set of ideas, expressed in right circles and now spilling over into the mainstream, represents the much-discussed ‘vibe shift’ following Trump’s victory — those proffered roles simply aren’t very enticing. As somebody like Reeves nicely (if a little hesitantly) analyzes, the new system presents some largely unanticipated conundrums to the male psyche. Men find themselves in a lose-lose situation in competing with women in schools or in the workforce — losing to women is certainly not cool, but beating women is also a bit ungallant (women have their own conundrums in navigating these dynamics, but those have been better analyzed) and the result is that, in surprising numbers, men simply drop out of female-coded educational institutions or industries altogether. The idea of the New Right is largely to recreate the gender-demarcated society that existed before the co-ed revolution. In its more reasonable expression, the idea is that men do better work in male-coded organizations and the converse is true for women — that men are more effective and fulfilled if in the playful hazing, pragmatic hierarchization, and bonhomie of male-organized spaces, and that a return to that sort of gender bifurcation is needed for men to get their mojo back. This set of ideas has only recently crested into public (non-right-wing) discussion and it is, of course, anathema to the left, which views these ideas as unreconstructed chauvinism and occurring at what is still a delicate moment for the lovely co-ed, egalitarian society of the future.

• Homosexuality and trans. The discussion of homosexuality in the society would seem to be finished. Social conservatives were long ago found out as homophobic, and the liberal principle of tolerance paired with the conservative principle of governmental non-interference combined to keep the state, or society-at-large, from ‘policing the bedroom’ or from pontificating on anybody’s sexuality. The emergence of trans issues in public space triggers a different set of principles (see point one above) with the right holding that trans rights — as articulated by so much of the progressive left — don’t hinge on arguments about tolerance but on an attempt to reconfigure the entire public sphere to accept less-than-fully-scientific precepts which fly in the face of some fairly obvious facts about sexual dimorphism. But the dust-up over trans issues brings homosexuality back into play in the public sphere. ‘LGBTQ’ becomes a sort of badge of admission to the left, while the right either codes itself as old-fashionedly straight (Trump’s position) or uses cracks in the LGBTQ coalition to try to pick away at the progressive worldview (as in Elon Musk’s less-than-subtle trick to try to legitimize Germany’s far-right AfD by pointing out that its leader is a lesbian woman).

• Fertility. Questions about fertility and the population haven’t so much been a part of the American political discourse in the way that they are in Europe, but they seem to be coming. Some of this is racially coded, as in MAGA fears of replacement by Hispanic migrants, and some of it ties into the debates about the arc of a woman’s life, as in Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment. The more intelligent way to think of all this, though, may be about cross-cultural differences in family planning. The West, since sometime in the 19th century, has prided itself on family planning involving a small number of ‘high value’ children, which is supposed to be a more socially responsible (as well as ecologically conscious) approach in a planet with a skyrocketing population. That’s simply not the perspective of much of the rest of the world where more is better as far as procreation goes, and that difference of opinion sets off one of the nastier political disputes ranging all over the world (it’s a significant part of the subtext of the Israeli/Palestinian clash as well as in debates over immigration to the United States and Europe). The right, in the Trump era and following from the success of anti-immigrant parties in Europe, has become bolder about bringing these sorts of demographic arguments into the public sphere. For the left — which also, on the whole, accepts the arguments about the societal benefits of reduced procreation — it is almost impossible to have this discussion without hitting the tripwires for racism and ethnic stereotyping. This whole set of ideas is still mostly on the fringe — confined to people who subscribe to the Great Replacement Theory and who really watch a lot of FOX — but it seems to be coming for us as it has come for different countries and is just one more item to add to the list of awful, insuperable cultural fault lines that make any kind of real political consensus a vanishingly slender hope.