The Trad trap
A glance at the Twitter feed of anyone with any connection to the Right indicates that Traditionalism – or at least a striking a “Trad” pose – is a popular online perspective. Naturally a lot of this is LARPing – changing your avatar to a top-hatted, mutton-chopped Victorian or a Spartan Hoplite, retweeting images of renaissance paintings with quotes attached decrying the degradation of 21st century life. You can see the appeal – the dynamism of being seen to be in opposition to the modern world, reclaiming some sacred gravitas from the ruins. I do it too – this article has a renaissance painting under its headline (to be fair, mainly chosen because there are no copyright disputes with a painter that’s been dead for 400 years, but still). At its best the online Trad attitude is a reaction to the shallowness and vulgar materialism of liberalism, and an attempt by people to reclaim something valuable destined for the junk-heap of history. This is based on the accurate sense that there are aspects of western culture, particularly those that relate to men and masculinity, that have been derided, devalued and discarded that are worth preserving.
In its simplest form this is expressed by people on the internet behaving like sort of idealised versions of their own grandfathers. The problem is of course that you’re a 21st Century shitposter and not a Russian country Doctor of the late 19th. People who adopt the Trad attitude on twitter keep saying and doing things that the people their chosen role models would never do. Just listen in on their conversations. Your father or grandfather may have an abiding love of country and unwillingness to put up with policitally correct nonsense but they also (probably) drank in moderation, attended church regularly, and were respectful to a fault about members of the opposite sex in public and private. They would have considered modern practices like playing video games, using porn or working out to maintain a sexually attractive appearance as contemptible, infantile and preposterous to varying degrees. It’s no great accomplishment to be in a state of showy reaction to the degeneracy of the modern world, but only the parts of the modern world that are personally inconvenient. It’s part of a larger question in relation to the emergent right – how seriously do people take these newly found convictions, and how much is a pose? Is this thing going anywhere?
When people on the right talk about a sense that everything that is worthwhile is being lost, what they are really talking about is demographics. So how many of these people – who rate this is as the key issue of our day – are doing the only thing that will reverse a negative demographic trend, which is having kids? When we talk about demographics that’s what we mean, right? Having kids and raising them to be like you so that the intangible things that are important to you stay behind when you’re gone. If you say that you’re a nationalist or that the preservation of heritage and western society is you key concern, why haven’t you had kids yet?
(We’ll assume from this point on that we’re talking about that portion of the emergent right that is old enough to have kids, which I’ll admit is an uncertain proportion.)
These are the questions all socio-cultural movements deal with, and how they deal with them is a sign of how robust they are, and the seriousness of their adherents intentions. Can you be a Traditionalist or a Nationalist if you don’t have kids? Well how about this – can you be a Feminist if you get plastic surgery? Can you be a Vegetarian if you wear a leather belt? One answer to those questions is “no” – a better, more empathetic answer to that is sure you can be, but maybe it just makes you an imperfect feminist or vegetarian. If that stance is hypocritical it’s a benign, human sort of hypocrisy, that understands people are flawed and even the most moral types of people frequently fail to live up to the highest standards to which they aspire.
Just because decide something is true or moral or important, that doesn’t mean that you are suddenly no longer subject to the same pressures that everyone else is, and that you are commenting upon. Just because you decide that eating meat is wrong, that doesn’t mean that the smell of barbecued beef won’t occasionally draft temptingly towards you from over your neighbours fence, and it doesn’t mean that you won’t break down and eat the occasional Big Mac. By the same token it’s probably not enough to say to people “have kids”. For the most part people feel no less impulse to have kids than they used to, they just feel that they can’t, that the support structures and societal norms that previously allowed them to have a family no longer exist, and can’t be conjured back to life in an instant. The decline in western fertility rates happened gradually and is only going to be reversed gradually. (And in fact there’s a question as to whether it can in fact be restored all, because not many countries have had success raising birth-rates significantly long-term when they’ve attempted to do it). Just because you’ve decided to call yourself a nationalist doesn’t mean you are suddenly unmoored from these problems.
Maybe what’s missing from discussions on the Right that would be helpful is not the idolisation of old-timey manhood but an admission of why we find the ideals and lifestyles of our forebears difficult to live up to and emulate. Understanding why this stuff is so hard is the first step in figuring out a solution, but it requires people to be mature enough to say out loud “I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to do this”, to show a crack in the immaculately arranged social media profile. Whether the emergent right will be able to have those conversations is a litmus test in determining if you’re the saviour of western civilisation or just a guy who retweets Oswald Spengler quotes because it makes him feel brooding and macho and irritates the shitlibs.
(Painting at top – detail from “The Waterseller of Seville” by Velazquez)
