how to argue with reactionaries
It’s likely you’ve seen it, but in case you haven’t, there was a clip making the Twitter rounds this past weekend where a woman complains that being a single working woman “absolutely sucks” and says she would rather live on a homestead and “have one baby in the belly and another on [her] hip and a toddler running behind.”
The woman is not just any woman, of course—she is Jacky Eubanks, a Catholic fundamentalist who ran for Michigan state legislature a couple of years ago and was endorsed by Trump. In that seat, though, in that debate (part of a series called run by Bari Weiss’s The Free Press called “The Swing State Debates”), Eubanks stands in for frustrated women who, in her words, “slave away for a corporation that doesn’t like you, doesn’t care about you, makes you sit under fluorescent lights for eight, nine, ten hours a day.”
Her propaganda—spewed in the most currently effective form, the personal confessional—is effective because it preys on a real problem. Women do feel isolated, because they are; they do feel like they’re slaving away, because they are. Eubanks blames it on the way “the economy is set up”—she’s not wrong—but her solution to this systemic problem is not structural at all, but one of lifestyle: she sums it up by saying she’d rather go back to the 1950s.
Much of the response I saw online was a rebuttal of that sentiment. People say she’s wrong, that the 50s were terrible for women, that she’s stupid, that the life she’s describing is not actually unalienated in practice, that she needs women’s studies, that she should talk to an actual housewife.
But reactionaries like Eubanks and Trump and his ilk are not actually offering women the homesteading lifestyle or the political project that would make it possible. They are offering them the fantasy of it, and since a lifestyle happens at the scale of the individual, they can never be held actually responsible for the fulfillment of that fantasy. It’s terribly convenient for them: women will vote for them because they’ll relate to the frustrations they outline, and they’ll never have to make good on their promises. When the vast majority of their supporters fail to have their own cows to milk or chickens to quarter and fry, it will always be the man’s fault for not working hard enough or the woman’s for marrying the wrong man.
That is why arguing against the fantasy is futile. In the fantasy, the man always works hard enough and the woman always marries the right man. The fantasy will always win, and it will get stronger when threatened; its holder will become more resolute in her conviction.
We’d be better off listening to what these women—not Eubanks herself, but those with whom her message resonates—are actually saying: that what mainstream feminism has afforded them in terms of participation in public life is not that great; that a job where they’re likely underpaid and overworked is not fulfilling; that they don’t have enough time to spend with loved ones. If the promise of second wave feminism—that you could shed the shackles of the home to participate in public life—seems undesirable now, it’s because public life leaves much to be desired. It’s hard to argue against that.