Baby Fever
Pro-natalism, right wing institutional capture, the vibe shift and more in this week's digest.
What I’ve been reading: The Burnout Society and The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han. An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci: His Life, Thought and Legacy by George Hoare and Nathan Sperber.
For those of you in Southern California, I’ll be speaking at the Maven Conference in Orange County on February 22.
Right Wing Institutional Capture
The Twitter user Lafayette Lee posted this observation, which appears to be about Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter.
Musk buying Twitter is an example of how right wing institutional captures differs from that of the left. The left has often captured institutions via infiltration or some variation of the fabled “long march through the institutions.”
This doesn’t work for the right. For one thing, the left is much more aggressive about keeping conservatives out of their organizations than vice versa.
Instead, right wing institutional capture works from the top down, not the bottom up. Examples are Ron DeSantis’ restructuring of New College of Florida, and of course, Elon Musk and Twitter. He bough the company, fired a ton of people, and restructured it in short order.
I wrote an entire piece a year ago on this phenomenon.
The key is that the left and right are asymmetric. Would be right wing activists and change agents can’t simply naively attempt to follow the same playbook as the left.
The Vibe Shift
There clearly seems to be some kind of cultural inflection point around Trump’s second term. Major corporations are shutting down their DEI offices. Bank of America publicly promised never to debank people for political reasons. And Pepsi just announced it would henceforth engage in viewpoint neutral advertising.
How much of this is driven by fear of retribution from Trump is unclear. But it’s definitely happening. The fact that so many Democrats are now openly campaigning against the activist left and “the Groups” tells us that it’s probably not just about fear of Trump.
Matthew Yglesias shared his thoughts on this.
But on a values level, is the new vibe going to bring back marriage promotion? Is America going to re-Christianize? There’s endless internet discourse about “tradwife” influencers, but the fact is, Trump has appointed more women to his cabinet than George W. Bush (and the first-ever woman chief of staff). We’ve gone from protesting JCPenney for hiring Ellen to Trump tapping a gay Treasury Secretary, and it’s not even noteworthy. Do Trump-voting Zoomers want to ban abortion? To privatize Social Security and Medicare? Or are they voting Republican in part because they believe these are settled issues and see the focal point of politics as something else entirely? And if it’s the latter, are they correct in that calculus?
To some extent, surely they are. I remember the week after the election, a gay college student told me that some of his friends were concerned that Trump’s win would threaten the Obergefell decision and marriage equality. I don’t really know what Trump is going to do, but I would be genuinely shocked if that happened. A big part of the “rightward” shift in vibes is not the revivification of old conservative ideas but precisely the opposite. The movement for LGBT rights gets weaker if most people decide that L, G, and B are no longer up for debate.
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In a Barnes & Noble in Williamsburg, Virginia over the weekend, I saw three different books about how the Christian Right is taking over America. I don’t think that newly MAGA-pilled tech executives or newly MAGA-pilled teenagers are backing Trump in order to facilitate a Christian Right takeover. I think they are backing him because they don’t see that as the stakes in American politics.
I do think the culture has turned more friendly towards explicit statements about Christian identity - look at all the Jesus talk from the teams in the college football championship game, for example. But fundamentally we’ve progressed towards a post-Christian right.
Related thoughts from Tom Edsall/NYT: The Right Is Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds
Christian Nationalism is a Farce
I’m on record as saying I don’t agree with Christian nationalism. But in reality, the entire Christian nationalism discourse is basically an unserious, illegitimate joke. It exists simply to attack Trump supporting conservative evangelicals.
We saw that this week when, at an inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral, the Episcopal bishop of Washington exhorted Trump to govern in line with a progressive Christian theology.
The anti-Christian nationalism crowd was strangely silent about this call for theologically informed government.
Also, while it’s true that conservative evangelicals do sometimes engage in boorish, inappropriate behavior, we see here that liberal Episcopal bishops do the same.
Baby Fever
Patrick Brown: Remote Work Created a Baby Boom. Can We Keep It Up?
World Magazine: Baby fever - Amid plunging birth rates, a growing pronatalist movement insists families need to have more kids - Another profile of the pro-natalist couple Malcolm and Simone Collins, whom I would categorize as part of the secular tech-right.
Simone looks like a “trad wife” who stepped out of an Instagram account. Her dark blond hair is braided around her head. She wears an ankle-length black jumper but with a modern twist: circular, black-rimmed glasses. Her youngest, a 6-month-old baby, is slung on her back. On the wooden play set, her 2-year-old daughter is swinging in a long dress. The family lives in an idyllic 1790s stone farmhouse in Pennsylvania. They believe it was built by a soldier who served at nearby Valley Forge. Their kitchen has a low ceiling, red brick walls, and copper pots hanging above the stove. Later that afternoon, Simone will cook dinner for the family.
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For the Collinses, pronatalism is not rooted in religion or marriage but in saving the species. On their website, they state they’re “vehemently against authoritarian population control policies” and oppose those who “use pronatalism as an instrument to other ideological or religious ends.” They support “anyone who has kids or may want them, regardless of race, sexuality, income, or other background.”
Magdalene Taylor: Fertility Olympics - The fertility anxieties of today are not what they were in the past
Recently, for example, some women online have been posting about how “fertile” they are in comparison to other women. These women do not appear to have children, nor have they discussed ever being pregnant. In their minds, fertility is dictated primarily by their aesthetic qualities, namely thinness. They tout their healthy diets, supplement regime and workout schedules as indicative of their ability to reproduce, without much substantiation. Women posting like this does suggest they view compatible, “high value” men as a scarcity, so much so that they need to skip past all their other qualities as women and get down to what really matters: the potentials of their womb.
Best of the Web
Bloomberg: The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers - Bloomberg sends seven reporters to dig into the big men’s podcasting space, with an obviously critical eye. Interestingly, these kinds of resources are basically never used to produce this kind of analysis of reporters and reporting at other major news outlets. It’s exclusively directed at people outside the guild.
The Atlantic: The Online Porn Free-for-All Is Coming to an End - great news
Joel Carini: Marriage Is Secular
Michael Brendan Dougherty: In Defense of Travel Teams - “The travel team dads and the dance moms are the secret high-trust society hiding within suburbs that have lost the habits of neighborliness.”
The Substack writer Yuri Bezmenov (a pseudonym), wrote an analysis of the various “resistance lit” Substack publications. I would not personally classify some of these as anti-Trump resistance sites. I don’t think Matthew Yglesias or Noah Smith fall into this category, for example. But this is very illuminating as to just how lucrative the resistance lit genre is. Jennifer Rubin has managed to rack up almost 350,000 free tier subscribers in less than two weeks, for example.
New Content and Media Mentions
I was mentioned this week by Oren Cass, Joel Carini, Joseph Rhea, and Benjamin Mabry. Kevin Watson put my book on his five best of 2024 list. Thanks, Kevin.
New this week:
5 Career Truths Your Boss Won't Tell You - Your résumé gap isn't a flex. It's a career death sentence
Memo to Big-City Progressives: Get Back to Basics - My latest in Governing magazine
Meritocracy's Blind Spot: How America Overlooks Its Own Talent - From National Merit Scholars to H1B visas, how America's elite institutions miss homegrown talent while chasing foreign labor - A guest post by Tom Owens
My podcast this week is with Jesse Rine on his new Christian college guide.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
Cover image credit: Malcolm and Simone Collins by TeggorMindFish/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
If the vibe shift is real, we might need to do some reflection on why the irreligious right won a culture war that the religious right lost.
Reading your American Mind piece on Christian nationalism again, it's obvious that you are 100% in favor of what the Left has been calling Christian nationalism. The very idea of taking guidance from America's past and seeking to be authentically American would trigger a Wokester into seizures.