Thread by @tzimmer_history

What stands out here is not only the eagerness with which these “patriots” embrace the implication that America is uniquely evil. It’s also the fact that using violence against the vulnerable - and their own kids! - is so naturally part of their preferred “solution.”

I simply do not know how these people could be any clearer about who they really are and what kind of society they want. The rule of the white Christian patriarch - who gets to use violence and dole out punishment whenever he deems it necessary - is the only order they’ll accept.

This statement is telling because it fuses all these different realms - public policy, the public square, the private, the family, the church, the school - into one grand tale of what really ails America: The “woke” assault on traditional authority. The solution: More authority.

It’s a diagnosis widespread among the wealthy and powerful, as it calls for the maintaining of hierarchies, which keeps them at the top. But it’s also attractive for everyone who believes the “assault” on traditional forms of authority in all spheres of life has gone too far.

This has always been one version of the American promise, the one the Right is determined to uphold: That this would be a land of and for white Christians, where the white Christian patriarch gets to dominate and use whatever force necessary to subdue the land and the people.

It’s an inherently authoritarian, violent vision - one that is always presented in religious and moral terms, as divinely ordained and morally superior. “I do this because I must, because I’m good, because I’m upholding order,” the patriarch mumbles as he rules and subdues.

These people are not interested in empirical evidence (on gun violence, the effects of corporal punishment, etc), they are not looking for actual solutions. They have all the answers they need, the ones that satisfy their desire for power and upholding their dominating status.

Much of Donald Trump’s attractiveness to conservative men (predominantly, but not exclusively white men) stemmed from the fact that he promised to elevate this kind of toxic patriarchal “alphaness” and made its defense against “woke” assaults a centerpiece of his agenda.

Just like with Trump’s overt racism, it was precisely the fact that he was so unabashedly “alpha” (in this particularly ridiculous, toxic way), so openly sexist, so unabashedly misogynistic that endeared him to these kinds of men: Finally someone who would fight back!

Trump’s promise, in this perspective, was the restoration of (white) Christian patriarchal glory - his rise to the presidency an unmistakable signal that there would be no more holding back, that “real men” could finally reassert their dominance, restore order.

The fact that Trump himself was unhealthy, unfit, immoral didn’t matter; what mattered was the political promise, the promise to lash out against the enemies of patriarchal rule - the Libs, those annoying feminists, the “beta males.” They voted for the Trump of MAGA iconography.

This perceived assault on “manliness” is at the core of what’s happening on the Right. Listen to any rightwing pundit or activist for more than five minutes and they’re sure to rage against all those “woke” forces who are out to persecute real manly men.

https://twitter.com/peltzmadeline/status/1533535629509894149

This isn’t just a fringe obsession, but one of the key grievances that animates the Right. Just listen to Josh Hawley raging against the attack on manhood, bemoaning the “crisis of American men” in his speech at last year’s National Conservatism Conference nytimes.com/2021/12/04/opi…

It is this “woke” assault on what the Right perceives to be the natural and/or divinely ordained order for “real America” - the racial, religious, and gender hierarchy that puts white Christian men at the top - that fuels the multi-level reactionary counter-mobilization.

Their vision for the country is one of 1950s-style white Christian patriarchal dominance - a vision that goes beyond the political institutions and encompasses all spheres of American life: the public square, the workplace, the family. That’s the overriding political project.