The crisis of male loneliness is very much in the news right now, for good reason; masculinity is certainly, to say the least, In Crisis. This is worthy of serious attention, but not from me. I’m going to focus instead on something that I think is kind of overlooked right now – what’s going on, exactly, with normie women? Women are a core demographic of the MAHA woo-woo right, many of them having abandoned long careers as Democratic voters to become fruit snack crusaders, vaccine skeptics, and general social menaces. There was a piece last month that a lot of people sent me, knowing where my interests in this stuff lie: “How New Age Women Turned Right,” by Sarah Jones. I was expecting some kind of explanation of how New Age women “turned” right, but with all due respect, the piece didn’t really deliver on that or much of anything else. It’s not exactly a book review, but most of the content summarizes one book about one very infamous New Age lady: Burning Eye Sees All, by Leah Sottile, about the late (excuse me, ascended) Amy Carlson a.k.a. Mother God and her cult, Love Has Won. Most of the insights in the piece are sourced from Sottile’s book; the one that was particularly interesting to me was Sottile’s contention that mysticism has historically been an avenue for women to transcend (heh) their restricted social status. (Including the 1970s-1980s New Age movement – Sottile points out that during these decades, women were still blocked from more mainstream spiritual authority.) Jones writes of Carlson: “she wanted authority, and a version of motherhood on her own terms, and it consumed her.” I think this is mostly right, and while the piece doesn’t explore this satisfactorily, I am going to excavate it like a commercial crystal mine for further insights.
Last month, around when the piece came out, I was also reading through most of Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. His ignominious later career notwithstanding, I was really impressed by it (it came out in 1933, for Christ’s sake!), and felt like it illuminates something crucial about the MAHA moment that other analyses continue to miss (our well of collective intellectual resource getting shallower, I fear, amid the contentization and podcastification of thinking). Reich carefully synthesizes social-economic and political data about Weimar and post-Weimar Germany to make inferences about the “average personality structure” of German people at the time, the average personality structure that, he contends, made them ready and even eager to receive the contradictory rhetoric, false promises, violent fantasies, and emotional appeals of fascism. Though Reich was a psychologist, the book is not principally “idealist.” A great deal of work is devoted to demonstrating how the average personality structure is contingent on what leftists like to call “material reality,” economic conditions of work and life, social conditions at the particular historical moment, distribution of life chances, prospects for fulfillment of basic and spiritual needs, and so on. Reich focuses on sex and sexuality (feels Freudian to me, idk), contending that the industrial organization of life creates sexual frustration, in fact exploits and diverts sexual energy to make people to things like work in factories for most of their waking hours and live in nuclear families. I think this can easily be generalized to what we might call life energy, creativity, spirit, or whatever, without losing Reich’s drift. Fascism, in Reich’s analysis, is an outgrowth of this diversion and exploitation; fascism as “organized mysticism,” as he calls it (mysticism of, for example, the family, the mother within the family) offers people a sort of substitute emotional release for all their pent up and frustrated aspirations and vital energy.
In this way, the average personality structure acts like a lurking variable that serves to explain political outcomes that are otherwise contradictory at, for example, the level of balance-sheet material determination that we’re so comfortable talking in. Why do people vote against their own interests – poor people for rich people’s interests? Why do people “fall for” deceptive rhetoric and false promises? Because, according to Reich, the organized mysticism of fascist ideology offers a way to process the unbearable contradictions of social and sexual life that occur and are felt at the level of the individual psyche. German fascism affirmed, on an emotional and mystical level, the very “authoritarian family structure” (Reich’s term) that had been shredded by Weimar economic crisis. The particulars are, of course, different for us today, but I think the psychological aspect is similar. Social repression and exploitation and mystification/exaltation of the mother within an authoritarian family structure… where have I heard this before?
The family structure in the US is under tremendous strain from economic conditions, social conditions, the commodification and brutalization of sexuality and emotional life, the bite of neoliberal social and welfare policy coming into millenial maturity, even women’s putative “liberation” with the freeing of markets – now you’re free to work a shift for your boss and then a shift, unpaid, for your husband and kids! Now you’re free to subjugate yourself to the market to survive! Is this not what Reich would call “sexual misery,” the frustration and wastage of women’s life force and ambitions on a population scale? But just you try to point this out, as Chappell Roan recently did when she mentioned on a podcast episode that the moms she knows are miserable. Those miserable moms will be the first to lash out at you; in addition to the bulk of unpaid social and private labor, women also, through social media, take on the work of mystifying themselves and their lives. (I just saw a TikTok video of a woman asking her husband to take their kids to a birthday party because she was tired, they both laughed as the husband hedged and said he didn’t know if he “had it in him.” Fucking embarrassing.)
I wrote about this a lot during the pandemic with the school reopening and nascent Moms 4 Liberty stuff – I wrote about it, but I don’t think I really understood it at the time. What’s the average personality structure created by the environment for women today? I don’t know if there’s a single term for it, but if I had to pick one, I’d advance “responsibility without autonomy.” Women, especially mothers, bear outsize responsibility for everything, even as more and more autonomy is stripped away from them. The patriarchal arrangements of marriage and heterosexual relationships have always seriously diminished women’s autonomy and authority; what I think the sci-commers and public health enthusiasts like myself were missing is what’s new here. What’s new here is the erosion of autonomy and authority over the main arena of women’s high-stakes responsibility — the family — by supposedly benevolent but ultimately faceless and indifferent social structures like public schools, public health, medical doctors, and so on. The crackpot health beliefs of these women (that COVID was no big deal in 2021 or for kids in general, that vaccines cause autism) might be construed as a way of processing the contradictions of sexual/psychological life and social life in the absolutely fucked crucible of the United States today. Upper middle class, educated moms get the mysticism of expertise, and the mystification of free-market ideology as empowerment, via Emily Oster. Poorer moms get MAHA. (Younger women of all walks of life get “tradwife” short-form video content, which Tressie McMillan-Cottom has correctly identified as an expression of yearning for the social relations pertaining to a bygone era of white-coded breadwinner-style economic relations.) In the backdrop of all this, of course, is the continued retreat of organized religion, so these mystifications have an increasingly weird, woo-woo, New Age and non-denominationally spiritual flavor.
Figures like RFK Jr. promise the impossible, absolution from the crushing weight of responsibility and the return of something like freedom and autonomy (read: dignity) to the individual. In terms of the average personality structure of Americans, I read a paper a while ago about how deeply “Emersonian” thinking is embedded in American culture. The idea of the primacy of the individual, of finding out your own truth, doing your own research, drawing your own conclusions, developing your inner wisdom, Going Your Own Way as Fleetwood Mac would say, is deeply American, I would argue very constitutive of the American personality structure. It is also very resonant with the focus on the spiritual authority of the individual self that characterizes the New Age movement. So the question “how did New Age women turn right” doesn’t even make much sense – the signifiers of New Age spirituality and the signifiers of right wing politics have been historically pretty different in the cultural imaginary (less so recently), but the underlying personality structure that both appeal to is pretty similar, if not the same.
Some of the really appalling MAHA episodes of recent memory, like the Mennonite woman whose child died of measles in the current outbreak and who subsequently gave an interview urging people not to take the vaccine (“my other four kids were fine”), are probably explicable at the level of individual, rather than mass, psychology. This lady seems pretty deep in denial, and that denial seems like a pretty necessary defense against confronting some deep and fucked up guilt. At the level of mass psychology, though, what’s going on with one of the most bizarre spectacles in recent memory: RFK Jr. on the child funeral photo-op circuit? Why is this guy traveling around to the funerals of toddlers who died of vaccine-preventable disease, and why are parents of toddlers crowding around to snap pics with him? What the fuck is Going On There? Why does the cold, hard, tragically irreversible fact of preventable child death not seem to have any purchase with the MAHA mamas or any power to diminish and discredit the movement among its own followers?
This last part is crucial. We can preach to the choir all we want, debunk and list facts, address scientific truths, present data, call these women brainwashed, pat ourselves on the back. It doesn’t matter. The power of the MAHA movement is that it is addressed to deep-seated emotional truths, not scientific ones. And the fact that people experience material contradictions and material suffering within their psyches means that emotional truths can’t be neglected. Here’s Reich again:
“One has to know the hidden life of these five million indecisive, ‘nonpolitical,’ socially-suppressed men and women to understand the role that private life, which is to say sexual life, plays quietly and subterraneanly in the hubbub of social life. This is not to be grasped statistically; nor, for that matter, are we partisans of the sham exactness offered by statistics, which bypass the real facts of life, while Hitler conquers power with his negation of statistics and by making use of the dregs of social misery.
Reich cites Stapel, a Nazi propagandist, writing that the National Socialist movement didn’t come to power through argument, and won’t be defeated by argument either. On this point, Stapel is correct. Far be it from me to say what we “should” be doing, but I do think that the shrill science communication and self-righteous denunciations of those of us that are rightly appalled by MAHA are beyond useless. (Reich: such an approach actually drives people into “the hands of the political reaction, which makes no bones about exploiting the consequences of [his] sexual misery.”) I think, at a minimum, any counter-force to the MAHA stuff worth its salt should try to figure out how to talk to people the way Reich was trying to talk to people.
Which is what? Well, I don’t know, but I have some tentative guesses. I think the inaccessible know-it-all tone and imperious judgment of the self-appointed Leftist Social Critics has got to go. How can we invite people, these MAHA warrior wellness mamas in particular, to politicize their experiences in a way that doesn’t neglect, exclude, or judge the emotional and psychological component of suffering in our political economy? How do we reach out to people like, it’s okay for you to be unhappy with the way things are? It’s okay for you to feel like everything is a fucking scam and not working. It’s okay for you to distrust the professionals who tell you how to live but have never done a single goddamn thing to understand your life or make it easier. It’s okay if you hate your dud of a husband, if you’re sexually unfulfilled and feel unloved, if you resent how much work your children are, if you’re exhausted, if you wanted more for yourself, if you are terrified about what might happen if one aspect of your family’s health escapes your careful control. That all of that is okay, and that all of it is a consequence of concrete choices about our social organization, and all of it is changeable.
More and more I am starting to think about the mysticism and romanticism (around being a tradwife, around raw milk, natural birth, food dyes, whatever the fuck), organized under the sign of MAHA, speak to an emotional experience of economic and social contradictions that we are all forced to suffer. I think we neglect the truths of that emotional experience at our peril. The stuff I’ve been writing about this has been using very orthodox Marxist Gramscian concepts of ideology, hegemony, internal contradiction, and so forth; these really do still operate at the structural, material-determinist, aggregate and exterior level. What is really useful about Reich’s argument, and what we can make use of, is that this stuff all interacts with a serious interior dimension that interfaces with (shapes and is shaped by) these more external material conditions.