We Can’t Let Family Life Become a Political Pawn

Illustration: Hannah Buckman

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I have written a lot about how neoliberalism, as the defining secular religion of our age, has turned families into units of competitive advantage seeking, of opportunity hoarding, of malignant self-interest. I’ve said a lot of shady things about intensive parenting and how it’s a form of selfishness that puts the short-term easing of our consciences ahead of the long-term improvement of our communities. I’ve spent the better part of the Biden administration writing about how families — liberal families in particular — need to lay off trying to control every outcome. I feel this more strongly than ever in the looming shadow of a second Trump presidency. Family self-reliance is a story line that has led us down a bleak path. There is an urgent need for us to think of our families, and act on behalf of them, in opposition to this story. Failure to do so leaves us without a compelling counternarrative to Trumpian fantasies about family resilience.

One of the reasons I resent the tradwife and Mormon moms of Instagram is that they have all but monopolized social-media storytelling about happy families. With the help of J.D. Vance, the concept of domesticity has been pressed into the service of a hateful pronatalist agenda. It feels like they’ve appropriated the entire narrative of family life and left us with nothing but the distinguished Doctors Oster and Becky and memes about being tired. It’s tempting to dismiss the importance of this kind of representational trend, but doing so is a mistake. The scripts we learn from social media seep continuously into our everyday speech, into our ways of making sense of our lives. When my friends share pictures of themselves taking pleasure in some domestic task, they might joke that they’re tradwifing, and I object to this. You are not tradwifing. You’re participating in family life, which is where radical change can take root. Representing this life, with all its joys and labors, is not the exclusive domain of the MAGA-pilled. Don’t let them have it.

Family life can be a site of relentless pressure. It can be such a millstone. So much admin. So, so much effort for most women to have an even remotely equitable partnership with a man. A largely tedious negotiation of one’s needs vis-a-vis the needs of others that will end when you die and not a moment sooner. And yet: Raising a family is a joy and a pleasure, and it keeps surprising me. Even as we struggle, making a home with people we love can give us a sense of complete reprieve, of total acceptance, of the laying down of every burden. Families, however we define them, are where we get our sustenance and motivation.

But if we want more equality, we have to accept that anxiously hoarding opportunities for our children is not the way to get there. We have to be willing to cede control, to loosen our grip on our sense of entitlement, and to trust that justice means sometimes sacrificing resources for the greater good — even when it comes to our own families. Parental peer pressure — the pressure to demonstrate family wealth in certain ways, to celebrate your children in certain ways — has created an ethical void in which we all sometimes operate. Performing conventional “happy family” on social media can look like projecting a signal from inside this void alongside the tradwives and all their ideological kin.

Take MAHA moms, for instance. Adjacent to the tradwives, there is a genre of happy-family storytelling on social media that has become increasingly widespread over the past two years, to do with maintaining vigorous health and purity from chemicals. “Purity” talk often intersects with white racial politics, and that’s part of the story, but the emphasis now is on purity at the microbial level — purity of the gut and mind. These are the raw-milk moms; the sourdough moms; the chic, rich crunchy moms in plush slow-fashion garments who prefer to remain politically agnostic on their feeds but almost certainly hesitate to vaccinate. There are a lot of glass vessels — never plastic — and talk of protein and whole foods. As is so often the case, the appealing aesthetics tend to speak louder than the ideology. This family narrative is steeped in the notion that we live in the presence of toxins (which, yeah, we definitely do) that, with enough diligence, can be eliminated (good luck!). To these moms, toxic exposure isn’t just food- and vaccine-based; these are the families who homeschool their kids so as to keep them clean from the kind of toxicity that flows through public institutions — toxic ideas, toxic “mind-sets.”

But mostly, this is just another way that some American parents are learning to fulfill their fantasies of being pioneers, of being people living on the edge of civilization, wild, free, and self-reliant. (The phrase “wild and free” is a secret handshake of sorts for this cohort.) Look closely and it’s not so different from the kind of neoliberal self-reliance that compels other parents to sign their children up for too many activities so as to maximize their potential in as many ways as possible. The difference is in the emphasis; rather than trying to control what opportunities their children will someday be able to access, these Make America Healthy Again moms are trying to control what ideas and additives will be able to access their children’s bodies and brains. But ultimately it’s the same practice, the same challenge: We will do it by ourselves, we will ask for no one’s help, and our family will be a thriving island in a sea of chaos that has nothing to do with us.

Our social order already asks too much of families, but the next four years are going to ask even more: that we sustain one another and ourselves with love and rage, that we give ourselves a safe place to collapse, that we pick one another back up as many times as it takes. We are all susceptible to fantasies of self-reliance, but we need to hold these fantasies in a new kind of contempt. They seduce us with consumerist delusions that will never satisfy us. They bind the idea of family with beliefs that dehumanize women. They keep us apart from each other.