Capitalist Cons of Conservatism

 Weird Conservative Feminism

I think there is some weird feminist thing happening on the right, especially among light-skinned working class women.  It’s connected to a whole raft of cultural, political, religious and financial issues.  Take QAnon, which is about child abuse on the surface, which everyone is against except the pedophiles - and women especially oppose it.  QAnon starts as some kind of weird female empowerment thinking, of women protecting the children!  It then descends into a fascistic mirror-glaze hell.

Branded and Bilious Biblical Billionaires

Or multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes, which are advertised to ‘stay at home’ mothers and women, or as a ‘side gig’ - and exploits their last dime since these are pyramid scams.  MLMs are accompanied by success coaches, motivational speakers and network marketing events, whose ‘self help’ is a brew of toxic positivity, emotional grooming and dollar demands.  Irrational positivity that ignores reality actually engenders depression, but they won’t tell you that.  Low-skilled, low-paid women and those who cannot afford daycare fall prey to ‘get rich quick’ ‘side hustles’ they can do at home.  They also fall for evangelical traps like home schooling – as if one or even two barely-knowledgeable ‘teachers’ with a lesson plan from some half-baked Pat Robertson U can actually do the job of many dozens of trained, educated teachers in a real school system.

Then there are all the off-base Trump  political women – Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Betsky DeVos, Marsha Blackburn, Michele Bachmann, Dana Perino, Margery Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Kari Lake, the female governors of South Dakota Kristi Noem and Iowa Kim Reynolds - and on and on.  They are the modern heirs of Anita Bryant and Phillis Schlafly.  Most of them are business types, shallow politicians or performance artists lusting after $$$$.  Many intersect with the ‘prosperity gospel’ pushed by slick religious loons like Joel Osteen or money-con, boot-strap schmoozers like Dave Ramsey. The MLMs draw flocks of desperate female inductees from white Christian evangelical and Mormon churches into their meat-grinder.   

On the internet, MLM motivational speakers and prosperity clones flaunt their perfect lives and wealth to women in contortions of performative success – showing off bricks of cash, high-end sports cars, yachts, big houses, pools and champagne. Tik Tok, You Tube, Instagram, Pinterest and even Facebook are full of coiffed and curated female ‘influencers’ trying to get you to buy some product, trying on fast fashion, using some miracle chemical goop, quack diet or 'wellness' miracle.  They are acting as the latest version of the capitalist ‘sales effort.’ MLM's ultimately commodify a whole family - in space, time, the husband and the life.  Male door-to-door salesman are outmoded in this context!

What has happened is that, like Lyft, Uber, TaskRabbit, Instacart or AirBnB, MLM companies have cleverly unloaded their real estate, maintenance, transport and stock costs onto their sales people, while claiming they run 'their own' business.  In reality they are proletarians using their personal property to make money, no different from a carpenter who brings his own tools, the artisans of old England with a loom in their garret or a home worker who has a personal computer to do a company's business. The vast majority are still being exploited.  You don't actually have a 'business.'

Some of these lonely women get dragged into small religious cults – mini-versions of large religions. These cults are full of male-domination, child and sexual abuse and exploited free labor, not just magical thinking. Even the larger Evangelical and Mormon churches can end up with aspects of cultish behavior.

Home Schooling!

Nearly all these forces promote perfect marriages, ‘the family,’ the ease and wonders of having children to receptive, conservative females.  (It is rumored that the Republican Party has rechristened itself as the “Parents Party!”) Conservative men want women at home, 'barefoot and pregnant,' so this fits.  Many of these women have low skills, are recently divorced or work in poorly-paid jobs.  They are concentrated in the backward South, in rural areas or in empty plains or mountain states.  

The con artists will pitch fantasies of the entrepreneurial, Shark Tank girl boss / boss babe running the world or her company and making loads of money. This fake feminism is only in the service of profits for the corporations.  The political Trumpist or Libertarian women will demonstrate how ‘strong’ they are. These sources are where Christian Nationalism gets some cultural steam. These tendencies form the fuel for various sad capitalist fantasies and magical manias, in a society actually coming apart at the seams.  In a sense they mirror one another.

What do you call this cultural complex?  It is certainly not 'the fight against the patriarchy' which is trumpeted by liberal feminists. The Trump women complex?  Frustrated feminism?  Evangelical feminism?  Fake feminism?  Working class female desperation? The Capitalist Cons of Conservatism?  Trad wives and trad mothers?   Perhaps you can think of a better one.  But don’t fall for them...  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Cults and Cultists,” “CoVideo Nation,” “The Cult of the Constitution,” “The Happiness Industry,” “Bright-Sided” (Ehrenreich); “Psychology and Capitalism,” “McMindfullness,” “Lost Connections” (Hari), “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Feminists and ‘Feminists’”; “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Revolt.  She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marx and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “The Testaments” (Atwood); “Patriarchy of the Wage” (Federici); “To Serve God and Wal-Mart.”   

The Cultural Marxist / April 5, 2022