Straight Fascism

Nobody is immune to fascist or reactionary political beliefs, but I think straight people get roped into it by something particularly somatic, embodied, and physically felt. All of those buzzwords. Before somebody believes I'm being exclusive in who I'm targeting here, I'll point out that people get roped into transmedicalist beliefs or TERF feminisms along, I'd argue, similar lines.

Back to straight people. Straight gender dynamics fall especially along the lines of divisions of labor. Both men's and women's social divisions of labor serve a purpose, similar to the original point of the settler nuclear family; it is the smallest unit of people needed to survive and spread the furthest. I think once money gets tight, and survival gets difficult, people feel the fullest force of this sense of "Fuck you, I'm drawing the line here. Somebody else's survival doesn't come before me."

One mistake I think that the left makes often is to hand-wave away poor Republicans as dumb hicks. However justified the anger may be (I'm not anti-anger, and I'm not anti-name calling), I'm seeing just as many Democrats and leftists get dumber by repeat COVID infections, and outsourcing their frontal lobe to A.I. What I am saying is none of us are immune to this righteous, angry sense of, "Fuck you, nobody comes before me," where survival is concerned. We're also not immune to becoming dumber while believing that all of us are becoming smarter.

This reactionary anger is an anger of, in this context, limited resources: to begin with it's not the anger of a minority having rights, but having them before you. I think people start here, and get egged on down a pipeline of grievances into its more overtly bigoted forms. As Imani Barbarin has pointed out, many disabled people are conservative because conservatives actually put the effort into recruiting them, and actually show up to their events. Disabled people like this are a perfect case study of "Fuck you, your survival doesn't come before mine." A germ of legitimate grievance, especially one that the "other side" is genuinely not taking seriously, gets nurtured by reactionary politics.

Nurture meaning to care for, to assuage, to shelter. To provide shelter for and to. And, importantly, to "raise," to look after the development of something. When there is a grievance not being taken care of in a practical way anywhere else, the reactionary politician who does look after it can "raise it" in however way they want.

I don't mean to insult your intelligence, but the word "reactionary" gets thrown around so much in political circles that I find it useful to go back to its original usage. A reactionary politics is usually a right-wing politics and one that believes that there was some better past which we should go back to. When life gets extremely difficult this is a really, really easy conclusion to jump to. Emphasis on that part.

And so when other options aren't available, and I mean that in the most direct practical sense, people with germs of legitimate grievances can have those grievances "raised up" into proper conservative politics, ones which feed them the idea that life used to be better before, an idea that gels precisely with their own current emotional experiences.

To use a queer example, I often find that queer people today take it for granted that a person magically is or isn't a TERF, as if it's a switch that gets flipped in evil people who decide to become evil. When I was in high school, a lot of the blogs that would become TERF blogs had back then painted themselves as your garden-variety vaguely radical feminist blog. In the bubbling stew of these milieus that would later become more overtly transphobic, one of the key talking points was a desire to go back to a more impressive lesbian yesteryear. I knew many butches for whom their transphobia did not exist in isolation, but instead was linked to a general frustration at a lack of gritty materialism. Midcentury working-class butches who smoked cigars and worked blue-collar jobs and didn't take shit from men, nineties lesbian biker gangs that did petty crime and protected women, these were yearned for as a vacancy in the (then) current lesbian experience.

Nostalgia is never just nostalgia; nostalgia tells us key information about what is missing from the present, and tells us nothing about the past. It's not a useless emotion, and it's valuable to be able to notice when you are yearning. You might find an actual workable modern solution for what you yearn for. There's no shortage of vintage fashion today, and no shortage of vintage fashion enthusiasts who champion "vintage fashion without vintage values." You can enjoy a vintage car without embodying everything about that decade. You can dial back your smartphone usage and engage in more unfiltered, unpredictable, real-life abundance. You can allow yourself to have an unmediated human emotion.

But often when nostalgia hits it does not feel like this; it does not feel like anything that can be assuaged by anything other than the real deal. Grief that cannot be fed or felt by anything other than a permanent return to a system that did work better than this one.

Both straight men and women who feel pulled to trad politics are not just seeking it, but also seeking cultural permission to slot into social roles that are guaranteed safety and comfort. It's a real human yearning to want to have somebody taking care of you or a wider community that sees your labor as real. Traditional gender roles offer both of these things, while also seeming like a permanent mutually-beneficial agreement that can work in perpetuity.

Part of the deeper grievance of homophobia or transphobia is that this was supposed to work in perpetuity. Without trans people or gay people or other minorities (hell, without interracial or inter-cultural marriage or any other social cross-pollination), the fantasy is supposed to be able to work forever. It appears to be a closed system in which, regardless of the context or income of the group in question, half of people can do one thing and half can do the other and both can build kingdoms without outside influence.

So you can see how reactionary or traditional politics can really neatly feed an existential feeling that a lot of people are having. And the yearning is real, the yearning for one completely closed system of people who have to take care of you. Emphasis on closed.

I don't believe any group is immune to reactionary politics. I do sometimes think it's funny when pro-USSR people label their opponents reactionaries, all while explicitly yearning not just for communism, but for the fantasy of glory of a specific version of communism that does not exist anymore. Modern iterations of communism are not what these people are looking for.

And modern heterosexuality (and heteropessimism) is not what some straight people are yearning for, a really specific version of heterosexuality is what they are craving. One in which they were not only the only option, but so deeply fundamental to life that they were written in the stars. Many people are yearning for a mythology of being straight in which the most beautiful woman and the strongest man are inevitable for each other (and society), drawn into ever-closer orbit, building new glory years that can magic up their own identities.

When I say this is a felt and somatic process, I mean not only is there usually pre-existing cultural conditioning to encourage it, but that it mirrors what falling in love feels like. Falling in love and having a child with someone does, actually, feel like building a new thing with the ashes of a life that nearly came into nothing. Again, along with pre-existing cultural mythologies saying that you are a person and you innately matter, the idea that this is life's central purpose and it needs to be innately protected is extremely intuitive. Felt, even. Physical, emotional, grounded in direct experience.

With all reactionary beliefs we need to recognize this core seed of a desire to protect something fundamental, beautiful. Societal brushes with death, I think, foment and ferment and accelerate this mythologizing process.