I wrote the first post for this blog series on February 27th. It is kind of wild how much the world and my life has changed in essentially less than 3 months, and I have to admit that, between the world and me, I have considered calling this project more than once, as it is really hard to squeeze writing time into the nooks and crannies of trying to be a full time stay at home parent and connect back into communities of resistance in the city of Seattle. 20-30 minutes here, if nap time is going well and I am not so exhausted that I have to nap too. Maybe one consecutive hour late at night after attending a meeting or spending time with my partner after the babe has gone to sleep, which sometimes spills into too and often leaves me extra tired the next day. Writing is not the easiest project to fit into my day, and I am still not really sure about the medium of a blog as the best way to share ideas, but I do think making this time to organize my thoughts and record them is worth my time…so the real question comes down to, do I keep trying to frame my thoughts around the ideology of Patriarchal Misogyny? Or should I stop trying to pigeonhole everything I want to write about and change about the world into one particular framework? After all, I have a lot to say about racism and white supremacy, heteronormativity, capitalism and the concept of property, ableism and the need to “be productive,” why the Great Plains Anarchist Network fell apart and whether that was a model of organizing and networking that is worth trying to build with again…can’t I just write about all of that stuff and try to organize my thoughts?
Well, I think the answer is probably yes, I can and should also be trying to write about all of those topics, when I can. However, I am not yet ready to abandon my belief that it is actually really important in this current political moment to absolutely hammer and attack the ways in which all of the current authoritarian movements around the world are really fixating on protecting a vision of masculinity that is undeniably patriarchal and misogynistic, and that this has been an incredibly successful tactic, but is also a flaw in their underlying structure that can cause the whole thing to collapse. As a nerd, I will use a Star Wars metaphor and say that Authoritarianism’s dependance on “winning” the battle to be the ones to define masculinity and to use that position as the foundation for their power is like spotting an Exhaust port on the Death Star that leads to its main reactor. From my subject position, Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) is a weak point that can be targeted and destroyed.
Capitalism, Imperialism, white supremacy, Heterosexism, ableism, all of these might also be effect avenues of attack, and ones I am happy to discuss, think about and act to disrupt, especially in alliance with others who want to attack there. However, I just cannot see any version of Trumpism or this outgrowth of the Alt-Right continuing to exist past the point that people in the US realize that the vision of masculinity being sold through PM is pure exploitive con artistry. There is no actual substance to this central idea of their entire ideology. They have no living or historical example of a “real man” that is worth pointing to and saying, “this is the kind of patriarch who will enact the vision that we are selling with our movement.” The leaders of their movement are pathetic examples of masculinity, only successful in harnessing generational wealth to create cults of personality around themselves and attempting to intimidate and bully those around themselves when the carrot of being a part of their cult fails to draw people in. Few of them are capable of even enacting the kind of violence they want to project onto the world around them except in situations where they have premeditatedly moved to eliminate any potential resistance (like in the sexual assault allegations against Trump, Musk and Andrew Tate). The only possible exception might Vladimir Putin, but I think I will save my critique of him for another day, as he is not a US example, and I am probably not well versed enough on contemporary Russian History to talk about him.
Even their historical examples of authoritarian strong men within a modern global world are almost all pathetic losers as well (With, again, maybe Russian autocrats as potential counterpoints that I am not prepared to speak to). Hitler was a pathetic loser. People knew it at the time. Too many world leaders humored him and tried to play his vanity for their own benefit, while thinking that his violent ideology could be down played with diplomacy, and so he was able to accomplish absolutely horrible and disgusting things…but his reign of terror was incredibly short and only really ended up creating long term benefit for the nations he went to war with. It is much the same with Mussolini, and the other European dictators. Dictators on other continents have faired slightly better overall (and lived for more than a decade from coming into full authoritarian power), but it has alway been within the context of essentially being a puppet of another nation pulling the strings and if that is not an obvious sign of being a pathetic loser, then I must really not understand what an “alpha male” is according to the dictates of PM ideology.
All of this Nuevo-Facism today is about creating delusional fantasies about ancient figures who lived in much smaller worlds that they did not control through their own authority, but because too many people bought into and staked their entire selves upon collective identities that were much bigger than their leaders, like Greek city states and the Roman Empire. Incompetent authoritarian leaders are the ones who bring about the end of empires, not build them. And that is exactly what we have here in the United States. The more power and authority that Trump manages to secure for himself out of the US empire, the more of that global empire he will end up being responsible for seeing violently destroyed, as is the true legacy of authoritarian masculinity. PM masculinity will never accept anything less than holding power for itself, or seeing the sources of that power destroyed. Do the central figures supporting Trump’s authoritarian rise know this? I think they do. They see the unilateral but multicultural Neo-liberal empire that the United States has made for itself as something that they actively want to destroy. They want to carve off all of the concentrations of people power that have been accumulated within the US, from moments in history like the Civil Rights movement, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Feminism, and LGBTQIAA2S+ movement and till that power back into soil that can be sold off as new property under their control. They think that they are going to be able to hang on to the authoritarian power structures of the United States without the people power structures that they are intentionally undermining, because they really don’t believe in the power of people to overcome the power of the gun, and they never have. As an Anarchist, it does sometimes get tempting to want to see if all the authoritarian power structures of the US will collapse along side the people power structures that have kept US citizens believing that they are doing more good than harm in the world, but world history doesn’t paint a pretty picture of what happens when authoritarian power structures collapse after belief in the people powered power structures of a nation or society collapse. After all, bullets and bombs tend to still exist long after networks of solidarity, mutual aid and compassion have been murdered and destroyed.
So yes, perhaps foolishly, I believe that there are lies that Trump administration are telling that will end up mattering to their supporters, but they are the ones that supporters have been conditioned to tell about themselves and what they stand to gain from staying in line. Overwhelmingly, these feel like lies of identity, and that seems why attacking vulnerable groups like immigrants and trans folks seems to be so successful for the Patriarchal Misogynist right. Because their vision of masculinity needs boogymen that it can easily bully and push around without fear of retaliation. It is far too fragile to handle any kind of actual resistance, and that is why Trump has consistently back tracked out of any rhetoric that draws him too much heat. He, and his followers are trying to outlast sustained resistance by creating a circus of outrage that they think will burn itself out on dogwhistles and groups that are pushed so far to the margins of the population they are targeting with their rhetoric that they are essentially invisible to the average MAGA supporter. In other words, it is an administration of cowards that is particularly effective at harnessing fear to motivate people like them, because fear is the thing that keeps motivating them to stay one step ahead of the calamity they create behind them. I really do believe that if we can get the larger US public to see and believe that this is the essential model of masculinity behind Trumpism and the PM right, that could be the trigger that leads to the collapse of their entire support network’s will to participate. Maybe next time I will refute this possibility, by talking about how it is possible that most of Trump’s supporters already know that fear-based masculinity is already the model that drives their Patriarchal Misogyny, but if I do, I will temper that critique with ideas about how to at least get that model on the process of destroying itself instead of just hiding itself with lies.