America Will Be Great and So Will You

The Right's most powerful political tool isn't policy or outrage. It's a story about who you're about to become.

Living the ‘Tradwife life’ is actually quite darling. While I lacked the requisite husband, circa 2017, I was living closely to it and its ideals. I didn’t discover the concept and the aesthetic on my For You Page or as a skeptical follower lurking from a distance, instead I recognized my own life in these flawlessly curated images. I spent my days doing things I deeply believed in: I rose early to milk goats whose bleats I could hear from bed, and often stayed up late wiping the brows of women in labor as a birth doula. I lived in a picturesque, hand built tiny home in an orange orchard with a view of a meadow and the mountains. My shelves were full of mason jars of jam I made. Both my shower and my chest freezer were outdoors.

At the time I felt like I was on my way to accomplishing my dream of one day having a farm, a family, and a community I tended to, I was so close to that reality.

Photos from my personal ‘Gram page during my own Tradwife adjacent time

At the time I didn’t know about the horseshoe theory of politics; the idea asserts that instead of being a linear continuum the far-left and the far-right are not opposites but that they share many values and nearly meet, like the ends of a horseshoe.

Image Credit: roots metals

I thought raw milk, supporting the health of women and babies during the intrapartum period, and making food from scratch were crunchy, hippy ideals. I had little idea that these evidence-based values would be seized on by the far-right to win over women concerned about the industrialization of agriculture and healthcare. I couldn’t imagine that then these values would be further manipulated to push for the restriction of access to women’s reproductive health services and reduce the accessibility of childhood vaccines. I didn’t see that agrarian societies and ideals were often aligned with authoritarian agendas. This IG-worthy life came with a strong dose of judgement about me and my ‘lifestyle’ from the family who owned the farm.

I upset the balance and order of life they had created. I was an outsider. I didn’t come from an intact, nuclear family. I wasn’t inclined to obey the unspoken norms of their quietly conservative family. I thought of money in terms of weeks and months, not decades and generations. I was going through a rocky time in life, I was managing health issues, a career transition, a break-up, and had recently lost a parent figure. I wasn’t my best self. I tried hard to fit the culture and the sensibilities, but I failed. I was ultimately asked to leave because they didn’t want “people like me on their farm.”

Parting ways with the couple and their farm still stings because I cared about them as people and there are so many parts of that life I still yearn for.

This quarter in UNASB, each participant created and trained a YouTube account on a specific right-wing persona, then spent weekly time on the account collecting data to track how ideas and trends spread in that ecosystem. My persona is the Dissident Right, and here is UNASB’s descriptor for my persona:

“The furthest right on this map. He thinks mainstream conservatives (Ben Shapiro, the GOP establishment, even Trump) are either compromised or too cowardly to address the real issues: demographic change, Jewish influence, the failure of liberal democracy. He communicates in memes, irony, and coded language that’s legible to insiders and confusing to everyone else. The humor isn’t just for fun — it creates deniability and works as a loyalty test.”

My feed doesn’t quite match the UNASB persona, probably because it has a little bit of me in it. My feed is a lot of clips showing how to disarm attackers by Delta Force veterans, ads for AI upskilling courses so you’re not ‘left behind by your peers’, and hot takes full of misogyny. From what I can see Mr. Dissident Right feels left behind by a society that doesn’t have a place for him. He yearns to protect his family and his country, to be celebrated for his masculinity. It took me a while to see through the signaling and recognize this archetype in my life.

Screenshot of my Dissident Right’s YouTube Homepage

I’ve come to recognize this persona as a permutation of the survivalists and apocalypse preppers I’d been close to earlier in my life. Pre-Tradwife era, my community was largely people who wanted to be ready for when Collapse happened. They were contestants on Naked and Afraid and who lived on pieces of land so remote they required a day’s hike to reach a road. They knew how to handle a gun for hunting and self-protection. Their everyday life included almost no plastic and they knew how to turn an animal hide into a pair of nice fitting pants. I’ve tried my hand at many of these skills and I identify with the urge. Why? Because this modern world feels so fragile. How much of our daily lives hinge on the Strait of Hormuz being open or Hong Kong shipping chips to us? In an effort to be anti-fragile I found much kinship with people who are actively practicing living outside of this fragile system. I’ve often wondered if people with this urge didn’t fit into society in the first place or if we chose this life because we see how much of the motivations are driven by capitalists wanting to control us.

A couple of weeks ago I read Yesteryear, a novel in which a Tradwife influencer is forced to actually live the pioneer life she’s been curating for millions of followers. This experience is told in parallel. Her curated dream of handsewn curtains, and perfect sourdough is almost split screened with the actual nightmare of isolation, restriction to obeying her husband, and illness that was a part of a pioneer woman’s life. I kept thinking about the goat farm, about how it looked from the outside and the actual toll it took trying to fit in there.

The juxtaposition of this book’s Tradwife with my Dissident Right persona created a click of clarity.

Cover of Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

The Right’s most powerful political tool isn’t policy, rhetoric, or outrage—it’s the cohesion of inspiring identities.

Both the Tradwife Movement and the Dissident Right are selling a myth about who you will be if you join.

For women, deliverance into beauty, belonging, and being genuinely celebrated for the vast amounts of invisible, emotional labor it takes to run a household, even one that doesn’t aspire to farm-style, wabi-sabi perfection. For men, a restoration of purpose, relevance, and a place in a world that stopped requiring them. The Right Wing is selling an incredibly tangible dream: America will be Great and so will You.

The Right built and tapped into content ecosystems that meet people in their loneliness and give them an identity that perfectly fills their fantasies for their life.

The Left is still publishing 50-page PDFs on our economic plan instead of YouTube Shorts that map our solutions to people’s pains.

Take the woman the Right thinks of as a Tradwife: she’s making her husband’s lunch box before his 5am shift and nurturing her sourdough starter on a Saturday. She’s angry at the FDA and asking why Europe bans what American companies put in her children’s cereal. She wants clean food, healthy kids, and a government that protects families instead of Monsanto. The Right brought her in through food and health, not partisan media, and she came willingly because someone finally names her instincts as wisdom. But here’s what the right doesn’t want her to know: her rage at the industrial food system isn’t a conservative position. It’s a critique of corporate regulatory capture.

She’s three YouTube Shorts away from being a progressive, food justice activist. We just need to make those three Shorts.

Then there’s the Dissident Right, he senses the fragility of the system we live in and he knows the lies we’ve been told. His uncle probably served in Vietnam and his family still carries the wounds of returning soldiers -- many drafted -- openly disrespected. He knew mainstream politics was just kabuki theater by a young age. He never trusted the official story. He knows that like the guys at the pub, most people, and all politicians, are either too comfortable or too cowardly to say and do the right and true thing. Or they’re voices shouting into the wind. He didn’t come this far to be managed. Let’s not sanitize this energy, let’s aim it. We agree: liberal democracy has been captured.

A small group of people are making decisions that affect everyone and aren’t accountable to anyone. He is right about the problem; let’s correctly identify the people responsible.

I try to mostly remember the parts of the farm I loved: the delicious goat milk, the smell of thousands of orange blossoms, the quiet, cozy mornings working alone in the barn and doing something real with my hands while the world was still asleep. My yearning was and still is not a political position but it is political material. This is what the right has understood and the left has not.

People don’t vote based on logic, they vote for a future they can see themselves in.

The Right has been reflecting carefully angled and filtered mirrors to the American people for over a decade. What is on the ballot is not whether we have a better policy plan, it’s whether we have a better story for people to play their part in; including people like me who know what it’s like to be asked to leave. We must build a story where all people can have an important part to play.

Another photo from my personal Instagram page during my Tradwife adjacent era