The Fascist Utopians

This election season we’ve been treated to the antiquarian gender stylings of one J.D. Vance, the vice presidential candidate and Catholic convert who’s more fervent than the Pope and significantly to his right. That some teachers don’t have biological children “disorients” and “really disturbs” him; political leaders who aren’t parents have no “direct stake” in the future of the country. He’s a skeptic of no-fault divorce. In a 2020 podcast appearance, he spun a story about how his mother-in-law, an accomplished professor, took a year off to help care for his newborn. “It’s in some ways the most transgressive thing I’ve ever done against the hyper-neoliberal approach to work and family,” he said smugly. He agreed when the host suggested that this is “in theory” the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.” He spends a lot of time explaining, as if to a space alien, that it’s really good for kids to have time with their grandparents. Vance gets under our skin because he claims to hold positions that also belong to the left (neoliberalism is bad for families) and acts like he discovered others (grandparents are good), and instead of attacking capitalism, he comes out with…Catholic integralism? 

This style of faith-inflected nationalist politics is familiar (see: Hungary) and shares more than gender politics with farright movements; notably, an obsession with borders. While Vance and Donald Trump have barely been able to keep to the right of Kamala Harris when it comes to border authoritarianism, they have a particular angle. Both Vance and Trump have referenced the Great Replacement conspiracy theory — the idea that elites, especially Jewish elites, are bringing thousands of immigrants into the country to replace white people — and accused Democrats of trying to replace white voters with voters of color in order to win elections. Meanwhile, banning abortion seems like a confused attempt to raise white American birth rates. The overarching idea is hard boundaries to protect white families. 

All of this is pitched as a political expression of the authentic desires of the white American working class. Vance, after rising to prominence with his risible class-traitoring sop to the Republican establishment, Hillbilly Elegy, appears to bring a sort of Appalachian authenticity to the ticket helmed by a silver-spoon twice-divorced rapey billionaire from the New York society circuit. But are 1950s gender relations, the end of abortion and divorce, and a heady intellectual rightwing Catholic anti-liberalism really the position of the silent majority? 

Another way to interpret the rise of Vance and similar figures like Senator Josh Hawley is that their politics appeal not to working-class voters, but to the GOP’s donor class. Vance may have a hillbilly past, but he is also a Yale Law School graduate who worked in venture capital under Peter Thiel. He is beloved of a certain Silicon Valley set who have identified him as a possible vehicle for their interests: deregulation, and crypto and AI expansion. After Trump picked Vance for the ticket, their donations exploded. 

But the interests of people like Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sacks include right-wing nationalism and sweaty-palmed Redditor ideas about race and gender that could also be at home at a nineteenth-century confab on eugenics. They are obsessed with DEI and “wokeism,” and, not unrelatedly, with making sure that the correct people breed. The correct people being themselves: Musk has at least 12 children, and is a passionate pronatalist who seems all too likely to have more. He’s cited declining birth rates as the biggest threat to civilization. Thiel seems most interested in living forever himself, with big donations to “immortality research,” but he has also made disturbing investments in “women’s health,” including a period-tracking app that supposedly obviates the need for birth control. (In 2009, he wrote that women’s suffrage was bad for a “capitalist democracy.”) He’s played a somewhat mysterious role in funding a new generation of media that pushes his own brand of revamped patriarchal nationalism. 

As far as we can tell, these fascist utopians would be content to let us all die under austerity on an overheated planet, replace us with their own spawn, and take the whole family to Mars. 

We conceived of this double issue as the election began ramping up. You’ll see a special section produced with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung on confronting the far right around the world — we believe that the left should engage in as much international exchange of ideas as the right does. Our scrappy journalists also set to work domestically, reporting on a MAGA takeover of Idaho politics and investigating the policing of abortion by mail in Mississippi. As the genocide in Gaza grinds on, we took on a question that has plagued the left: Is international law a sham, or can we use it to help end the killing? And, as ever, we have incisive writing on fiction (lesbian romance, queer horror), the internet (masculinity TikTok, communist OnlyFans), and much more. 

We hope that this issue gives you fuel for what is bound to be a politically tumultuous year (and indefinite future?). The fall is packed with events for the Lux community, and we hope to see you out there.