#postliberalism

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jason Wilson at The Guardian:

In a December 2023 speech, JD Vance defended a notorious white nationalist convicted over 2016 election disinformation, canvassed the possibility of breaking up tech companies, attacked diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and talked about a social media “censorship regime” that “came from the deep state on some level”.

The senator’s speech was given at the launch of a “counterrevolutionary” book – praised by the now Republican vice-presidential candidate as “great” – which was edited and mostly written by employees of the far-right Claremont Institute. In the book, Up from Conservatism, the authors advocate for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, for politicians to conduct “deep investigations into what the gay lifestyle actually does to people”, that college and childcare be defunded and that rightwing governments “promote male-dominated industries” in order to discourage female participation in the workplace. Vance’s endorsement of the book may raise further questions about his extremism, and that of his networks. The Guardian emailed Vance’s Senate staff and the Trump and Vance campaign with detailed questions about his appearance at the launch, but received no response.

‘Congratulations on such a great book’

Vance’s speech was given in the Capitol visitor center in Washington DC last 11 December, according to a version of C-Span’s subsequent broadcast of the event that is preserved at the Internet Archive. The occasion was the launch of Up from Conservatism, an essay collection edited by Arthur Milikh, the executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. In his introductory remarks on the day, Milikh said the book “maps out the right’s errors over the last generation … on immigration, on universities, on the administrative state”.

The book, however, appears more directed towards supplanting an old right – seen as too accommodating – with a “new right” focused on destroying its perceived enemies on the left.

In the book’s introduction, Milikh writes: “The New Right recognizes the Left as an enemy, not merely an opposing movement, because the Left today promotes a tyrannical conception of justice that is irreconcilable with the American idea of justice … the New Right is a counterrevolutionary and restorative force.” Also in that piece, Milikh offers a vision of the new right’s triumph, which has an authoritarian ring: “We like to say that one must learn to govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule.” In his speech, Vance first offered “congratulations on such a great book, and thanks for getting such a good crew together”, and then warmed to themes similar to Milikh’s. “Republicans, conservatives, we’re still terrified of wielding power, of actually doing the job that the people sent us here to do,” Vance said, later adding: “Isn’t it just common sense that when we’re given power, we should actually do something with it?”

Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War, a critical account of Christian nationalism and the host of the Straight White American Jesus��podcast, said: “Vance, many Claremont people, including some folks in this volume, and especially the ‘post-liberal’ conservative Catholics that he hangs out with, have advocated for a form of big government that will wield its power in order to set the country right.” He added: “And you may think, well, OK, that doesn’t sound so bad. But here the common good is rooting out queer people, making sure non-Christians don’t immigrate to the country and outlawing things like pornography that are currently a matter of personal choice. “You end up with this conservatism that promotes an invasive government conservatism rather than a small government.”

[...]

‘Free our minds … from the fear of being called racists’

In the book, commended by Vance, a series of authors take reactionary – or “counterrevolutionary” – positions on a number of social and economic issues. In one chapter, John Fonte writes of disrupting narratives of civil rights progress: “The great meaning of America, we are told, comes from liberating so-called oppressed groups and taming the power of privileged groups. Thus, our history is one of liberation: first of Blacks, then of women, then of gays, and now of the transgendered.” Fonte retorts: “Not only is this narrative false; it will take us further down the path of national self-destruction … On the questions of slavery, American Indians, and racial discrimination, the progressive narrative is not a historically accurate project designed to address past wrongs, but a weaponized movement to deconstruct and replace American civilization.”

Like other authors in the collection, Fonte offers policy recommendations. He proposes heavy-handed federal intervention into education: “[T]he US Congress should prohibit any federal funds in education to support projects … that promote DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) and divisive concepts such as the idea that America is ‘systemically racist.’” In his chapter, David Azerrad tells readers: “We need to free our minds once and for all from the fear of being called racists.” The assistant professor and research fellow at rightwing Hillsdale College, and former Heritage Foundation director and Claremont Institute fellow, also claims that conservatives have been too conciliatory on race: “For too many conservatives, the goal is to outdo progressives in displays of compassion for blacks … yet blacks continue to vote monolithically for the Democratic Party and progressives have only ramped up their hysterical accusations of racism.”

Azerrad continues with white nationalist talking points on race, crime and IQ, writing: “It is not racist to notice that blacks commit the majority of violent crimes in America, no more than it is to incarcerate convicted black criminals … There is no reason to expect equal outcomes between the races … In some elite and highly technical sectors in which there are almost no qualified blacks, color-blindness will mean no blacks.” Elsewhere, Azerrad writes: “[C]onservatives will need to root out from their souls the pathological pity for blacks, masquerading as compassion, that is the norm in contemporary America … This is most obvious in the widespread embrace of affirmative action (the lowering of standards to advance blacks) and the general reluctance to speak certain blunt but necessary truths about the pathologies plaguing black America – in particular, violent crime, fatherlessness, low academic achievement, nihilistic alienation, and the cult of victimhood.”

[...]

‘Do not subsidize childcare’

Helen Andrews, meanwhile, offers “three things we could do right now that would put a big dent in the multiplying lies that have come from feminists for the last forty years about women and careers”. Her first proposal is to “stop subsidizing college so much”, since, according to Andrews, in the 22-29 age group, “there are four women with college degrees … for every three men. That is going to lead to a lot of women with college degrees who do not end up getting married.” “Second,” Andrews continues, “the Right can do more to promote male-dominated industries. Reviving American manufacturing and cracking down on China’s unfair trade practices isn’t just an economic and national security issue; it’s a gender issue.” Her third proposal is “do not subsidize childcare” – since the fact that “many working moms are struggling” with childcare costs “might actually be good information the economy is trying to tell you”. Andrews is the print editor of the paleoconservative magazine the American Conservative and has previously written sympathetically about white supremacist minority regimes in Rhodesia – renamed Zimbabwe after white rule ended – and South Africa.

Scott Yenor claims in his chapter that before the 1960s, America lived under a “Straight Constitution, which honored enduring, monogamous, man-woman, and hence procreative marriage. It also stigmatized alternatives”. Yenor is a political science professor at Boise State University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute. He then claims: “We currently live under the Queer Constitution”, which “honors all manner of sex”, and under which “laws restricting contraception, sodomy, and fornication are, by its lights, unconstitutional”. Yenor claims: “These changes in law are but the first part of an effort to normalize and then celebrate premarital sex, recreational sex, men who have sex with men, childhood immodesty, masturbation, lesbianism, and all conceptions of transgenderism.”

Yenor says the state should intervene in citizens’ sex lives: “In the states, new obscenity laws for a more obscene world should be adopted. Pornography companies and websites should be investigated for their myriad public ills like sex trafficking, addictions, and ruined lives. The justice of anti-discrimination must be revisited.” In a separate essay co-written with Milikh, the editor, Yenor advocates in effect destroying the current education system and starting again. The essay includes a recommendation for school curriculums: “Students could start building obstacle courses at an early age, learning how to construct a wall and how to adapt the wall for climbing … Students could learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals.”

The Guardian reports that Trump VP pick and Ohio Senator JD Vance promoted far-right extremist views from Arthur Milkh’s Up From Conservatism essay book.

[azspot]

The West is at an impasse, caught between technocratic and populist politics that is variously authoritarian and demagogic. Faced with the forces of capitalism, unmediated techno-science and bureaucracy, neither old orthodoxies nor new ideologies are offering transformative ideas and policies to foster human flourishing. The old order dominated by liberalism is collapsing because liberal philosophy goes against the grain of humanity. It wrongly assumes that humans are more prone to vice than they are capable of virtue – selfish rather than reciprocal, greedy instead of generous, distrustful of others and prone to violence, not inclined to trust and cooperate.

What is postliberalism now?

[kaapstadmk]

As someone who falls somewhere in the centrist postliberal/communitarian/Ubuntu philosophy camp of political philosophy, I worry that postliberalism and communitarianism in the US are being subsumed by the right and becoming synonymous with some of the far right movements, like JD Vance, which is not necessarily what these philosophies are.

They are neither Left, Right, or Center, but rather describe philosophies standing in contrast to stark individualism and acknowledge the communal nature of society and individuals.

It is not inherently Christian Nationalist cottagecore philosophy

[eternal-echoes]

[apesoformythoughts]

«[In] the discussion up to this point the categories of liberal discourse have largely remained intact. We find ourselves arguing often about the boundaries between Church and State, but far less often do we consider the possibility that it is these categories themselves that are our problem. We talk a great deal about protecting religious liberty, but very little about the possibility that the modern concept of religion itself (not to mention that of “liberty”) is integral to Christianity’s diminution. We ask whether capitalism is the best economic system, but we do not consider that perhaps the question itself presupposes a liberal understanding of the social order.

We are talking a great deal about liberalism, but very little about the possibility that by remaining within liberal discourse, we are unwittingly reinforcing our own marginalization. Can we offer a critique of liberalism that remains bound by liberal concepts? As an answer, I would venture that if we do so remain within the liberal discourse of rights, laws, states, economics, etc., it is not merely that we will not be able to articulate a coherent opposition to liberal modernity. It is far worse than that. By remaining within liberal discourse, we are engaged in a massive yet obscured project of begging the question. Our criticism buttresses its object.»

— Andrew Willard Jones: “The End of Sovereignty: An Essay in Christian Postliberalism”

[tomorrowusa]

J.D. Vance is even worse than you think.

[H]is worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy. Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump’s scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week’s assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting on Democrats’ rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence.

Being "evidence-free" is fairly normal for Republicans theses days, but let's continue.

This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law. “You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” he declares. The President Jackson quote is likely apocryphal, but the history is real. Vance is referring to an 1832 case, Worcester v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the US government needed to respect Native legal rights to land ownership. Jackson ignored the ruling, and continued a policy of allowing whites to take what belonged to Natives. The end result was the ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Natives — an event we now call the Trail of Tears. For most Americans, this history is a deep source of shame: an authoritarian president trampling on the rule of law to commit atrocities. For Vance, it is a well of inspiration.

Implicitly, Vance favors the persecution of Native Americans. He's a fan of ethnic cleansing.

Vance apparently alters his views simply to further his ambitions.

Ultimately, whether Vance truly believes what he’s saying is secondary to the public persona he’s chosen to adopt. Politicians are not defined by their inner lives, but the decisions that they make in public — the ones that actually affect law and policy. Those choices are deeply shaped by the constituencies they depend on and the allies they court. And it is clear that Vance is deeply ensconced in the GOP’s growing “national conservative” faction, which pairs an inconsistent economic populism with an authoritarian commitment to crushing liberals in the culture war.

A favorite abbreviation of mine for "national conservative" is Nat-C.

Yes, Vance actually follows a monarchist blogger. What would the signers of the Declaration of Independence think?

Vance has cited Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, as the source of his ideas about firing bureaucrats and defying the Supreme Court. His Senate campaign was funded by Vance’s former employer, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He’s a big fan of Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor who recently wrote a book calling for “regime change” in America. Vance spoke at an event for Deneen’s book in Washington, describing himself as a member of the “postliberal right” who sees his job in Congress as taking an “explicitly anti-regime” stance.

Those pushing the odious Project 2025, which we should think of as „Mein Trumpf“, are big fans of J.D..

Top Trump advisor (and current federal inmate) Steve Bannon told Ward that Vance is “at the nerve center of this movement.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the driving force behind Project 2025, told Ward that “he is absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.” He would be a direct conduit from the shadowy world of far-right influencers, where Curtis Yarvin is a respected voice and Viktor Orbán a role model, straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Viktor Orbán is not somebody any American leader should emulate. Orbán is essentially a goulash Putin.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean described himself as hailing from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” If the GOP under Trump has indeed evolved into an authoritarian party, then Vance hails from its authoritarian wing.

So Vance is from the authoritarian wing of the authoritarian party.

Dictatorships are much easier to prevent than to remove. What are you doing in real life to work for the defeat of the Trump-Vance ticket? If you like democracy, you can't take it for granted.

NOTE: Zack Beauchamp who wrote the highlighted article above at Vox has a related book out this month.

[adarkrainbow]

Playin with fire, Transgression as truth (B)

And here is the sequel to this post! Now, I do believe the interpretation gets a little far-fetched sometimes and some hairs are pulled... But it stays a very interesting analysis and theory!

READING « FRAU TRUDE » QUEERLY

Diving deep into the queer possibilities of “Frau Trude,” I offer, but certainly don’t exhaust, queer understandings from both the girl’s and Frau Trude’s perspectives. I read certain passages multiply, without contradiction. More decipherment than conventional analysis, much remains to be explored in my approach. I find the girl too knowing and too anxious to leave her past behind, the witch too desirous of warmth and light, the ending too filled with jouissance, ardor and contentment, heat and brightness to regard the story simply as a caution against curiosity or a warning against an old woman’s nefarious ways. My investigation of “Frau Trude” takes further inspiration from Dinshaw’s assignment of impulse and tactility to her work on late medieval England. Following a “queer historical impulse” (1999, 1), she embraces the radical possibilities for making connections between lives in the past and present. In defining a contingent history, she takes seriously the term’s root meaning L. com + tangere, to touch, as it revises our relation to the disjunctiveness and indeterminateness of queer lives and sexualities. Deliberately celebrating fragmentation, using “new pieces of history,” Dinshaw shows that “queers can make new relations, new identifications, new communities with past figures who elude resemblance to us but with whom we can be connected partially by virtue of shared marginality, queer positionality” (39). Of course, fictional figures may provide even wider lati[1]tude for connecting past and present, existing only to be touched by and to touch the changing generations who read their stories. In this time, in this place, I touch “Frau Trude” queerly

For anyone who has gone through the emotionally demanding drill of “coming out” gay or queer, as I have, reading “Frau Trude” retrospectively as an early narrative model of this painful yet exhilarating process is revelatory. Emphasizing a conscious self-recognition of one’s homo-identity, postliberation “coming-out” narratives now occupy their own category.11 Their widespread acceptance as a popular genre, beginning in the 1990s, inspired my Winnipeg class of that era. We discovered all the motifs of the classic coming out narrative in “Frau Trude”: forbidden attraction; desire to meet the love object; parental restriction on such desire announced in a threat of disownership; stubborn determination to go, regardless of such threat; feelings of fear and self-doubt manifested in menacing images; encounter with the lover, who simultaneously calms the fear and stokes the fires of passion; and, finally, the transformation—no longer just any girl, but now a glowing gay girl. Reading “Frau Trude” as a coming-out story, our interest focused on the young woman’s compulsion, fears, courage, and identity shift. This interpretation dovetailed nicely with Stone’s emphasis on the girl’s quest for self-knowledge and freedom.1

But “Frau Trude” also touches an older, transgressive narrative tradition, alive and well in the nineteenth century and earlier. Our tale aligns nicely with the Sapphic subgenre, those steamy stories of obsession, deviance, desire, and seduction. In these narratives an older woman, schooled in seduction, lures a younger girl willing, in some sense, to learn.13 Even if positioned as an innocent, the girl, drawn to the seducer, sticks around long enough to be debauched, or at least to gain carnal awareness of her intended debauchment.14 The older woman figures as what Terry Castle calls “the apparitional lesbian” in her investigation of lesbian spectrality in novels ranging from Denis Diderot’s The Nun (1797) to Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928): “Western writing over the centuries is from one angle a kind of derealization machine: insert the lesbian and watch her disappear” (1993, 6). Yet Castle maintains that “the very frequency with which the lesbian has been ‘apparitionalized’ in the Western imagination also testifies to her peculiar cultural power” (7). She is actually “in plain view, mortal and magnificent” (2). In novels, the elder character often holds institutional power—a mother superior, for example—but fairy tales carry the spectral lesbian in the marginalized figure of the witch.1

Tension builds in Sapphic stories as the cat-and-mouse game of lure and seduction plays out. This function of transgressive mutual attraction also drives the “Frau Trude” plot, flying in the face of normative prescriptions for relations between young girls and mature women. Neither the girl’s desire to go to Frau Trude nor Frau Trude’s desire to possess the girl is ultimately interrupted; rather, the plot inexorably draws the two together, promoting their encounter’s inevitable climax. Mutual attraction is the tale’s turnkey, raising the power of desire against all others. Much of the narrative establishes this mutuality, first from the girl’s, then from Frau Trude’s, point of view.

We enter the tale at a point of exasperation and bitter argument between parents and daughter. We’re not hearing this quarrel for the first time. The willful girl insists on going to see Frau Trude then, attempting to diminish parental concern, rationalizes her desire by claiming her real interest lies not in the older woman but in getting a firsthand look at her “marvelous” house and its “weird” contents. This deflection only serves to alert the reader that “going to” Frau Trude is the girl’s real goal.16 The parents try, of course, to block her, excoriating Frau Trude as “a wicked old woman who performs godless deeds.” They are in direct competition with the witch, who appears to have a quite lively reputation. The girl has “heard so much” about her, but from whom? Likely, vicious gossip and innuendo, including suggestions of sodomitical acts, have trailed Frau Trude for some time. Whatever the daughter has heard evidently has not repelled but rather intrigued her. Over time, this feeling has cranked into high gear

I prefer “intrigued” to Stone’s gloss of the girl as “curious” to capture the sense of anxious arousal she manifests. Intrigue is a specific kind of curiosity associated with “arousal of interest,” the “fascinating,” the compelling, and hidden, often sexual, desires. It also names an illicit love affair (Brown 1993, 1405). Where attraction meets prohibition, something more than conventional cognitive curiosity is at stake. This intrigued girl allows nothing and no one to stand in the way of her fascination with the source of her allure, Frau Trude. The parents sense their daughter’s transgressive desire; whatever she wants from the witch is irredeemably contaminating. The monstrous possibility that Frau Trude’s “godless” non-normative state might become hers as well can only be addressed through the ultimate parental threat: “if you go to see her, you are no longer our child.” Disowned, she loses both her legal and her social-emotional status as blood kin, marked effectively as abnormal, unnatural.

Does she care? No. In this charged moment of disavowal by her parents, the girl senses change in herself; she’s already disavowing them. She’s transforming, even as she will soon be transformed. She heads off. Given numerous warnings and thereby chances to retreat from her mission,17 inexorably, she proceeds. Despite meeting three frightening male figures on the steps entering the Frau’s house, she still goes forward. Looking through the window and seeing the devil, she does not turn back; instead, she enters the house to finally meet her witch. Intrigue and attraction trump prohibition and trepidation every time.

This girl is but one case of the curious, willful maids found in Grimms’ tales, from “The Virgin Mary’s Child” to “Fitcher’s Bird.”18 The sin of knowledge (Eve’s error) compounds curiosity with the disorderly impulses of desire and sexuality that spur some fairy-tale girls out into the world beyond interdiction.19 Yet curiosity remains, as Michel Foucault suggests in his introduction to volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, the great stimulus for abjuring propriety to gain the knowledge that sets one free: “As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; . . . It was curiosity—the only kind of curi[1]osity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself” (1985, 8).

Fairy-tale curiosity links with inappropriate directives conventionally deemed most disastrous for women: I wish, I want, I will. Fulfilling such self-determining commands requires a determined disobedience. The girl’s curiosity demands a decision to disobey her parents and an acceptance that such defiance is tantamount to disownership. Borrowing a phrase from Judith Butler, disobedience is a failure to “repeat loyally” (1993, 220).20 If, as Butler ([1990] 1999) critically assessed, gender and sexuality norms are never original but are based on citation and repetition, then obedience, the reiteration of the normative, is the hammer of carnal conformity. Wilhelm Grimm may have rewritten “Frau Trude” to emphasize the perils of girls’ curiosity and disobedience. But for the queer reader, he unwittingly creates a perfect entrée for identification with a character who, in pursuit of her transgressive desire, declines loyal repetition. Breaking convention, her “failure” sets the girl on her own initiatory journey. As Cristina Bacchilega suggests for “Bluebeard,” “Frau Trude” is not a cautionary tale about learning to control curiosity but is about “a process of initiation which requires entering the forbidden chamber” (1997, 107). Initiation’s goal is revelation: to convert partial knowledge to full. The girl directs her curiosity toward someone she has already “heard so much” about. Something about what she almost knows—or senses—for herself about Frau Trude powers her curiosity and, more important, her shamelessness. Though she eventually feels fear, the girl never expresses a hint of regret or shame for pursuing her desire to know. With non-normative sexual desire at stake, shamelessness propels curiosity’s norm-breaking function. Specifically, for “Frau Trude’s” girl, driven by a compulsion for “unholy” alliance, shamelessness queers curiosity

Even so, she is “trembling all over her body” as she stands before the woman for the first time—with fear but also with the anxiety of first encounter and perhaps a modicum of release. Having crossed the threshold, exiled from her natal home, she stands now inside the house of marvels. Frau Trude allays the girl’s fear of the figures she has met outside. Soothingly, and perhaps with a faint inflection of flirtation, she says they are not phantoms, just the routine men—collier, hunter, butcher—who assist her in everyday living. The figure the girl saw inside the house, a fiery devil, is no phantom either, but a true manifestation of Frau Trude, who emphatically exclaims, “Then you have seen the witch in her proper dress.” Later, I will return to this dramatic self-proclamation of who Frau Trude is; for the interim, I am interested in what she wants. For at this crucial juncture the Frau identifies her witchy nature in the same breath as she unburdens her womanly need: “For you I have long waited, and longed for you” or, as Zipes translates the same passage, “I’ve been wanting you here and waiting for a long time” (1992, 160). How remarkable. The all-powerful devil-witch has been feeling a very human yearning for her cohort, with the exigencies of her longing made explicit by recourse to romantic convention: the confession of temporal anxiety both in terms of duration (waiting) and emotion (longing). Reading Zipes’s and Hutschek’s translations together yields the triumvirate of desire’s expression: wanting, waiting, longing

Witches live in both real (human) and supernatural (magical) time. In her womanly aspect, Frau Trude does not—or cannot—use her otherworldly powers to force the girl to her. As Roland Barthes claimed, “Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move” (1978, 38; emphasis in original).21 The witch endures such enchantment. She waits, as she must, for the fulfillment of a seduction she no doubt has plotted but cannot complete without the girl’s autonomous desire to seek her out. Seduction’s game depends on waiting and requires both parties to spend some time getting worked up. The girl’s willfulness and Frau Trude’s yearning are dynamic emotional forces in this tale, exerting a mutual pull that resolves in their meeting. The story’s heightened play of attractions is contingent on Frau Trude and the girl knowing about each other. More than suggesting, the story demonstrates explicitly that they’ve been circling each others’ wagons for awhile. Their proximity lends itself to a relational reading of their encounter. The girl’s sense of intrigue concerns her desire to engage Frau Trude, a specific, named woman, while the witch admits her yen not for any girl but for this particular girl.

From the normative outside, predation haunts homosexual relations in literature, theater, and film as well as in life. Sapphic novels hyperbolize the older woman as a ruthless hunter after young flesh. The witch has fared no better; her predatory compulsions are assumed. From the lesbian inside, however, predation’s unidirectional aim is blunted by attention paid to how desires and feelings actually play out. The girl’s attraction to the witch negates any presumption of one-sided sexual greed. And Frau Trude, no hunter, stays at home, saddled with yearning and its attendant anticipatory joys and frustrations.

FIRE UP THE FLAMES OF DESIRE AND PASSION

Having waited too long, Frau Trude wastes no time making her move. Immediately following her declaration of need, the witch changes the girl into fire. The converted girl then blazes for the pyro-prone witch, who sits down to warm herself next to this flame she has so long desired. Both protagonists are highly flammable and fire operates as the tale’s core symbol. Modernity ended our forebears’ need to live daily with open flame as the major humanly controlled source of heat and light. But fire fills the realm of fairy tales, like it did the world of their earlier telling—from hearth to oven, candle to coals, and torch to stake. An essential element, it acted as a force, a tool, and a potent, if ambiguous, symbol representing both creative and destructive forces. Bottigheimer notes that fire in the Grimms’ tales ranges in meaning, “as an image of Promethean progress or domestic comfort, as well as a Satanic symbol.” In a nod to “Frau Trude,” she says “the hearth is where the witch sits” (1987, 25).2

Associated in Christian tradition with martyrdom, purification, and transformation as well as evil and damnation, fire, the tale’s central motif, grounds “Frau Trude” in familiar religious binaries. The Grimms mark the putatively innocent, if willful, girl’s self-martyrdom as well as Frau Trude’s satanic manifestation. Attempting to prevent their unblemished child from seeking Frau Trude, the parents indict her and threaten disinheritance, setting the girl on her Grimm highway to hell. At this point the tale burns zealously, fueled by defensiveness, because as the Grimms were only too well aware, protection of a young girl’s innocence—of her unknowingness—services the perpetuation of family bloodlines, property rights, and economies. Religion stands with the family as a bulwark preventing the realization of young women’s wishes and desires

The Grimms note both the standard sacred/profane and pure/impure binaries, yet the story does not ultimately support the moral divide these oppositions conventionally create. Even if chaste, the girl is not pure. Her willfulness interrupts her trip down the straight path of protected innocence, which is the course of parental, religious, and state authority. The Grimms burn her as punishment for her failure to remain exemplary, her refusal to obey. The girl goes to hell. Stained by her perversity, she dies in flames—becoming the fires of hell—and Frau Trude, the satanic force, lives on to revel in the glow. The Grimms’ warning at the tale’s end provides this equation: play with the fiery devil and you may become the devil’s flame. For the brothers, the story concludes with a teleological clunk. The girl gets what she deserves, and the witch, satisfied with capturing her prey, sits at the hearth blazing with her winnings.2

A queer approach reads “Frau Trude”’s fires differently, drawing on secular and sexual rather than religious connotations. Associations of fire with passion and love include the fourteenth-century “to inflame with passion” (L. inflammare) and “ardor” (L. ardere, to burn), referring to the heat of sexual desire (Harper 2001–10). The girl’s sense of intrigue and Frau Trude’s sense of longing meet in the flames of passion, not damnation. Fire signifies their appetite and its means of satisfaction. Frau Trude, the tale’s fire marshal, manipulates the meaning and use of fire in service of seduction. Though the girl looks through the window expecting to spy Frau Trude, she says she sees instead “the devil with a fiery head.” The woman’s retort simultaneously verifies the blazing manifestation as an identity of hers but quashes any direct equation with the satanic. She immediately reroutes the girl’s claim; she has instead “seen the witch in her proper dress” or “in all her finery” (Tatar 2004a, 368).

Frau Trude’s sartorial metaphor alludes to the red raiment of fire: to see her as she truly is, is to see her “dressed” in her elemental form. Outside the house peeping in, the girl observes only the devil; once inside, she is offered a different interpretation. Frau Trude defines herself as a witch, a kind of magnificently burning woman, whose reference to feminine finery lends a seductive shine to her self-identification. The girl will discover what her compulsion to see Frau Trude suggested: someone quite extraordinary; not a wretched hag, or a slimy ogre, but a woman dressed in finery, queen of her realm, confident in this moment of revealing her truth

What particular truth does she impart in this dramatic instance of encounter? Frau Trude’s associations with fire, witchery, the satanic, the profane, and the godless are suggestive. They point to something the text both conceals and reveals: this witch also can be read as a sodomite, harboring a lesbian desire. Research in related European materials shows the infamous sin against nature bearing a long historical relationship to fire, diabolism, and witchery.25 But according to Mackensen (1934/1940, 225), Frau Trude’s dual nomination as both witch and devil is rare.26 Yet if it codes her as sodomite (lesbian), Frau Trude’s ready substitution of herself from devil and fire to woman and witch makes perfect sense. She exercises a range of sodomitical symbols to announce her intentions. When the girl sees her as fiery devil, she sees Frau Trude as the sodomite symbol she truly represents. Then her declaration as fire-dressed witch doubles the sodomitical symbolism while indexing its humanity. Transferring sign to reality, she becomes the lusty lesbian, the woman who will have what she’s waited for, while the girl finds what she’s wanted, too.

Momentarily they stand face to face conversing. Their discursive foray concerns the actual, but this is also the moment of their truth, revealed by Frau Trude and immediately recognized by the girl. The queer utopian crux of the tale witnesses what Maria Tatar names the “magic [that] happens on the threshold of the forbidden” (2004b, 1). Their truth, to use a worn but worthy cliché, will set them both free. In this singular instant of encounter, they are present and open to each other, their agreement sealed; they enter their own time.

The girl makes no attempt to escape, nor does the witch kill her by throwing her bodily into the fire. Instead, a transformation occurs. Having demonstrated that status change—symbolic and real—can be willfully achieved, Frau Trude touches the girl for the first time, turning her into a block of wood, adequate fuel for the witch’s ardor. By first being made into a neutral source of fuel and thence into flame, the girl is not annihilated but, rather, given the elemental condition that makes it possible for her to meet the fiery Frau on mutual, powerfully erotic terms. The girl, too, dons her “proper dress.” Yearning for her for too long to simply destroy her, Frau Trude instead gives her a new and highly compatible form. The story’s dual flames, which in a conservative reading overdetermine the hellish, queerly provide a point of sexual contact and consummation. Now the girl also lives by burning, for Frau Trude and for herself. Yet she need not only burn. Frau Trude easily could convert the wood block back into girlish form; the Grimms’ “The Drummer” (Zipes 1992, 610–11) features just such reverse transformation of a burning log into a maiden at a witch’s command. Or perhaps Frau Trude may grant the girl her own capability to change at will.

Putting such speculation aside, in the end, the two effect a merger through an elemental medium. The witch, who plays with and can manifest as fire, transforms the object of her desire into a proper partner. Fire plus fire makes for greater heat and passion, with two desires burning together in the harmony and unity symbolized at the tale’s conclusion by the hearth. Erasing differences in human age, station, and history, their passion cannot be acknowledged in the language of human social life, but it can be spoken in flames.

This reading of fire finds consonance with German scholar Elke Liebs’s (1993, 128) suggestion that the burning wood, left at the finale “in voller Glut” (“full blaze” or “gleaming”), refers to the widely understood nineteenth[1]century German symbolism for sexual ripening and first experiences in love. While she does not move to a lesbian interpretation, Liebs, like Stone, leaves the question open as to why the girl blazes exuberantly in the end. Perhaps this gap can be retroactively referred to the contemporary gay colloquialism “flaming” or “to flame,” which refers to flamboyant, often excessive transgression of gender, sexuality, and other norms of behavior.27 Frau Trude’s transformation “flames” the girl, ignites her, releasing her own transgressive lesbian desire. Moreover, by remaking the girl in her fiery likeness, the Frau recruits her as protégé. No longer daughter, the girl celebrates her natal disownership by “flaming” for, and with, Frau Trude. Now, as undying homoerotic flame, she carries Frau Trude’s line forward into a future we discover here. Judgment on relations between witches and maidens too often damns them as fueled by rapaciousness, resentment, or jealousy, resulting in deceptions and negative transformations.28 Frau Trude, however, conceives a positive solution to meet her need. Using her powers to free the girl, she perpetuates their passion by ensuring their likeness as fire, not their opposition as ogre/human. The binary that might separate them goes up in flames. The fiery ending is actually a beginning for these two, whose future of transformations lies ahead for them

THE ONTOLOGY OF “FRAU TRUDE”

Finding Frau Trude’s earliest incarnations in the realm of devouring and death synchronizes her story with a greater complex of patriarchally devised narratives inspiring categorical fear and loathing of woman. They include tales of the biblical Eve and Lilith, the apocryphal Mary Magdalene, figures found in pagan antiquity—including those associated with descendents of major Greek goddesses Hecate and Artemis and mythical monsters such as the fire-breathing Chimera—and early European man-eaters and hags.29 Frau Trude’s Freudian counterpart is the phallic mother, fantasmically endowed with both the mother’s “breast” and the father’s “penis.”30 The complex problematizes the female body, appetite, sex, desire, childbirth, knowledge, and agency and is underwritten in the structural relations its female figures bear to each other, especially in terms of the life/death binary. “Frau Trude”’s early variants fit this narrative model with its reviled protagonist. A strange and estranging female character, living in a house filled with vats of gore and entrails strewn about for decorative effect, her association with misplaced blood; dismembered, disordered flesh; decomposition; and death makes her just one more in a long line of female inverts, perverts, women impossible to convert: witches

Despite its concision, “Frau Trude” provides a more detailed record than most of the multiple associations to be gleaned from witches in fairy tales. Among the most “undisciplined” of female characters (Greenhill and Tye 1997), she is unclassifiable. Largely due to their age and unmarried, nonreproductive status, witches bespeak the anomalous. They are woman/not woman, a biological and social contradiction arousing fears of pollution and requiring severe castigation, even death. Anomalous women pose a danger to the common rule of what Adrienne Rich ([1980] 1993) termed “compulsory heterosexuality”; thus their association with deviant sexualities comes as no surprise

However, witches like Frau Trude are not just out of order; amorphous shape-shifters, they are also out of form. The very qualities that marginal[1]ize them as subhuman can also lend them superhuman transformative potency. Frau Trude manifests four different personas—woman, witch, devil, and elemental fire—and she can choose to become any one of these momentarily, at will. Theatrical by nature, she plays the drama queen: a masculine devil one moment, a feminine witch the next, but always the “showgirl.” She flaunts a transvestite’s gift for rendering gender as a form of artifice (see, e.g., Garber 1992). The girl’s parents accuse “the wicked old woman” of “performing godless deeds,” and certainly, she is a performer par excellence, skilled in questioning the opposition between construction and essence. An icon of “gender trouble,” Frau Trude’s performances fully execute the witch’s anomalous/amorphous status in its ability to destabilize and denaturalize imposed categories of gender completion. As she herself suggests, it’s all a matter of “dressing” the part

Remarkably, her anomalous/amorphous status on the sex/gender/power continuum presents as patriarchy’s problem—not hers. Being impossible, she attains her power of doing the impossible and quickly brings her partner up to speed. The girl’s transformation into neutered wood, then elemental fire queers her into a powerfully amorphous state, too. Structurally, she moves from determinate gender and social categories to becoming, like Frau Trude, an unclassifiable shape-shifter, a flickering flame

In interpreting witches, exploring the relationship between normativity, anomaly, and power is critical.31 But the oppositional power politics of witchery tends to overshadow its less obvious “structures of feeling,” Raymond Williams’s (1977, 128–35) designation for the affective social content in art and literature that cannot be reduced to other systems. Queer scholars take Williams’s lead, modeling affect-centered approaches to non-normative desires, heterogeneous sexualities, and abjection.32 In their keeping, Frau Trude’s story and others like it beg new questions of a queerer, more intimate kind, exposing suppressed, ignored, or coded links between witchery and lesbianism. How do fairy-tale witches feel? Can we read their emotions as well as their powers? How do they change over time? They seem to take pleasure in being alone, but do they also suffer from loneliness? Are they capable of love as well as desire? Are they a special case of the subject whose evolving consciousness has been obscured by structural bias?

In beginning to answer these complex questions, we see certain emotional intricacies and contradictions of lesbian sexuality and subjectivity writ in the mysteries of Frau Trude’s tale. Witches do have feelings, and complex ones at that. The Frau’s uncertain future recalls that of the protagonist in novelist Irène Némirovsky’s Fire in the Blood: “It might be impossible to predict the future, but I believe that certain powerful emotions make themselves felt months, even years, in advance, through a strange quiver in the heart” (2008, 134–35). Having felt that quiver, Frau Trude’s desire for the girl provokes new, if uncertain, affective urgencies. She craves, but not the old yearning for flesh to be devoured or for lips to be smacked at the taste of blood. Now she wants the warmth of an overheated girl. Her cravings have altered into longings for sexual relationship and union with another. And along with them have come emotional vulnerabilities and ontological quandaries as well.

Traditionally, ATU 334 resolves in formulaic murder or escape. “Frau Trude” finishes differently, not in determinant action, but in an unresolved mood of contemplation. The flaming frenzy of anticipation and desire modulates, literally and figuratively, to enlightenment, thereby marking the crucial ontological, as different from gendered or sexual, outcomes of our story. Certainly they are wrapped together, but Frau Trude’s tale is striking in the degree to which it ultimately resonates with Sue-Ellen Case’s proposition that queer theory does its real work “not at the site of gender, but at the site of ontology, to shift the ground of being itself, thus challenging the Platonic parameters of being—the borders of life and death” (1991, 3).

The ontological concerns of “Frau Trude” underscore its profound interest in discovering the truth: who knows it, who doesn’t, who wants to know it, who represents it, who can claim it, and, finally, who is absolved by it. Characters pronounce the truth, argue its status, and make its case. The parents think they know the truth about Frau Trude and her godless ways; they defend the “normal” and “natural.” The girl seeks to discover the truth of Frau Trude on her own terms. She wants to “see” the naked truth of this “other” and when she does, she tells Frau Trude the truth of her observation. Their subsequent mutual interrogation tests the truth of the visible until Frau Trude proclaims her truth, dressed in metaphor. Her long-awaited encounter with the girl results in the witch’s moment of truth; she “comes out,” entrusting the girl with the knowledge of who she really is and what she truly wants. All this stress about the nature of truth finally dissolves at the hearth, that ancient symbol of domestic peace and harmony, and the story finishes with the Frau’s distinct pleasure in gaining more light.

Having cried out to the girl right before changing her, “now you shall give me light,” she afterward sits next to the blazing essence to warm herself and also to enjoy a pure moment—perhaps the one she has waited for most—of receiving the fire/girl’s full gleam. Her delight evident, she philosophizes, with satisfaction, in the final line, “For once it burns brightly!” Having touched, transformed, and set the girl burning, the initial passion[1]ate meeting subsides in meditative afterglow. In an observed moment of domestic quietude and contentment, we picture a woman at last brightened by the light of her life. Notably, the Grimms’ prototype for “Frau Trude,” Meier Teddy’s 1823 poem, does not end in the witch’s cry for light, only in her desire for warmth. But by partnering with light in Wilhelm Grimm’s version, Frau Trude gains a new eminence

Light, like fire, is old in symbolic meaning, variously associated with soul, spirit, higher mind, new knowledge, and with life itself.33 This witch, whose long history in the tale world has been defined by darkness, menace, and death, at last sees a glimmer of freedom from her sullied past. As fire, the girl stokes the old woman’s passion, but as light she brings what feels like relief. A queer liveliness pervades the story’s end. Frau Trude no longer kills what she craves. Instead she keeps it near, treasures it, marries it. Gone are the entrails and blood-filled vats that crammed her home in earlier variants of the tale. Now her house of marvels produces visions and transformations, not corpses, and her distinct yet fluid manifestations as fire, devil, woman, and witch mark her own ambivalent state of becoming. The man-eating sociopath of old is changing her one-dimensional, monstrous, murdering ways. Done with those centuries-old defensive, ogreish shenanigans, she is no longer interested in finality; her teleological darkness has morphed into a desire for ontological brightness, a shift from the determinate, death, to the possible, life. She cries out her need for light eagerly as much as gleefully. The witch herself is transforming, undergoing a process of self-shattering that would free her

Frau Trude’s emotional longing for the girl is critical to this move. Long[1]ing and waiting pose different temporal meanings in this story. Waiting tropes seduction and desire, but longing associates with a deeper need for companionship and kinship. Animals, ogres, humans all engage in mating games and stratagems to satisfy base instincts for food and sex. For certain, the witch retains a good bit of all that sordidness. Yet her longing for the girl seems to demonstrate a desire to be better than who she is—or was: not just hungry, not just hormonal. Frau Trude tentatively experiences the warmth of the heartfelt, poised to reap the benefits of light.

As for the girl, her transformation from human to elemental form guar[1]antees a change from gendered mortality to immortal status. Her youthful energy, sexual curiosity, and willfulness converted into fire and bright light, she blazes; she gleams; she is passion and hope all at once. Now she is the symbol of life. The Frau remarks, almost surprised, how brightly the girl’s light shines. She implies that it’s giving her more than she knew to expect, not only passion and light, but the illumination of life itself. Not a figure of innocence betrayed or moral martyrdom, the gleaming girl ends the story as Frau Trude’s redeemer and, by implication, rescuer of a whole class of witches heretofore stranded in the realm of death. She becomes an exemplar of what gay beat poet Harold Norse calls “the fiery force”: “Nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time” (2003, xix). Of course, neither the girl nor the witch “burn[s] out in time.” Living outside mortal constraints in the fiery force of their tale, they perpetuate, for our understanding, their queer ontology of pure flame, pure eroticism, and pure light.

The truth at the core of “Frau Trude” dissolves the potency of prejudices stemming from the “inclusion/exclusion,” “who fits/who doesn’t” binary. In this tale, truth and transgression walk together to undo any determinate calculation of the fixed or proper meanings of sex, gender, age, feeling, or being, all finally summarized in the meaning of home. The parents work the inclusion/exclusion binary as the calling card of their authority; they want the girl under their roof and they have the right to disown her. Initially, the girl possesses all the trappings of heteronormative familial inclusion, but she chooses to relinquish them. Accepting exclusion from her family to come to Frau Trude, she initiates the possibility of her inclusion in a new relationship.34 Frau Trude personifies exclusion, as all witches do, and she exploits the fearful power it inspires. But she also endures its loneliness. She chooses the girl to belong to her, so as no longer to feel essentially excluded and alone. Coupled, the two seal a transgressive—and innovative—bond of kinship in their house in the woods. Frau Trude and the girl have, in the end, been absorbed into their own self-created “fit” unopposed, consummated but not consumed.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

the plague of right-wing Catholic postliberal intellectuals is making the Know-Nothing party look positively prophetic

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Laura K. Field for Politico:

On July 29, 2021, JD Vance appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show back when he was still a Fox News host. Like Carlson, Vance had once opposed Donald Trump, and like Carlson, he had transformed into a prominent Trump supporter and a rabid participant in the culture wars. “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” he told Carlson, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to name Kamala Harris (and Pete Buttigieg, and AOC) as his prime examples of the childless leaders who should be excluded from positions of power. For years, Vance has played a key role in the elite echelons of the New Right, which can be described, loosely, as the intellectual wing of the Trumpified GOP (including many of the people in charge of Project 2025). This mixed-up group of intellectuals, activists, politicians and influencers is made up of a wide array of characters, who hold to a variety of belief systems and sometimes have divergent policy goals.

But the one instinct that Vance and the rest of the New Right share is a deep skepticism about modern feminism and gender equality — or what the New Right calls “gender ideology.” Overt chauvinism that seeks to roll back much of feminism’s gains is one of the most obvious unifying threads of this varied movement, and Trump’s choice of Vance anoints and entrenches it into the culture-war side of the MAGA movement. Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.

Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggested that it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orbán’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign said such an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.

In all of this, Vance fits squarely within (and identifies with) the faction of the American New Right that typically refers to itself as “postliberalism.” Patrick Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame, captured the basic outlook on gender and feminism among this cohort in his 2018 hit Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen’s argument is that liberal modernity is based on an irreparably individualistic view of human nature, which leads to a culture that values autonomy over community and family life. “Liberalism posits that freeing women from the household is tantamount to liberation,” he wrote, “but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage,” because work outside the home is submission to the forces of market capitalism. Somewhat bizarrely, in the postliberal mind, even gay marriage — people coming together and uniting legally into family units — becomes a form of social dissolution, because it is based on individual choice rather than traditional moral forms. Vance is an admirer of Deneen’s work and was a featured speaker at the launch of his most recent book, Regime Change, at Catholic University in May 2023. Vance spoke highly of Deneen’s book, identified personally with postliberalism and the New Right, and declared himself to be “anti-elitist” and “anti-regime.” He has picked up on the populist language used by the postliberals, who speak in all-or-nothing terms like the “ruling class,” “replacing the elites,” “using Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends,” or “searing the liberal faith with hot irons.”

The most important figure in American postliberalism is Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule, whose 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism describes a mode of constitutional thinking that would make it much easier for conservatives in the United States to legislate morality. Under Vermeule’s conception, judges could rule against a given law — say a law allowing marriage equality, or abortion in another state — by appealing to his “Common Good” standard. Vance is also friendly with the Claremont Institute, an election-denying “nerve center” for the broader New Right movement. He gave a speech at their newly opened “Center for the American Way of Life” in 2021 where, revealingly, he declared that the conservative movement should be about something simple: “I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family and dignity on a single middle-class job.”

The Claremont cohort is home to, or friendly with, some of the most extreme anti-feminists and misogynists in the movement, such as Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State and a fellow with Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life. He courted controversy in 2021 for calling career-oriented women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.” Or Jack Murphy, a stalwart of the Manosphere, who once declared that “feminists need rape,” and was a fellow with Claremont in 2021. Many of the leaders at the Institute, including Yenor and the president, Ryan Williams, are also part of a newly formed and pro-patriarchy fraternal organization, the Society for American Civic Renewal.

[...] National Conservatism is the big tent, umbrella organization where the New Right comes together. Vance has been a speaker at all three of the four National Conservatism conferences that have taken place in the United States since 2019 — including the meeting in D.C. earlier this month, where he gave the final keynote address at a VIP dinner on the closing day. Whereas the first big NatCon conference seemed like an upstart, fringe affair, this year, Chris DeMuth, a former American Enterprise Institute president who is one of the conference’s key leaders, opened the conference by declaring: “A revival of faith, family, and fertility are not far right, they are the new mainstream!” Vance, for his part, gave a speech titled “America is a Nation,” which touched only lightly on questions of gender, merely echoing DeMuth’s call for a renewal of the American family. Patrick Deneen was pleased.

J.D. Vance’s New Right/postliberal views on gender roles give off weirdo vibes.

See Also:

Politico: Are Republican Voters Ready for the Nerdy Radicalness of JD Vance?

[azspot]

To answer these and other questions, Christian postliberals would draw less from Augustine and Aquinas—the gloomy Guses of inherited guilt, predestination, and infernalism—and more from figures such as Gregory of Nyssa and Nicholas of Cusa. Gregory’s eloquent and ferocious condemnation of slavery is one of the most extraordinary moral documents of antiquity, and he rooted his call for abolition not in a political metaphysics of rights but in theosis, an eschatological vision of humanity fully restored to its divinity. (“For how many obols did you value the image of God?”—a question that could well be posed to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.) Nicholas, whose work is witnessing a long overdue and hopefully permanent revival, is perhaps the theological avatar of a Christian commitment to innovative, democratic agency: the first theologian to explicitly contend that all governance stems from the consent of the governed, he also wrestled with the problem of how an evolving, multifarious universe, pliable to the art and technics of culture and civilization, could still be a manifestation of the divine.

Toward a Christian Postliberal Left

[androgynealienfemme]

"The denial of erotic categories, coupled with the mythology that we could all get into bed together, served to foster profound doubts in many of us about our ability to be sexual at all. Further, when the internal conflicts got too great and, in an attempt to salvage a vestige of self-esteem, we removed ourselves from the arena of “political correctness,” what we managed to rediscover was so truncated, caricatured, and pejorative that claiming it involved yet another struggle for self-worth. I might wish for a butch lover like Beebo Brinker, but butch in the seventies was a cartoon. Mighty Mo from Rubyfruit Jungle is a “diesel dyke” whose approach is to “barrel down… slam on her breaks… and bellow.” By the 1980s, femmes were named “sellouts” who reclaimed heterosexual privilege and used it to oppress butch lesbians.

            Finding the lived reality of butch-femme beneath the stereotypes is difficult. The predominance of lesbian-feminist preconceptions, and their remarkable similarity to the heterosexual myths, means everyone “knows” how to tell who’s butch and who’s femme. Who can fix a car? Who does the dishes? Who makes the first move in bed? Who looks more believable in a skirt? Whose hair is shortest? Butch-femme is a simultaneously both a straight image we apply to ourselves as a joke and a visible part of the lives of historical lesbians (Gertrude and Alice) whose fame we used to justify our existence. As such, it is easy to assume that “real” butch-femme always exists elsewhere. From Rusty Millington, in Word is Out, who is clearly butch but denies it by comparing herself to someone else who is really butch, to everyone who told me I couldn’t be a real femme because I was “too tall/too intellectual/too small breasted/too rarely seen in a skirt,” the message is that one might get away with being “into roles” as long as one doesn’t call them that. I am reminded, ironically, of Joana Russ’s litany of the requirements for “real lesbians,” and her conclusion: “There are no real lesbians; real lesbians have horns.” The speed with which women who reclaimed the words lesbian and dyke say they “can’t relate to labels” never fails to amaze me.

            In the past, butch-femme appears to have been an admixture of heterosexual expectations and genuine challenges to the traditional construction of female gender; the shape it takes in the 1990s, one hopes, might break free of the former if lesbian-feminists would stop naming us an imitation. What is most difficult in claiming butch-femme in a “postliberation” era, however, is untangling both the homophobia that defined “real lesbian” as butch and butch-femme’s association, like that Del and Phyl make, with only a heterosexual portrait. Sally Gearhart remembers:

I think the pressure was from society, which made me feel that, if I was not a woman in the sense that the society said a woman should be, then I must be a butch. I don’t think I understood that there could be femme lesbians. I didn’t think I understood that there could be femme lesbians. I didn’t want to do the things ordinary women did, so therefore I must be like a man, and therefore, I think I dressed and acted more butch than I probably was.

Under this equation, femme is not quite a “real lesbian.” Pat Bond recalls: There was a lot of pressure to look butch if you were [butch]. And, of course, you wanted to, ‘cause you wanted to be identified as a dyke. I was never too good at it. I looked really funny trying to look like a man. Men’s pants look funny because I’m very short waisted and big busted. Trying to wear the short haircut with sideburns shaved over the ears, I looked like the missing link.

The standard of lesbian-feminist androgyny are equally intolerant. I’ve heard from more than one younger lesbian reluctance to claim the name “lesbian” because the movement conveys “it means having to give up being a girl” because the movement conveys “it means having to give up being a girl.” For a long time, I thought I couldn’t be femme because I had never been straight. Lesbian-feminism seems determined to portray butch-femme as rigid, even though butch and femme characteristics can be interchangeable, subtle, and allow for more variation than do heterosexual sex roles. Degrees of butchness and femmeness- stone butch, butchy femme, femmy butch, ki-ki- are named points on a spectrum that is shortchanged when portrayed as masculine-feminine extremes. It is difficult to imagine heterosexual patriarchy allowing women to experiment with and choose sexual roles or no role at all. Yet, it is from feminists that I still hear that I can’t wear a skirt, whereas my butch lover Jo never thought knowing how to rebuild an engine made me less femme.

            As an issue, butch-femme is fraught with ambivalence and denial. When Jo Ann Loulan asked lesbian audiences around the United States if they had ever rated themselves or been rated by others on a butch-femme scale, 95% acknowledged they had. Yet the same percentage also affirmed that they “did not consider butch-femme to be an important concept in their lives.” Loulan points that this is a statistical anomaly; rarely does a group insist that a universal experience is universally unimportant. In a separate but related survey, Loulan found that one-third of her respondents identified themselves as either butch or femme, but that fully three-quarters of those who did so claimed not to demonstrate that identity in obvious ways within the lesbian community. If Loulan’s data is valid, a substantial proportion of one-third of the community is “in the closet” about a butch-femme identity."

"Recollecting History, Renaming Lives: Femme Stigma and the feminist seventies and eighties" by Lyndall MacCowan, The Persistent Desire, (edited by Joan Nestle) (1992)

[imall4frogs]

From the article:

Around the world, liberal regimes were under assault from right- and left-wing populist movements. He [Patrick Deneen] saw that a window was opening for critics of liberalism to articulate a vision of an alternative regime in which conservatives presided over a strong central state.

That last sentence reverses decades of conservative thinking. Abandoning their “small government” rhetoric US conservatives are now warming to the idea of a strong central government. How strong do they want this central conservative government to be? Offhand I would hazard that they want a central authority strong enough to ignore elections.

The political divide that Patrick Deneen has articulated can seem academic, so please allow me to place the terms of the debate into cornbread language: both liberalism and conservatism seek to wield greater governmental power, but to different ends. Liberals want to intrude into our boardrooms but conservatives want to intrude into our bedrooms. Within our American political duopoly we must choose one.

Choose wisely. And if freedom and dignity still mean something to you, then keep your ear turned to Deneen, and be ready to refute his highly polished attack on liberalism.

[oracleoutlook]

I have only ever interacted with Post-liberalism as a theological project than a political project. Maybe the Stock Market is sinful because it isn't natural for money to reproduce. I never really thought about the pre-modern gendered world of economics. Let me ponder this for a while.

Because of this, I am a bit confused by people who take this seriously as a political threat. Every once in a while I see a news article saying, "Can you believe that Vance is Catholic and once went to a Catholic conference where they discussed Catholic political theory? Fascism!" The criticism seems so idiotic.

And some of the criticisms are just over-exaggeratedly angry. James Lindsay became frothing mad at the idea that encouraging virtue in citizens may be part of a healthy functioning society. Quick quiz, which Post-Liberal academic said:

There exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity; since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.

Sorry, the language style probably gives it away, but that was George Washington. Let's try again?

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The objects of their desires are changed; what they were fond of before has become indifferent; they were free while under the restraint of laws, but they would fain now be free to act against law.

Nope, no one outside Tumblr uses 'fain' anymore, that is Thomas Jefferson.

So many Post-liberal writings mostly looked to me to be a return to American-liberal writings (as opposed to Continental Liberalism, which has seen a surge in popularity in America only recently.) And again, I saw it as a theological movement more than a political movement. Again, I'm not going to pretend that I've read every essay and blog post in the sphere, but what I did read seemed begin, and I assumed the rest would be as well.

So when someone I would have described as a Post-liberal, Andrew Willard Jones, says:

Take, for example, the postliberals gathered around Adrian Vermeule. These thinkers rightly recognize our late-modern economic form as an oligarchy hiding behind the fiction of the “private” in order to profit from the destruction of the clearly public goods of family and community. Yet the postliberals imagine they can rectify this unjust “economic” form by doubling down on the political form that corresponds to it—the centralized, social-engineering, late-modern administrative state. For them, the solution to the tyranny of politically active economics is the reassertion of economically inactive politics, one that can regulate economic actors and order them toward the common good. In this manner, they simultaneously deconstruct and deploy the public-private distinction, relying on it in order to combat it.

We find ourselves with the troubling conclusion that postliberalism amounts to what Vermeule might call liberalism “working itself pure”:[1] The old liberals were wrong; the public-private distinction isn’t natural (supposedly private companies tend toward public tyranny), and so the postliberals must force the distinction into being, must somehow create the properly “public” political realm and in so doing recreate the properly “private” realm. But this doesn’t get them very far. Indeed, some postliberals have come to the less-than-enthusing conclusion that the New Right should just become the Old Left, or “Pro-Life New Dealers,” as a recent attempt at self-classification by Sohrab Ahmari put it.[2] The “baby boomer” conservatives were wrong to idealize the 1950s when, it turns out, it was the 1930s that got things right! Spinning wheels.

I take this criticism a lot more seriously than those who amount to saying, "Liberalism is the ultimate good, so any movement calling itself post-liberal must be the ultimate evil."