White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre arrives for a news conference in 2024. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The girlboss is dead, or so I thought. She belonged to a brief moment in a longer struggle over women and our suitability for life outside the home. Now the home might swallow us up: The right wing dreads “the longhouse,” ruled by women and their “weepy moralism,” or “the great feminization” of society. The girlboss had begun to look quaint by the time I picked up Karine Jean-Pierre’s new book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines. She is best known as Joe Biden’s former White House press secretary, the first Black and openly LGBTQ+ person in the role, and she earned some attention earlier this year when she announced she was leaving the Democratic Party to become — don’t hold your breath — an independent. The memoir is short, which is a mercy. Reading it made me wonder if I’d consumed a life-altering quantity of Benadryl and hallucinated a trip back in time. She writes as if the year is still 2014 and a woman’s professional accomplishments outweigh moral considerations. The girlboss lives after all.
A review in the Washington Post called Jean-Pierre an “artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice,” defined by “the word ‘empowerment,’ the musical ‘Hamilton,’ the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.” Indeed, the phrase self-care appears in the book, though not in jest. There’s little independence on display, either, as she devotes page after page to the magnanimity and sharp instincts of Biden. The girlboss might lean in, self-advocate, [insert cliché here], but she works within the system, not outside it. The same goes for Jean-Pierre, whatever her subtitle suggests. Instead, she’s still doing the job that Biden once paid her to do — and poorly. The Biden we all saw during his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump did not exist. She says he simply had a cold. She believed in him, though I’m still not sure why. She writes, incessantly, of her own feelings and comfort, or the lack thereof. During the Democratic National Convention, Jean-Pierre turned off the TV “and nestled against the cushions of my living room couch.” (Must have been nice.) The White House press corps was too mean to Biden — but not nearly as mean as it was to Jean-Pierre, who berates reporters for publishing “jabs” and “thoughtless gossip” about the quality of her work.
Sometimes she looks away from her mirror to consider the rest of the world. This produces a few trenchant observations, like “It was during Covid, a bizarre as well as historic moment,” and “In this political moment, we need to find ways to maintain our individuality even as we build coalitions.” Good talk, thanks. Elsewhere, she recalls the uprisings of 2020, which followed the police murder of George Floyd and launched “a vigorous conversation about being antiracist” with books like “White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo gaining in popularity.” Dinosaurs walk the earth, but how dangerous are they? Biden is no longer in power, and neither is Jean-Pierre. Independent is more of an audition to co-host The View than a serious analysis of the Democratic Party and its troubles, and it fails on both counts. Still, it’s hard to dismiss Jean-Pierre, if only for what she represents. The girlboss has always been more than an empty pantsuit.
When Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In in 2013, she sought “to redefine what revolution means,” the ex–Facebook employee Kate Losse wrote in Dissent magazine. If feminist goals were once understood as the end point of a collective struggle to restructure society itself, Sandberg offered something else. In Lean In, revolution was “a battle to restructure the self,” Losse argued. Sandberg is hardly the sole — or even the most important — architect of our present woes, but she is a useful study. The writer Susan Faludi observed “little tangible cross-class solidarity” from Sandberg and her ilk, who preferred instead to contemplate themselves or, more rarely, women of similar status. When Margaret Thatcher died — and left a trail of misery behind her corpse — the official Lean In Facebook page asked followers to post their warmest memories of her career, Faludi wrote. Thatcher had clawed her way to the top, and that mattered more than anything else she’d done. In Independent, Jean-Pierre credits Thatcher for wielding “power with such force that she was dubbed the ‘Iron Lady’” and honors her alongside Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, who expanded illegal settlements and said that Palestinians “did not exist” at the founding of her nation.
If strong female leadership is valuable in its own right, individual success takes precedence over the public good. Independent has something in common with PragerU’s Women of Valor, a children’s book that celebrates the history-making achievements of Thatcher’s and Meir’s, whether Jean-Pierre intends this or not. The girlboss has priorities, but they are centered on herself; her compass always points inward. Jean-Pierre was the voice of the U.S. government, a responsibility she demotes to a form of self-actualization. She exempts herself from introspection and regret. Did Biden, the hero, get anything wrong? Did she? Israeli forces killed thousands of Palestinians with arms that Biden sold them, but Jean-Pierre never questions him or admits her complicity. The genocide in Gaza is some “terrible conflict.” Biden announced a temporary cease-fire toward the end of his presidency. End scene. “It was a whirlwind, leaving me little time to reflect about endings or beginnings, whether they were Biden’s or my own,” she writes.
I then recalled a BuzzFeed News listicle that still haunts me. Midway through the first Trump term, an illustrator in Brooklyn created a series of prints that depict “impactful women through history having their period,” as BuzzFeed put it. Sacagawea’s naked rear hovered over a shrub. Joan of Arc sat on a wooden board with a hole in it. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was perched on a toilet, still in her robes. The point, allegedly, was to celebrate #MightyMenstruation and the power of women, who get shit done while bleeding once a month. We could have it all, a legal career and a regular cycle, the dreams of our foremothers realized at last. The message was a little archaic even in 2018. The age of the girlboss was already synonymous with surrender, and a menacing era for American women had gotten underway. Ginsburg bore some of the blame. Two years after that listicle, she died on the bench and gave Trump a prized opportunity to replace her with Amy Coney Barrett. Roe v. Wade did not last much longer.
The girlboss was cringe — and dangerous, too. Underneath the kitsch, she’s a mercenary, and she persists because of powerful incentives for her behavior. Jean-Pierre is right: The Democratic Party is broken. But she’d have to look beyond herself in order to tell us why. “Being independent means refusing to silence your voice just so you can belong,” she concludes. Our voices carry further when we have something of substance to say. Otherwise, we’re just making noise.
Photo: Andrew Burke-Stevenson/Boston Globe/Getty Images
One morning in late September, I drank a cup of coffee without sugar and ate half an English muffin for breakfast. Boring choices, but I like routines; I always drink coffee in the morning, and I always drink it with some milk. If I eat breakfast, I don’t eat much. I didn’t think it mattered — I still wouldn’t, if I had any choice, but two hours later, a medical assistant pricked my fingertip and told me that my blood glucose was 330 milligrams per deciliter. That seems bad, I thought. A few minutes later, I learned my A1C was also much too high, which supported one undesirable conclusion: I have type 2 diabetes, like my mother and millions of other people in the United States, and I’ve likely had it for a while. The doctor sent me home with a sample continuous glucose monitor along with prescriptions for metformin and Mounjaro, a popular GIP and GLP-1 receptor agonist. The following morning, I checked the data from my CGM and saw that my fasting glucose had reached 400 milligrams per deciliter. I did not eat an English muffin.
Still, there is good news: Mounjaro and metformin are effective medications. I know that from my doctor, the scientific literature, and my CGM. A month after getting diagnosed, my blood glucose has declined to safer levels, and the disease frightens me less than it initially did. Pragmatism has taken over. I already have mild neuropathy in my feet, and I’d rather it didn’t get worse. If I want to feel all my toes again, the solution is medication, a better diet, and exercise. There isn’t an easy way to reverse the symptoms of type 2 diabetes, and I knew that the day I found out I had it. I also knew that my illness wasn’t my fault — or I thought I did. People develop type 2 diabetes for a combination of reasons, like a sedentary lifestyle and an unhealthy diet, but genetics matter, too, and I have a family history of the disease. Also, so what? Nobody deserves a life-threatening illness, and a medical diagnosis is not a moral failure. I’ve never thought I should blame my mother for getting sick.
Still, I began to berate myself. I thought about my meals — the small ones, the big ones, the occasional snack — and wondered when I’d crossed the line. Was it the Coke I drank for my headaches? Those English muffins? I told my husband that I felt stupid. I should’ve taken more Pilates classes, eaten fewer carbs, ordered more salads. My husband, an ex-Catholic, told me to be less of a Protestant. Shame has its place in the world, but not here, in this conversation or this illness. He’s right, but in the Make America Healthy Again era, I find it difficult to silence that angry voice in my head. Every time I scroll through Instagram, I see ads and videos that promote dubious supplements and fad diets — and then there is the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of it all. Diabetes is a fixation for our Health and Human Services secretary, who believes America suffers from a “chronic-disease epidemic” that can be resolved through better nutrition. “Sugar is poison,” he said this year, and it is “giving us a diabetes crisis.” Conditions like diabetes deserve more attention than measles, he claimed amid a deadly outbreak of the infectious disease. Pharma companies want to sell GLP-1s like Mounjaro because “we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs,” Kennedy told Fox News last year, adding, “If we just gave good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman, and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight.”
The MAHA ethos contains an element of truth, which makes it even more insidious. Our choices do influence our physical condition, whether we’re at risk for type 2 diabetes or not, but we are also more complicated than MAHA admits. A woman who lives in a food desert needs more from her government than nutrition education; she can’t simply bootstrap her way out of medical danger. Neither can I despite my relative security. By the time I found out I was diabetic, I was too sick to manage my blood sugar through diet and exercise alone, and I may need medication for the rest of my life. My health depends on my salary and my health insurance, not my choices alone, and that’s the reality most of us live with. Instead, MAHA prefers a commonplace American myth, and so does my inner scold: Fix your mind, make better choices, and health will follow. Self-mastery is free-market logic in another guise, and it won’t make Americans healthy at all.
If the key to health lies in the mind, our “chronic disease” crisis is more spiritual than material. We are making ourselves sick, so we must heal ourselves. When MAHA attempts any structural diagnosis, it complains of big pharma and big agriculture, but individual choices are still the principal focus. Industry is bad because it encourages bad decision-making; it provides shortcuts, like antidepressants or GLP-1s, so we can avoid the hard work of good health. The underlying theme is “mind-power,” as scholar Kate Bowler wrote in Blessed, her 2018 history of the prosperity gospel. Mind-power and “its discourse of control and efficacy” is “centered on the role of thought and speech,” according to Bowler, who traced it back to a Victorian-age religious awakening in American life. “Self-mastery became an art and occupation, as people sought to consolidate the era’s advances with improvements to their own lives,” she wrote. Faith healers promised miraculous cures to believers who paid their tithes and said the right prayers to the right version of God.
In an extreme case, Mary Baker Eddy “discovered” Christian Science and taught her followers that all matter “is infinitely malleable through the power of mind,” as the journalist and ex–Church of Christ, Scientist member Caroline Fraser explained in God’s Perfect Child. Disease was a mental error that should be rectified by good thoughts. Christian Scientists reject most medical interventions and rely, often, on Church practitioners, who say they guide physical healing through the pursuit of spiritual truth. The results can be deadly, as Fraser showed in her book. Children have died because of their parents’ religious convictions. “The history of the United States of America is a history of religious sects that have sanctified the power of self,” Fraser argued, which is hard to dispute.
Now, mind-power as a concept is more powerful than Christian Science or even organized religion, and it is embedded deeply in our national bedrock. Though MAHA is an eclectic perspective, and most who fall under its umbrella accept some medical intervention, its rejection of expertise and reliance on the self are familiar enough. When Kennedy conflates type 2 diabetes with its type 1 counterpart, as he has done in the past, he makes a scientific error that is shaped by his ideology. When he says in the same interview that “juvenile diabetes and prediabetes” can “be reversed completely by changing diet,” he makes a different mistake for the same reasons. Kennedy isn’t asking us to pray, but he is telling us to purify ourselves, and, like Eddy, he takes that moralism and calls it science.
MAHA shifts responsibility for health and well-being onto the individual, and that too is an old trick. Mind-power may emphasize thought, but it still requires some labor from believers, who may depend on objects and ritualized behavior to attract health and wealth or dispel spiritual and mental attacks. Bowler wrote that Creflo Dollar, the prosperity-gospel preacher, once “advised the saints to cure poverty with dollar bills hidden in their shoes.” Kennedy and Martin Makary, the FDA commissioner, recommend wearable health technologies, like my CGM. Unlike a dollar bill inside a shoe, a CGM can have a real purpose, but that also depends on who’s wearing it. Right now, I use a sample Dexcom G7. A sensor in my left arm takes a reading every five minutes and feeds that information into an app on my phone. If my blood sugar gets too low or too high, an alarm sounds and I can take action. Most people don’t need a CGM, but Makary assigns the device a near-talismanic power: Make it widely available and users can ward off a dreadful fate. “Why are we holding these tools to help people empower them with knowledge about their health until after they’re sick?” he said during his Senate confirmation hearing.
Donald Trump’s surgeon-general nominee, Casey Means, founded the Levels app, which connects to a CGM and warns users if they’re experiencing a glucose “spike.” This is not as helpful as it sounds. Blood sugar always rises after a meal and returns to baseline sometime later, and there’s no evidence that spikes lead to health problems in most people, according to a recent story from The Cut. Levels may promise a path to well-being, but that’s marketing, not science. The app merely creates busywork for whoever is using it, and it relies on mind-power. Levels bombards the average person with information they don’t need so they can adjust habits that may not require correction. Once they’re convinced of their own inner failures, an “expert” steps in with a fix. The app’s backers include Mark Hyman, a celebrity in the pseudoscientific field of functional medicine. Hyman’s views on GLP-1 drugs are mixed at best; for blood-sugar control, he once recommended Himalayan Tartary-buckwheat-sprout powder, an unproven supplement.
MAHA sells a seductive idea: Take this powder, wear this device, or use this app and you’ll become the captain of your own body and the master of your own future. The implications are grim — if you get sick anyway, you’ve failed, and you are rightly on your own. “By tying health outcomes to individual choices and digital self-surveillance, MAHA policies risk making healthcare less equitable and overall, less effective,” the writer Scott Gavura observed at Science-Based Medicine. “Unproven technologies” can feel empowering, he added, but in practice they divert “attention away from public health interventions that actually work, like vaccinations, nutrition assistance, and access to primary care.” Mind-power and self-mastery are useful concepts to the White House and the rapacious capitalism it worships. Why should anyone care about type 2 diabetes or what it does to the people who have it? Just eat less pizza.
Here’s a little secret about type 2 diabetes (it’s not really a secret): The disease is expensive. I’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on co-pays, prescriptions, and supplies, and I still don’t know if my insurance plan will cover the Dexcom G7 that I’ve been sampling. If it doesn’t and I want to keep using the device, I’ll likely pay hundreds more out of pocket every month. My insurance does cover a different CGM, the FreeStyle Libre 3, but a month’s supply still costs me $77. A lot of people with diabetes forgo a CGM and track their blood sugar with a blood-glucose meter and finger sticks, but I need both thanks to a genetic quirk. I was born with a hereditary red-blood-cell disorder, which makes my case more complicated to manage; thank you, God, for your intelligent design. At least I have insurance, a decent salary, and a reliable work schedule, so I can keep up with my doctor’s appointments. I’m a union member, which provides a level of security that I would otherwise lack. And I live in a neighborhood where I can walk to the nearest grocery store and choose from a variety of fresh vegetables.
My prognosis is good because I have material advantages that many people lack. According to one analysis from GoodRx, people pay an average of $2,712 per year to self-manage their blood glucose, whether they have insurance or not. That figure includes a blood-glucose monitor, lancets, and test strips but not a CGM. Costs may be higher or lower depending on the specifics of a person’s treatment and their socioeconomic circumstances. For uninsured and underinsured Americans, test strips alone “could add up to thousands of dollars a year,” the New York Timesreported in 2019. Out-of-pocket costs are higher for Americans with type 1 diabetes, one study found, but as I’ve learned, type 2 is not exactly affordable, either, and the expense can make it more difficult to manage the condition while preventing future complications. Self-mastery only gets us so far. The choices we make depend in part on the decisions of others, including policy-makers who allow inequality to flourish owing to inaction or malice. Research cited by the CDC says that “adults who experience food insecurity are 2 to 3 times more likely to have type 2 diabetes.” If you’re poor and can’t afford healthy food and a safe place to live, your health tends to suffer. I’ve seen that at home in southwest Virginia, a rural and predominantly white area, but the crisis is widespread and pronounced among members of some racial minority groups. Inequality helps explain why Black Americans develop type 2 diabetes at much higher rates, as do Latinos, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. In MAHA logic, people of color are more likely to get type 2 diabetes because something’s wrong with their character, their minds, and it’s DEI to say otherwise.
The MAHA prescription mostly ignores reality because it must. Universal health care would violate its deepest conviction, which is that people who get sick deserve to be punished for it. When Senator Bernie Sanders asked Kennedy if he thought health care is a human right, he demurred. Health care is not a right like free speech is a right, he said, because “if you smoke cigarettes for 20 years and you get cancer, you … you are now taking from the pool,” draining valuable resources. Now that he’s in power, he and the Trump administration have done nothing to make America healthier than usual. Nutrition experts say that MAHA’s favorite solutions, like the removal of high-fructose corn syrup, synthetic dyes, and seed oils from our food, ignore riskier ingredients in ultraprocessed items. Kennedy will soon release new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat foods high in saturated fat, but as MedPage Today has reported, there’s no real evidence to support the recommendation. Trump has said he wants to lower the cost of GLP-1 agonists, but he also lies, and Mehmet Oz of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has only uttered vague assurances that Medicare will negotiate better prices for the drugs. On Friday, the Washington Postsaid the average Obamacare premium will rise by 30 percent next year, based on rates set by Oz’s agency and the probable “expiration of pandemic-era subsidies.”
My inner scold is quieter now, and in its place, there is rage — not just for myself but for my mother, who has struggled sometimes to afford diabetes care, and for people I do not know. A society can become so obsessed with the self that an individual life no longer matters.
The Wages for Housework campaign demanded economic power the average housewife otherwise lacked. Photo: Bettye Lane/Schlesinger Library
For a little while, American women had more rights than their foremothers. That’s no longer true after Dobbs, which accelerated a much older assault on legal abortion, and the law is only half the story. The day of the girlboss is over, and with her goes the valorization of individual choice. We once heard that our place was in the White House but that if we wanted to stay in the kitchen, that was all right too. Choice feminism was a political fiction; it presumed autonomy, which we had not yet won. Liberalism has no answer for the vengeful anti-feminist backlash that is taking its place. Women are entering a new era of struggle.
Although we still have choices, they are limited and under renewed threat. To Vice-President J.D. Vance, “childless cat ladies” threaten an essential American project; by withholding children, they withhold the most meaningful social contribution they can make. President Trump once proposed a vague “tax credit” for family caregiving, which is largely performed by women, but never released a formal plan and is silent on the matter now. Secular pronatalists say they want to create mothers, not housewives, but in prizing fertility rates above reproductive liberty, they offer women a familiar fate. The most extreme Christian nationalists are so keen to keep us down that they would deny us the vote. If they are correct, and a woman is wired by God or biology to stay in the kitchen, then she deludes herself by desiring anything else. “It’s in our nature,” the influencer Alex Clark said recently. Women who prioritize career over family life are “more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be,” Scott Yenor of Boise State University said at the National Conservatism conference in 2021.
The problem with the kitchen is not the kitchen itself but who’s in it and how she got there. If women are so suited to domestic labor, perhaps we’d be happier — but in Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net, the sociologist Jessica Calarco depicts an immiserated generation. To Calarco, policy works alongside social conditioning to keep women in place. Pronatalism did not begin yesterday, or even with Dobbs. Instead, most women hear early in their lives that motherhood is a unique source of personal fulfillment, if not a religious or cultural obligation. But motherhood is not just a biological relationship; it is a social role with political implications, and without a functional safety net, it can also become a weight around a woman’s neck.
Through policymaking and social conditioning, women are still the nation’s caregivers, often at the expense of our own wellbeing. We thus have one leg in a trap the Wages for Housework movement sought to blow open decades ago. As the historian Emily Callaci recounts in her new book, Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor, a global and multiracial coalition of women in the 1970s demanded recognition for the work they did at home and more. Economic power would be a step toward a new and liberatory world. That world is still possible, decades later, no matter how distant it may appear.
To write Holding It Together, Calarco carried out a series of sweeping research surveys, beginning in 2018, and reached thousands of participants. Her subjects are ideologically, geographically, and racially diverse, an overdue departure from the usual narratives about women and work. Stack up the books and the hot takes about who’s opting out and why, and the principle characters will be white-collar women of means. Calarco takes a broader view, and her analysis is richer for it. The women she interviews offer complex and sometimes unexpected conclusions about the decisions they make and the labor they perform. Their experiences, while distinct, complete a portrait of thwarted ambition and desire. A woman who dreams of children and a large family can still long for autonomy and resent its absence. Unless she has wealth of her own, her choices are often restricted by the decisions of others: her spouse, his employer, and policymakers.
Calacro speaks with Audrey, who wanted her toddler daughter to have a sibling. Then she lost her retail job in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Unemployment was difficult for her. The job “had been the thing that helped most in overcoming” her postpartum depression, Calarco writes, and Audrey wanted to delay her next child. Though she couldn’t tolerate hormonal birth control, her husband, Colby, wouldn’t wear condoms, and one day he didn’t pull out, either. “It’s very clear that it wasn’t something I was okay with,” she tells Calarco later. “It wasn’t something that I consented to.” Although she believes sexual assault is an “appropriate” term for Colby’s abuse, she says that many in her life disagree. She relies on their Evangelical church friends for emotional support and practical help with meals and child care, and they disapprove of abortion and divorce. Audrey fears she can’t afford to leave Colby, either. She’d need paid work again, which means she’d also need to pay for child care on top of her credit-card payments, medical debt, and car loans, “which totaled more than $40,000,” Calarco writes.
Even if a woman’s partner or co-parent tries to be involved and supportive, structural inequalities make it difficult for her to exercise whatever freedom she has on paper. In 2019, Sierra, a young Black woman who lived in Indiana with her toddler son, worked as many hours as her fast-food job would allow. She earned less than $1,000 a month, which qualified her for WIC, welfare, and Medicaid, but the benefits weren’t enough to lift her out of poverty. Her child’s father, Derek, moved to Alabama to work in poultry processing, and Sierra followed him so their son would grow up with both parents nearby. When the pandemic struck, Derek managed to hold on to his job, but they struggled to pay for necessities until the federal government mailed their first stimulus checks. That money gave them breathing room, which paid work had not delivered, and Sierra got to spend more time with her son. “We do finger painting, and we color,” Sierra tells Calarco. What more could any mother want?
As Calarco observes, a woman’s wants matter less to policymakers than the unpaid work she performs. Put another way, America needs women, but it doesn’t need women to be people. A woman is too often defined by what she can do for others and not by her innate dignity and worth. Someone has to change a baby’s diapers. Someone has to supervise a grandparent with dementia. Either Supermom does it herself, or she pays another, more precariously situated woman for her labor. Calarco writes that our “DIY society” depends on “the magic of women.” But it’s not magic — it’s work. There are no miracles here.
Who should a woman blame for her condition? There are many villains in our lives, and sometimes they are male. Although American men do more household work than ever before, a discrepancy persists, and women make up the difference. Still, most of us don’t live in a sitcom, even if we’re heterosexual. If women are human beings, so are men, and we all make decisions within certain constraints. I can count on one hand the number of times my father ever played with me, or cooked dinner, or scrubbed a toilet. When I’m searching for an explanation, I can refer to our Evangelical convictions, or to my father himself, but if that’s where I stop, I’ll never get the full truth. We needed my father’s income, such as it was, and our economic reality bracketed a hoary old hierarchy. My father won the bread, and my mother, naturally, did everything else.
In 1975, the Italian scholar Silvia Federici wrote of a distinct problem with housework. Unlike waged work, housework was not only “imposed on women” but “transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character,” she wrote in Wages Against Housework, perhaps her most famous essay. A wage is a form of recognition, even leverage, that the archetypal housewife lacks. Though a woman might liberate herself in a limited way through wealth or education, she is not free as long as housework remains “a feminine attribute,” Federici wrote. A half-century later, the right is proving her point in the crudest terms possible. “Having children is more important than having a good career,” the late Charlie Kirk told women. America’s “DIY society” is built on similar sentiments, as Calarco writes. It’s capitalism by another name.
Illustration: Jacquie Ursula Caldwell/Library of Congress
To Federici and her comrades in the Wages for Housework movement, the housewife was trapped in the same web as her husband, even if she occupied a different and less advantageous location within it. In Emily Callaci’s new book on the movement, she describes it as a “critique not only of women’s oppression, but of global capitalism in its entirety.” Some members demanded a literal sum for the domestic work of women; others did not. As Callaci observes in her introduction, the movement could be somewhat controversial, even in the world of second-wave feminism, but the basic analysis is difficult to refute. A woman can’t escape capitalism by vanishing into her home. Once she is there, love — for her children and, maybe, their father — becomes one more restriction on her life.
Callaci writes that for Mariarosa Dalla Costa, another prominent Italian scholar, autonomy is a “central” notion. Influenced by operaismo, which considered “work the means to a paycheck” and not “a source of identity,” Dalla Costa does not think of autonomy as a form of isolation but rather the opposite. In Dalla Costa’s postcapitalist vision, a woman is no longer stuck in the kitchen, alone with her children. Once she is free to share the work with others, in communal laundries and nurseries and elder-care homes, her identity becomes hers to define. To campaigners, liberation was a material goal, not a mere slogan. Before Wilmette Brown co-founded Black Women for Wages for Housework, she joined the Black Panthers in Berkeley, California, during the late 1960s. There, Callaci writes, “she would have participated in discussions about Black self-determination and autonomy,” and she was “drawn” to the work of Frantz Fanon, who sought “reparations, rather than charity, for formerly colonized peoples.” Brown, a lesbian, was not living a traditional life, but as she wrote later, the perspective of Wages for Housework “made it possible” for her “to connect with other Black women in whatever situation, because we are all struggling against housework, against heterosexual discipline, heterosexual work discipline, and for money — to be independent.”
In the most pedantic reading of history, Wages for Housework might seem like a failure. Whether we call it housework or care work, most women around the world still perform it without much recognition, let alone pay. A future without capitalism feels especially distant in the U.S. But Callaci is too skilled a historian to lapse into easy literalism. A radical vision may defy a simple translation into policy and retain all of its value. Ideas can have unpredictable afterlives, as Callaci shows. Although the campaign has faded, Callaci’s subjects apply their energy and their principles to other, linked struggles: the decriminalization of sex work, an end to war, and the preservation of our environment. In the early aughts, the late scholar and activist Andaiye launched a Wages for Housework campaign in her native Guyana, protesting the austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on countries like hers. Others, like the writer and activist Selma James, still want cash for caregiving. “Once we have it, it is very hard for them to take it away,” she said at an event that Callaci attended.
Cash helps. A woman can buy some mobility with it, but freedom is more elusive. In Women Talking, the novel by Miriam Toews, a group of Mennonite men have drugged and raped women and girls in their community. (The novel is based on a real crime.) When the women gather in secret to discuss their response, one cautions, “When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.” It is the same question we all face, no matter what’s in our pockets.
No policymaker ordered Calarco’s subjects home, or forced a career woman to do most of the housework, but no one had to. Housework still codesfeminine, and so does caregiving itself. We are circling the kitchen, warily, wondering if the door will shut on us and who might lock us in. Everyone is explaining our desires to us, our nature, through polling numbers and white papers and the almighty discourse, and there is no room for women to be people.
Consider The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, a new book by the Catholic writer Leah Libresco Sargeant. In Sargeant’s view, autonomy is impossible, and that is especially true for women. Because most of us can give birth, we are “shaped by dependance” in ways that men are not, and we cannot free ourselves by denying our essence. If “the freedom we enjoy is imagined to be the freedom to ‘control … one’s destiny’ rather than to shape it within natural constraints,” she writes, “then the whole outside world becomes women’s enemy because it does not bow to our will.” The Wages for Housework campaign is still relevant, she adds later, if only because it named the value of unwaged domestic labor, but that is where she leaves it. Women “can’t live fully within the lie of autonomy,” she writes. She proposes “caregiver credits” as partial compensation for work that mostly falls on women, and in her role at the right-leaning Niskanen Center, she once called for a one-time “baby bonus” payment to new parents. To some, that’s enough: She spoke at the Abundance Conference this year.
Others concede that women might pursue their interests, if only within those “natural constraints.” Earlier this year, Scott Yenor wrote a piece for the right-wing Institute for Family Studies where he set out a taxonomy of “tradwives.” The “side-hustle wife” is an “ambitious, intelligent woman” who does a bit of “extra work” to help the family finances, he explained. She finds meaning in her paid work, but not too much; she believes her husband should be the provider. To her, motherhood is “worth the sacrifice,” and it is “the most important thing” in her life. Some conservatives are more explicit about what they’re asking women to surrender. In an interview with Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention, podcaster and author Allie Beth Stuckey attacks the abortion-rights movement for telling women they have “a desire that needs to be fulfilled, and that is to be autonomous,” a political sensibility that lacks “the constraint of the sacrifice of motherhood.” A woman should give up her body, her time, and even her mind.
If a woman must choose between dependence on a husband and his employer or dependence on her own wage, the latter is preferable to the former. Some choices are indeed better than others. And yet a woman with a salary makes sacrifices too. Whether she likes her job, or tolerates it, or actively loathes it, she surrenders most of her time and cognitive effort to an employer who might not think she’s a person, either. Her wants don’t matter on the job site. “Work has not brought us liberation, freedom, or even much joy,” the journalist Sarah Jaffe wrote in Work Won’t Love You Back. Calarco’s subject, Audrey, needs her own steady income and a more egalitarian church, but more than that, she needs a different sort of world. A baby bonus won’t get us there, and neither will a side hustle. The women of Wages for Housework “wanted to confront collectively the present systems of social production and reproduction rather than merely individually escape them,” explains the scholar Kathi Weeks, who prefers a guaranteed basic income. If that income met our “basic needs,” a person could “refuse waged work entirely,” though most would likely pursue a “supplementary wage,” Weeks adds in The Problem With Work. Autonomy is neither isolation or “interchangeability between the sexes,” as Sargeant put it, but a form of self-determination. It is the freedom to decide, for yourself, who you are and what you want.
I always knew I didn’t want my mother’s life, and as I entered my early 20s, her fate terrified me so deeply that I thought I had to define myself against her or the women around me. Some night, as I neared the end of my time at an Evangelical college, I watched three couples enter the dining hall. The men sat down. The women stayed upright and started walking away to fetch dinner for their boyfriends. Because I was young and righteous and sad, I asked them why they were doing it. They looked shocked at the question. “We want to do this,” one said. “It’s just an act of service.”
Only years later did I realize that I’d gotten it wrong, in my anger. Why did I say something to the women and not their smug men? Why didn’t I shake my fist at the religion we shared, which told us from birth that God made us subservient? I was so pleased with my own choices. I would not become my mother. And I haven’t, and still we’re not so different, my mother and I. Sometimes a woman makes a bad choice because it’s the best of her terrible options. Revolution begins there.
Graham Platner at home in Maine. Photo: grahamforsenate.com
When Senator Susan Collins of Maine appeared at a ribbon-cutting in the small town of Searsport this week, protesters awaited her. A now-viral video of the event shows Collins, a moderate Republican, at something of a loss. “Shame! Shame! Shame!” protesters shouted at her, until she said, “I have a suggestion. Would you listen to the suggestion?” One protester had an idea of their own. “Vote Graham Platner!” they replied.
Platner was national news by the time Collins arrived in Searsport. On August 19, he announced that would run as a Democrat to unseat Collins, who has been in the Senate since 1996 and chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee. The state of Maine has become “essentially unlivable” for working-class people on her watch, he said in a campaign video, and he was “deeply angry.” In interviews, Platner has avoided labels, including “liberal” or “leftie,” but he also hasn’t shied away from topics that Democratic leaders often avoid. “People are being kidnapped into unmarked vans by masked police. There is a genocide happening in Palestine. Literal billionaires have taken over our government. And all Democratic leadership can do is send us another fundraising text?” he recently posted on X.
Though Platner is new to national politics, he’s familiar to the residents of Sullivan, Maine, where he was raised and lives currently. He is an oyster farmer and the town harbormaster, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army who served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is still a competitive shooter. He entered the race against Collins at a vulnerable moment for her with her popularity declining — though she has defied expectations and polls in the past.
Platner’s pitch to Maine voters is not solely about Collins. He is a critic of “oligarchy,” as he said in his campaign video, and has focused much of his energy on a cost-of-living crisis that is making Maine unaffordable for many of its residents. Platner has a long road ahead — he already has primary competition, and state Democratic officials hope Maine’s septuagenarian governor, Janet Mills, will enter the race. Nonetheless, he has achieved startling momentum during the first week of his campaign. On Labor Day, he’ll appear in with Senator Bernie Sanders and Troy Jackson, a former state senator who’s running to replace Mills as governor. I spoke to Platner on Thursday about his new campaign and how he arrived at a platform that includes Medicare for All.
I want to start with Susan Collins. She’s been in the Senate since 1996, and conventional wisdom says that because she has that seniority, it’s important to keep her around. What’s your take on her legacy and what it has meant for the people of Maine? I think at its core, one of the reasons I’m running is that in the 30 years that Susan Collins has been in the Senate, things have gotten materially worse for working-class Mainers. For me, that’s the baseline. If you’ve been there for that much time and you’ve accrued as much power as I continue to be told that she has accrued, then where is it when it comes to doing things for working-class people in the state of Maine?
Because things are worse now. Our hospitals are falling apart. We have an affordability-and-housing crisis and it is not just ours; it’s nationwide. But frankly, that’s what being a U.S. senator is all about: fixing larger systemic problems. The Senate is one of those places where you can accrue an immense amount of power through seniority. She’s waited a long time to be head of the Appropriations Committee, and she’s there now. And yet what has it given us? I think if you went around the state of Maine and asked people, “Has your life gotten materially better since Susan Collins became head of the Senate Appropriations Committee?,” they’re all going to say, “Absolutely not.”
Can you say more about Maine’s housing costs in particular? I live in a small town on the coast. We have some very, very nice summer homes. We also have a lot of people living hardscrabble lives in a prefab or a mobile home. Eastern Hancock County is poor. People struggle real hard. People work really, really hard. There was a time, though, when that kind of hard work could still keep you in your house. It could put good food on your table. You could even save. You could send your kids to college. I know guys who are clammers who sent their kids to college with the money they made. Those days are over.
The housing-affordability crisis is such a systemic issue. I would love to just tie it to Maine, but it’s obviously not the case. A friend of mine works at the store where I get my breakfast, and she’s born and raised here, and wants to stay here, but she is thinking about leaving because she spends more than 50 percent of her monthly income on rent and can’t buy a house. She’s looked at going elsewhere, and she’s not sure where she can go because it’s the same problem everywhere else. So the problem manifests itself clearly in the rising cost of goods and the fact that wages have remained stagnant.
I know a lot of guys who have construction gigs or are contractors. The tariff uncertainty has driven prices for them up 20, 30, 40 percent. So now there are projects that were being done that aren’t being done because essentially we have a self-made supply-chain crisis and it is impacting people in material ways. Deleterious isn’t even the right word for it. People can’t live around here anymore. It’s getting effectively unlivable and that’s not even talking about the health-care problem, which is its own disaster in the making as we speak.
Maine also has an aging population. In your view, what would need to change in order for Maine to be the sort of place where a working-class person can comfortably retire? One, we need to fix retirement in this country. There was an age when there were three legs of the retirement pedestal. You’ve got social security; you had pensions, generally built out from strong labor unions; and you had 401ks, which are supposed to be supplemental. Social Security has been attacked for decades. Benefits have been reduced. To me, it’s all insane because if we just remove the cap, then we fund Social Security forever and always and expand benefits.
Here in eastern Maine, if we had Medicare for All and we had accessible health care that people at the moment of care did not have to pay money for, people could take care of themselves and be healthier for longer. It’s also a whole bunch of money that you could use that to save and save for retirement. What would eastern Maine look like if everyone in eastern Maine didn’t have to worry about paying for health insurance or work a job they hated to give them access to health insurance?
You could have an economy that is booming and that is full of people that want to live here and move here. We have none of that right now, and that’s why this place is in many ways dying, and it’s not through any fault of the people that live here.
You enlisted in the Marine Corps and later served in the Army. Why did you decide to enlist? And how did your experiences in the military shape your views? I’d always felt a real sense of duty. I always wanted to belong to something that was bigger than me, and here in the United States, military service, certainly for younger people, that’s a place that you get to do that. I also grew up in eastern Maine and I wanted to see the world. I wanted adventures, and I read too much Hemingway when I was in high school. I wanted to be Robert Jordan.
So I joined the Marines and I joined the infantry and deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan. Wound up in the Army. My experiences in many ways shaped my disillusionment. I was already skeptical. I protested the war in Iraq before I fought in it. I still went because I felt like I had some kind of duty to go. I tried to stop it. We couldn’t stop it. I had some feeling that maybe it was better that I go than somebody else.
In my time overseas, I began to become very, very critical of American foreign policy, which in many ways began to make me deeply critical of our system. And I began to look at things through this lens: If we continue to not accomplish the things I thought we were trying to accomplish, then I have to reframe the question and start to wonder, Well then, what are we trying to do? And the answer I came to for American foreign policy and a lot of other things is that we have a system that is built to make a very small number of people very wealthy and powerful. And we will expend an immense amount of capital, we will shoulder an immense amount of human suffering, in the service of that. That made me very, very angry for a long time. I still am in many ways, although I’ve definitely found better places to channel it. Hence this.
Can you say more about your transition out of the military and how it influenced you politically? When I got home from my fourth tour, I was suffering from all the stuff that you would expect infantrymen to suffer from. I definitely self-medicated. About six weeks to two months after I got back from my fourth tour, I got a DUI. I was in this place where not only was I having all of the normal responses to that kind of trauma, I was also going through this immense emotional disillusionment where I began to realize that everything I had done, everything I’d taken part in, all this violence and horror had quite possibly been in the service of nothing good.
And that was very hard. To this day, honestly, it makes me emotional. Even saying these words out loud. This still is a thing that I struggle with deeply, in the sense that trying to tie something I’m very proud of, which is my military service, to the fact that I felt like I was in many ways taken advantage of by the larger system. I know I’m not the only one that feels this way. A lot of guys I served with have very similar problems and very similar feelings.
Then I finally got to the VA and got care, and I got treated for PTSD. And through that, I got access to health care, I got access to a lot of foundational support, which allowed me to build a really spectacular, fulfilling life that I’ve lived now for almost a decade. It was that kind of support that allowed me the freedom to start a small business, allowed me the freedom to buy a home. All these things that allowed me to move back to Maine and get engaged in my community and fall back in love with this place, that came from the support I got from the VA. And I’ve just gotten to a point where I think that that freedom, that support, should be accessible to all Americans. You shouldn’t have to go fight in foreign wars and watch your friends die just to get the basic foundation of living a good life in this country. I find that frankly abhorrent.
My husband was a Marine, and he’s told me the transition period can be very difficult. Even if you haven’t been in combat, you’ve had so much structure, and you have a purpose, and then all of a sudden — It goes away.
It goes away. And the VA has been very important to him in helping him navigate that. Did your experiences with the VA inform your current support for Medicare for all? One thousand and ten percent, yeah. The VA saved my life. My body was a wreck. I have herniated discs in my back, my knees were banged up. I mean, I was in the grunts for a while, and it’s hard on your body. And my mind was not doing well. I had PTSD. I was blown up a lot. I was hit by multiple IED strikes and RPGs impacting my position. So there were all these elements of being that close to blasts a lot. There were symptoms that I for a long time did not recognize were symptoms. I also came out of the infantry, so I had this masculine bravado thing, like, Oh, it’s fine, I’ll deal with it. And by dealing with it, I meant ignoring it and drinking a bit too much, which is not actually, it turns out, a successful strategy for overcoming trauma. Who knew?
So in 2016, I came back to Maine. The Maine VA is spectacular. They reached out to me, they got me the care I needed. I started going to regular therapy, all these things that for a long time I knew that maybe would be helpful, but I just shoved it away. And my life entirely turns around. It all comes from that direct support. As a small-business owner, I often get asked to talk at these small business-oriented Zoom meetings or meetings of people who are curious about how a small business in the coast of Maine can succeed. They’re always like, “How did you do it?” “Oh, easy. The VA gives me free health care and helps me pay my mortgage.”
That’s how I got to start a small business. If everybody else could do that too, they too could start a small business. So that, for me, has laid the foundation. I got material support and that allowed me to live a better life. And I am convinced that if we gave that kind of support to all Americans, we would have a much more vibrant economy, a much more vibrant society. I don’t think there is anything valuable, frankly, except to maybe a few people who own the apps, in convincing people that hustle culture is the only way to live. People working all day every day at things that they do not love is not how you build a successful society. It just isn’t. And we need to give people the freedom to do that.
You’ve spoken of oligarchy in your early campaign materials. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan has suggested that oligarchy is not a word that resonates with working-class Americans. Why did you decide that it was important to use that word, and what do you think it means to the people you’re talking to in Maine? I use it because I think it’s literally the accurate term. When I go on Wikipedia and look at the definition and then I see the world we live in, I see a lot of similarities. Also, I’ve read a number of academic papers in which it has been argued quite forcefully that the system we currently live in is in fact an oligarchy. So that’s why. And no disrespect to anyone else, but I actually think the American electorate is much more intelligent than a lot of people give it credit for. I think that people can understand concepts that may seem academic. And I know this because I live in a small town. I use that word in conversation, and people do not look at me like I’m confusing. They understand. So I guess, for me, that’s why I use it. It’s the right term, and I think it is not inaccessible in any way.
This is sort of related, but how are you tapping into what seems to be an anti-Establishment feeling within the American electorate right now? I think you focus specifically on the things that unite pretty much all working people in the United States. Health care, housing, child care, a feeling that they have watched immense amounts of money get spent on horrific foreign wars while they’ve gotten none of the things they need. Talk about those things. People respond to the material conditions that are their lives. I believe that. I believe it because I see it every day. I don’t have to read some focus-group paper on how we should talk to working-class people. I make $50,000 a year, and I live in a town of a thousand. I’m a working-class person who lives in a working-class town. I don’t believe in magic words. There’s this thing right now where everyone’s like, “Well, what if we change the words?” Then we’ll message differently. And that’s insane. Again, I don’t think people are idiots. It’s not a messaging problem.
People know that when you’re trying to tailor the message, it’s because you’re not trying to change the content or the actual context of what you are saying. The discussion about how we need to use different words, I find it so absurd because by openly having that conversation, you are stating that you don’t want to change anything. You just want to change how you talk about it. I think people see this stuff as just a bunch of weird focus groups politicking, and that’s what they hate. It’s what I hate. It’s why I’m here. It’s why I’m doing this. I can’t stand that stuff. I think it’s ineffective. I think it alienates people. I also think that it’s the reason a lot of people have given up.
So you don’t get dragged into that stuff. You don’t have to run away from your ideals. You don’t have to sell anybody out. You don’t have to say that you believe something you don’t or that you don’t believe something that you do. What you have to do is engage people with the reality they know to be true, which is that they live in a society that is not built for them at all. They live in a society that is built to enrich very, very few people, and it is meant to extract as much wealth and time and energy out of them for that group’s benefit as possible. Everybody knows this. Republicans know it, Democrats know it. Progressives know it. Trump voters know it. Go across the working class of this country, and ask people if they think they live in a society that is designed for their benefit. Not a single one of them is going to say “yes.” And the way that you tap into that is you tell them the truth that they already know. You say that is correct. The people who are screwing you are way up there, and they have accrued all the money and all the power, and they’re going to continue doing it until we start building power of our own.
How do you plan to sustain your current momentum and build relationships with voters across such a rural state? Well, that part is in some ways easy. I’m 40. I have an immense amount of energy. I’m a former bartender, and I love talking to people. And I’ve got a Toyota Tundra with at least 400,000 miles left on it as long as I do the oil change. So that’s how. I think we’ve got 22 town halls lined up over the next two months. The plan is me and my wife are going to get in the truck and we’re going to drive all over the great state of Maine, and we’re going to talk to quite literally everybody. And I want to hear from everybody.
The other thing is that I’m not going out there to go talk to Democrats or talk to Republicans. I want to talk to everybody. They’re open town halls. I want everyone to come. I very much think that we are in the situation that we are in because we have a political Establishment that stopped talking to working people, stopped hearing about the material realities that people live in and that are the outcomes of policy. We need to reengage with reality. We need to reengage with what happens when you do policy a certain way. And the only way to do that is to go out there and talk to them. So that’s what we’re going to do. That’s the plan.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Vice-President Vance delivers remarks on the One Big Beautiful Act at Don’s Machine Shop in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, on July 16. President Trump signed his flagship tax and spending bill into law on July 4. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
In July, the right-wing Claremont Institute hosted Vice-President J.D. Vance at its annual Statesmanship Award dinner, where he proceeded to tell his audience that all their fears were coming true. The left was on the move. New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani and his supporters “hate the people in this room, they hate the president of the United States, and most of all, they hate the people who voted for him,” Vance said. He offered no proof, but he didn’t have to; it wasn’t the sort of crowd that needed it. They’d come to hear red-meat oratory, and he delivered. Mamdani was “ungrateful” to the land and to the people who settled it, Vance said. Because Mamdani called our great nation “contradictory” and “unfinished” even as he praised its beauty, he tarnished it and those who died for it. “Who the hell do these people think they are?” Vance wondered.
As the vice-president would have it, Mamdani is an interloper whose rise threatens a redefinition of “American citizenship” along far-right and nationalist lines.
Vance has long rejected America as an idea in favor of America as a blood-and-soil nation, built on the bones of our (presumably European) ancestors. America “is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation,” he said when he addressed the Republican National Convention in 2024. Vance’s America is the eastern Kentucky cemetery where he wants to rest with his wife, and eventually his children, who would be the seventh generation of his family entombed there. His family “built” America, made things in America, would fight and die for America, and that “is a homeland,” in his words. That rhetoric is an implicit threat, too. If the homeland is in trouble from the likes of Mamdani, as Vance now says, we must defend it and finish the project the vice-president’s ancestors allegedly began.
A few days after Vance spoke to the Claremont Institute, the Department of Homeland Security posted a painting to its social-media accounts. American Progress,by John Gast, depicts an angelic white woman in flowing robes floating over the American West as settlers bring the light of civilization to a shadowed continent. The image might be familiar; it often illustrates school lessons or articles on Manifest Destiny. After publisher George Crofutt commissioned the work from Gast in 1872, he advertised the result in patriotic terms: “This great national picture” shows “in the most artistic manner all the gigantic results of American brains and hands.” Many Americans agreed. To them, settlers had a divine mission to conquer western land along with the Native people who lived on it; in fact, America could only realize its true greatness through displacement and murder.
It’s not hard to understand why Manifest Destiny might appeal to the Trump administration, and particularly its Department of Homeland Security, whose agents carry out another act of conquest, a purge they justify in the name of Western civilization. The administration has occupied the streets of Washington, D.C., because it wants to punish the people who live there, because it wants to remove immigrants that it does not like, and because it sees itself as a conquering force. The streets properly belong to it, and not to locals. Manifest Destiny was about blood and soil, too. “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending,” as DHS wrote in its post of Gast’s work. Trump even used the term in his inaugural address this year.
“Our ancestors realized that to carve a successful nation from a new land meant creating new, tangible things,” Vance said at Claremont in July. Settlers built “new homes, new towns, new infrastructure” so they could “tame a wild continent.” Vance never specifies what — or who — made the continent “wild,” but we can infer his meaning. He also does not explain what “new, tangible things” today’s citizens might create, though he previously said that American manufacturers need protection, so that we do not “lose a fundamental part of who we are as a people.” He added, “Making things, building things, working with our hands is America’s heritage,” which is a strikingly funny line given that Vance does not make things, or build things, or work with his hands. The Yale Law graduate doesn’t seem to do any work at all, unless posting on X is a job. Since Trump assumed office in January, Vance has gone on vacations to Vermont and Disneyland and his native Ohio, where the Army Corps of Engineers changed the outflow of Caesar Creek Lake to create “ideal kayaking conditions,” or so one anonymous source told the Guardian. Then he traveled to the United Kingdom, where he vacationed in the Cotswolds before proceeding to Scotland.
Vance may continue his life of leisure for the indefinite future, but what about everyone else? No one carves cities out of the forest now, and manufacturing jobs are not returning under Vance and his boss, either, but neither fact matters to the vice-president or his allies. People need to fill the jobs our expanding police state might create. Manifest Destiny was less a specific policy than a justification for a violent national expansion that sought new territory as it enforced a social, economic, and racial hierarchy. Even now, the world Vance wants to build cannot exist without conformity and control.
When J.D. Vance converted to Catholicism five years ago, he came into contact with what the Associated Press recently called “a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings.” Vance has called himself a “postliberal” Catholic in the past and has endorsed policies and tactics favored by adherents of the label, such as purging the administrative state and his rhetorical promotion of “pro-family” policy. (His actual legislative record on this subject leaves much to be desired.)
His rise as a national figure has carried relatively obscure ideologies closer to political power, including what the AP called a “subset” of postliberalism, known as integralism. What is integralism, then, and could it influence our would-be vice-president? As held by prominent thinkers like Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, integralism imagines a future when the state may punish the baptized for violations of ecclesiastical law. Kevin Vallier, an associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University and the author of All The Kingdoms of the World, spoke with me about Vance, integralism and the political order that integralists seek to create.
I wanted to start by defining our terms. Briefly, could you tell me what is integralism and how it differs from views held by prominent conservative Catholics like J.D. Vance or someone like Leonard Leo?
J.D. Vance is friends with many of the leading integralists, so it’s not entirely clear to me how far away he is from thinking that this would be the best system of government. It’s just unknown. He’s called himself a Catholic postliberal, which, in my view, is less radical than a Catholic integralist. But he’s been to one of their conferences as a speaker.
Integralists think church and state should be integrated for the entire common good of the people, not just in this life but also the next. But the way that it works is that the Church is the primary mode of social organization that’s guiding people into the next life. In certain cases, the Church can deputize the state to help enforce some of its spiritual policies.
An integralist regime doesn’t necessarily have to be at all violent or super oppressive. It just depends on what the Church directs the state to do. Still, we’re looking at heresy laws. We’re looking at apostasy laws. If someone leaves the faith, there’s some kind of penalty. If you teach heresy, and you’re condemned by the Church and so by the state, something happens to you. You distribute banned and heretical books, something happens.
Can we fit integralism under the broad rubric of Christian nationalism, or is it somewhat distinct?
Christian nationalism is usually very Protestant, and also, integralism is not nationalist. Christian nationalism to me is like bargain-basement integralism. Integralists are very intellectually sophisticated. Christian nationalism, frankly, I think it began as a way for the right to troll the left four or five years ago. It was kind of to scare Democrats. So it doesn’t really cohere intellectually very much, which is why you hear Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about Christian nationalism, but you have Catholic theologians talking about integralism.
Obviously, integralism is not a new idea, so when did its resurgence begin, and why did it begin?
The story’s pretty interesting. There was an informal group of American intellectuals who were thinking of these things before Trump — some of whom considered themselves on the left, and some of them considered themselves on the right. They opposed everything they thought of as liberal. They opposed theological liberalism, any kind of looser, more ecumenical or less miraculous understanding of religious texts, political liberalism in terms of stressing the dignity of the individual and sharply limited government, along with the market economy and the separation of church and state.
The right-wing people wanted to bring Catholicism back to public life and even some control on the grounds that it would have better family policy in many cases. When Trump was elected, though, it really divided them because the Catholic left were less extreme on church/state stuff, but they really just thought Trump was as un-Catholic as a leader could be. The right-wing integralists thought that Trump was a way of destroying liberal elites and hoped that is what he would do. They just didn’t see much social progress unless there was a new elite.
I’ve been told that by 2020 any semblance of left-wing integralism was gone. The right-wing integralists spent a large amount of time building connections with Viktor Orbán, whom they’re very big fans of. He’s a Calvinist, but because he’s enforcing cultural Christianity in some way, they think that’s better than nothing. He’s trying to grow families. So the history, like any early radical sect, is full of strong, crazy personalities and weird fights and stuff.
It’s a small community, as you note in your book.
Yes, it is. It’s weird because you would think it would have no influence at all. Catholics over 50 tell me that this is a joke. There’s nothing to it. But then I meet all these Catholic graduate students at different universities, and they’re super excited about it. Maybe they’re not fully integralists, but their friends are, and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know what to think.” It’s in the air. I had a blast last year just going to different students all over the place and talking to them about it.
But the biggest thing I think that will change things is that there are lots of priests that are becoming integralist and that can really matter because people go to their priests. A lot of these younger Catholic priests, if they say Latin Mass, they’ve got growing churches. This isn’t a dwindling church somewhere. So they’re influencing people. They’re shaping minds and spirits and so on. So that could matter, but it’s very hard to know how much it matters.
It ebbs and flows. I thought last year, the only way that integralism was going to have a future after all the infighting was if J.D. Vance became VP nominee, and then he did.
You go over this at length in your book, but could we discuss how integralists propose capturing the state and enforcing their agenda?
What Vermeule gets is that you’re not going to be able to do this with a small government. You’re going to need a very powerful executive branch, and you’re going to need a very powerful administrative state. Then the question is just going to be how you prepare a large pluralistic society to submit to a religion that they don’t all share. So the first thing you have to do is you have to think you know that liberalism will collapse.
While liberalism is collapsing of its own weight, you get the right reflective, deeply committed Catholic people into those bureaucracies, into the judiciary, into the executive. It’s like, history will hand you this opportunity. You have your small group. They’re training their own people. They’re ready to go.
So getting there requires a large state. It requires the intellectual discrediting and collapse of liberalism and having the right place and the right time for a new elite to take things in as integralist direction as possible as they can, hopefully with relatively little bloodshed.
It doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily planning some civil war where they take over and crush dissent violently in the streets. But is it possible to do what they want to do without engendering violence in some way?
Well, the engendering is the key because it depends on who controls the levers of government. If it’s still controlled by the left, or however you want to think about it, yeah, it’s going to require bloodshed. So they’re not going to say, “Yeah, let’s do that.” I don’t think these are bloodthirsty people. I think some of them are mostly nerdy intellectuals, then some of them are really politically obsessed nerdy intellectuals.
There are two groups of people. There are people who want to argue theology all day. I like them. They’re weird, but I like them. Then there are people who are obsessed with politics and are hanging out in Hungary, making sure Orbán has an audience with DeSantis and all this kind of stuff. They’re the first ones to really grease those wheels. They like Orbán because they can see him as destroying the elite power of the Hungarian left, although Orbán’s benefited tremendously from the left being completely fragmented there, and so he can create a coalition that wins fair and square.
So I don’t think they’re eager to hurt people. I just think they believe today’s society, and liberal society generally, is just so profoundly corrupt that you’re just not going to make life better for people without what they call a postliberal order. You’d have to fundamentally change the terms on which a modern society operates. They’ve told us almost nothing about how that is, as opposed to banning some stuff.
What would religious freedom look like under an integralist regime?
That’s actually one of the most complicated questions, and it’s one of the ones that got integralism started in the first place. The quick answer is you have to have religious freedom for the unbaptized. You can’t force them into the Church. But if they are baptized, if they’re members of the Church, then they’re subject to the Church’s jurisdiction, which means that in an integralist state, of which all the baptized were members, the Church could direct the state to control but usually to punish the baptized for culpable sins.
Thomas Pink, a philosopher emeritus at King’s College London who’s its chief intellectual but perhaps rejects its politics, has said integralism isn’t going to happen. People disagree too much now. You can’t get the kind of uniformity that you would need for this kind of ideal society.
But you can imagine a very Catholic society. Then people know a lot more about Catholicism, and they know what’s bad about defecting from it. In those cases, you could punish them. The same way that in some Muslim countries, where Christians and Jews are people of the book, and so they’re to be tolerated. At least in principle. But if you’re Muslim, then the policies can apply to you. Now, there are modern Muslim societies. There are much more conservative ones. So I’m not talking about a general tendency of Islam. I’m just saying if you’re trying to get a sense for this, with integralism you’re going to use coercion against your co-religionists to keep them on the straight and narrow. That’s the main kind of coercion that would be introduced.
I’m curious about their view of racial and gender equality.
They’re fine with racial equality. Most of the time they’re trying to deflect worries about antisemitism, which is complicated. Gender, on the other hand, is completely different. They reject LGBT equality in every way that one can. They’ll say, “Look, there are certain gender roles that are appropriate.” Most of the new right factions have this masculinist component.
They would definitely get rid of same-sex marriage. They would ban pornography of every kind. In many cases, they are associated with very patriarchal views of marriage. They don’t talk about that a lot, but it’s there.
“I didn’t leave the progressive movement; the progressive movement left me,” Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx recently toldCity & State New York. He was referring to the conflict within the left over Israel. Describing himself as a Zionist for the past decade, about “half of his posts, retweets or interactions” since October 7 have been supportive of Israel, City & State reported.
Torres is not a hypocrite. If we take him at his word, he’s been a Zionist for a long time. But he’s not being entirely truthful about the progressive movement or his place within it either. The movement didn’t leave him: He left it, if indeed he was ever fully part of it, by making a series of deliberate choices. One such choice is to support Israel despite the unbelievable brutality it has inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza.
Support for Israel isn’t the only reason Torres might find himself outside the progressive movement. During his time on the City Council, Torres angered progressive supporters by agreeing “to water down the Right to Know Act, which would have forced officers to provide a business card in every encounter with the public,” City & State reported. In 2017, ahead of the vote, he said, “I stand by what I have chosen to do, even if it means standing alone … even if it means I am no longer beloved in progressive circles.” He carried that attitude with him to Congress, where he discovered allies within the Democratic Party, such as Senator John Fetterman. The Pennsylvania senator also holds a stringent pro-Israel position and told comedian Bill Maher this month that progressivism “left” him after October 7. “I didn’t leave the label, it left me on that,” he said.
Mondaire Jones, who’s running to return to Congress, struck a similar note in an interview with Politico. After he endorsed the AIPAC-backed George Latimer over progressive incumbent Jamaal Bowman, he came under significant fire from the left. The political arm of the Congressional Progressive Caucus even rescinded its endorsement of him. “These people were never my actual friends,” he claimed, saying that he would do nothing differently if given the chance. “The appreciation that people have in these actual communities in the Hudson Valley is what matters to me,” he said. “That as well as my own sense of morality compelled me to intervene, given how god-awful Mr. Bowman’s conduct has been.”
Torres, Fetterman, and Jones are free to say that the progressive movement has left them behind. Perhaps they think they’re even being honest. The term “progressive” can be vague, even meaningless. Various Democrats and their supporters interpret it in wildly divergent ways. It’s possible, then, for Torres to think of himself as a progressive, though he was never as far left as some may have hoped. But that exercise is difficult to sustain now, as Israel carries out a genocidal campaign in Gaza. Torres and pro-Israel politicians like him have sided with power over the powerless.
In doing so, they’ve cast themselves out of the progressive movement. The label didn’t leave Fetterman; he merely discarded it. He was happy to call himself progressive in social-media posts, to court the left as a candidate, and to accept a Sanders endorsement during his successful run for lieutenant governor. Now, when it truly counts, Fetterman is likelier to taunt the left than he is to embrace it. The left must employ litmus tests if terms like progressive are going to mean anything at all, and Fetterman would fail. So too would Torres and Jones. If they feel uncomfortable with the progressive movement now, it’s likely a sign they never belonged in the first place. Their values were always in conflict with the left, and Gaza merely brought that reality into sharper focus.
It’s convenient, though, for pro-Israel Democrats to shift blame onto the left. Doing so gives them a chance to present themselves as brave truth tellers: See Jones, speaking of his personal sense of morality. But the left is not as powerful as I want it to be, and no courage is necessary to attack it. Critics instead exaggerate its influence in order to score points. It’s a cheap way to look principled. Jones must invent straw men — “trust fund socialists in Williamsburg,” as he put it to Politico — in order to sound somewhat reasonable, let alone courageous.
Courage is not in the eye of the beholder. It means something. (So should the word progressive.) There’s nothing brave about rejecting the left in a moment of great moral consequence. Nor is there anything particularly courageous about standing with Israel, a longtime U.S. ally, as it pummels Gaza into dust. Courage in politics looks more like Bowman, who faces a formidable challenge from AIPAC as he defends his seat in Congress. A recent poll showed Bowman trailing Latimer, who is running to his right, but Bowman has refused to compromise his beliefs. “They’ve got money, we’ve got people,” he posted on X.
The U.S. needs a viable left: a counterweight to politicians who turn their backs to ongoing mass murder. Without it, we’re doomed not to ambivalence but something worse, an embrace of brutality and vengeance and horror. Torres, Fetterman, and Jones have made their choices. Progressive may be a mostly toothless label, but if it’s still too much, the movement is better off without them in it.
A photo-illustration in a previous version of this story incorrectly included Antonio Delgado, not Ritchie Torres.
