Tag Archives: ritual

A Moment of Solidarity

A couple weeks ago, one of my wife’s college friends and her husband visited the Morehead, KY area for a couple days. Like us, they’ve been retired for awhile and have been traveling for weeks in their RV. While in Morehead, they camped for a night at Cave Run Lake, joined us and 20 of our other friends for an event outside a local brewery, and visited our home before leaving for their next stop. They’re nice people and we stood around chatting after they had us up in their vehicle and showed us their queen-sized bed and extensive storage space. It was all easy and familiar though my wife hadn’t seen her friend in 15 years and the husbands were meeting folks for the first time.

But there was a more serious moment just before my wife’s friend and her husband left on the next leg of their journey. At least three of us started talking about transsexuality. Even though my wife and her friend both had careers as nurses, the conversation about transsexuality wasn’t about transition or trans medical issues. Nor was it about the right-wing effort to erase transsexuality from American society, the fraught politics of transsexuality among Democrats, or the cis v trans distinction which I think of as a monumental cultural accomplishment. Instead, conversation focused on trans people we knew or had met. Trans folks are barely 1% of the population but all of us knew trans folks. I know five or six and mentioned that a couple trans teens from the local high school had been facebook friends from the early 2010’s. My wife mentioned the trans daughter of a family friend and how his transition had made him more comfortable with life.

Although this conservation was as easy and friendly as the rest of the day had been, there was also something more serious at play. First, the four of us were identifying trans people as part of our lives (although absent for this occasion). More particularly we identified trans folks as part of “us” in the sense of the multicultural “society” with which we affiliate and also identified ourselves as accepting trans people into our sense of our collective. It was really striking to me that the conversation about trans folks came after saying goodbye and served as a concluding affirmation of a moral bond among us.

If the trans conversation involved an affirmation of a bond among white lib/lefties, the same conversation was also another way to disaffiliate from white MAGA/conservatives and a broader sense of cultural or civilizational whiteness. If acceptance and identification of transness is a bedrock of white lib/left culture, the refusal to recognize trans people as “us” is a bedrock of MAGA conservatism. The MAGA reduction of human sexual identification to male v female, the effort to erase transsexual identification from government documents, and general bigotry toward trans folks is one of the defining qualities of MAGA conservatism and much of what makes white MAGA so repellant to white Americans who identify as liberal, left-leaning, or progressive. Because the same bedrock conflict exists for the white population in relation to race, acceptable roles for women, and LGBT, immigrant, Native American, and disabled acceptance, the idea that there is a general white culture, shared values, or opinion has become obsolete. In most of the ways that count, whites in the United States are no longer a “people.”

And as we were saying good-bye to our friends, we were once again indicating our rejection and repugnance for white conservatives.

The Herrenvolk Right

The Insurrection Flag

Trump voters are creating a “herrenvolk” political culture where white conservatism has a symbolic anchor in “simple” and “authentic” patriotic gestures like the Flag, the Pledge, and the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Like conservatives everywhere, Trump voters have a hunger for tradition as a guarantee of their moral rightness, but conservative political traditions and historical figures have come under such intense attack in the post-Civil Rights era that conservatives have had to either give up on or de-emphasize Columbus, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Old South, the Confederacy, pioneers, McCarthyism, and other badges of conservative honor. Unable to identify with liberal political movements and figures, conservatives have more or less retreated to George Washington as the sole guarantor of the conservative version of national honor.

But that’s not enough and conservatives have been working overtime to shape Donald Trump into the kind of mythic figure who functions on such a monumental scale that he can substitute for almost 250 years of the honored historical traditions to which conservatives are so poorly connected.

They are also creating a set of cultural rituals in which displaying flags, re-enacting the Pledge of Allegiance, and singing songs like “the Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” that identify them as “simple,” “authentic,” “patriotic,” and thus superior in virtue to the liberal coastal elites and Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, LGBT, and feminist activists who condescend towards them as “bigots.” Real “patriots” practice and revere such rituals while all the enemies of conservatives ignore, disdain, or rebel against them.

Thus revealing themselves to be “enemies of the people” just as much as the mainstream media.

At the rally for Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate last night, the Pledge and Flag ritual was made extra special by the American flag flown at the Jan. 6 Insurrection. But herrenvolk conservatism need not be limited to political rallies. As is the case with Trump reverence, all segments of the religious right, gun culture, and the conspiracy world can rally around herrenvolk patriotism and feel a sense of identity in opposition to the rest of the country.