In A Great Nation, Women Make Dinner, Cocktails, and Babies...Right?
National Conservatives have explicitly foretold a dystopian vision that looks like early-Cold War imperialism—a social order that requires the subjugation of women.
Handmaid’s Tale is fantasy mixed with truthiness. Frightening in an Orwellian sense, but ultimately a farce that makes anything that happens to women in the real world seem mild by comparison.
But there’s a 2022 film that many people slept on—called Don’t Worry, Darling—that paints a similarly grim yet far more realistic picture of how women might have to eat it in order to fulfill certain patriarchal political fantasies from which, ultimately, only the oligarchs stand to benefit.
Directed by Olivia Wilde, the movie depicts a 1950s suburban lifestyle at its most romantic, initially. Sunny Southern California deserts and mountains. Everyone gets a new-construction home on a single income. Beautiful tradwives who seem happy, have plenty of leisure time, and greet their husbands after work with a cocktail.
For the men, who are the breadwinners of the household, everyday appears to be an orgiastic celebration combining White History Month with Steak-and-Blowjob day. It’s easy to see how this lifestyle might seem very desirable to a certain kind of dude.1
But the dystopia of the film depicted reveals that nothing is as it seems. Much like Cold War liberalism itself, the patina of a good life masks a darker reality: A rapacious project globally built on the foundation of a patriarchal social order at home. The mid-century project naturalized the subordination of women in such a way that they were denied basic things like checking accounts,2 yet bought off with the psychic wage of being included as beneficiaries of the system…as long as they kept their mouths shut and dutifully fulfilled their god-given role as domestic caretakers (work that denied them an actual wage for their labor).
But the story, a fictive allegory about Cold War liberalism, also gets something profoundly right about the historical conjuncture we find ourselves in now. MAGA has explicitly linked Trump-onomics with tradwives, aiming to make women make babies—an unapologetically patriarchal vision put in service of empire.
Here’s the thing: A specific kind of social order is being sold to the MAGA faithful, and it looks like Don’t Worry, Darling minus its political critique—male breadwinner, submissive wives, white picket fence. This mirage weaves together a response to a crisis of capital accumulation with a male-dominated utopia sustained by an imperial mode of living that dramatically narrows who gets to be not just American but human.
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What makes lusting after the 1950s a reactionary mirage is not only that it ignores who pays for the fantasy but also that the fantasy is literally unachievable. It’s part of an ideology meant to draw political support for a project of oligarchy that, by definition, benefits a few at the top. Nobody else matters.
In the event you find this patriarchal dystopia attractive, let its core contradiction puncture the myth: A social order that reproduces oligarchy needs plentiful labor to exploit cheaply. In MAGA-nomics, a “surplus” of women and immigrants in the economy are thought to dilute men’s wages. The “solution” offered by the right aims to not only purge immigrants but also restrict women’s rights so that they get shoved back into single-family suburban life where they receive no wage for their domestic labor and are ruled by their husbands. Dependency is leverage, leverage makes domination possible, those who dominate tell you you’re lucky to be dominated.
But this vision presents a practical problem for capital—reducing the immigrant-and-woman share of the workforce is supposed to cause wages for everyone else (white men) to rise from a shortfall in the labor needed to produce profits. Oligarchy only benefits from the patriarchal vision as long as the vision goes unrealized. Even if only white men had full employment with high wages, the economics of oligarchy would fall apart. There is also no economic basis for recreating the 1950s fantasy.
And this is where everything gets really dark. Rather than pay the white man awesome wages, a system of oligarchy will undermine even the white man by exploiting the cheapest resource of all—slave labor. If you can put more people in prison, for whatever reason, you can extract their productivity for pennies on the dollar. If you can expand the homeless population, and then put homeless people in internment camps, which is happening as I write this, you can exploit them however you see fit because they’ve been erased. Similarly, domestic work is labor, but uncompensated and unseen.
So white, working-class patriarchal bros are rubes getting cucked by oligarchs. The very system of hierarchy and dehumanization that the bros think will lead to a white-picket-fence fantasia is actively growing a surplus population that owners of capital exploit to avoid seeing their profits redirected toward whatever remains of the working class.
Ultimately, anyone you can erase becomes a surplus population—“leftists,” DEI advocates, military officers who believe in the Constitution, women who dye their hair, people who oppose authoritarianism. Designating enemies—and then setting up systems to extract their labor—is a way of unlocking new shareholder value in a world where normal wage work is disappearing. The MAGA way presents itself as the answer: A preferred social order (keep rich white mean at the top, remove immigrants, enslave dissenters, and suborn women) that responds to a crisis of capitalism. But who benefits from that in the end? Not the working class.
Julia Gledhill joined Lyle Rubin and I on The Bang-Bang Podcast to dissect Don’t Worry, Darling—check it out!
Don’t Worry, Darling Trailer
Personally, I’ve never vibed with the mid-century aesthetic, in part because I can’t shake the politics that accompanied it, which nauseate me. Denial of equal rights for Blacks. An erasure of American colonialism in the Pacific (which endures today). Cold War militarism, which nearly caused a nuclear holocaust on multiple occasions. A literal war on socialists and leftists of various types around the world that eventually left more than 14 million dead and saw the US attempt regime change more than 60 times (44 on the side of autocracy!). But I get why many folks love mid-century modern and would think of it fondly. I don’t begrudge anyone their preferred nostalgia or style.