Conservatives aren’t losers, they just live like the frontier never closed. Part 1/?

A common claim about conservatives is that they are losers, they don’t want to “win”, etc, etc. All of this is misunderstanding the core situation. I am as guilty as anyone on this front, not being a child of the frontier myself.

Conservatives, or really the descendants by blood of frontier settlers who never civilized, are trapped in a frontier mindset that leaves them endlessly vulnerable to incursions on their ability to live, work and form families. They cannot protect each other because pathological individualism is inherent to the frontier personality. They can only come together under the influence of a strong personality for specific tasks for extremely limited periods of time. They are under-civilized, yet dependent on hyper-civilization to have the tools and resources that allowed their ancestors to farm hundreds of acres almost entirely solo.

As far as culture war stuff and economic warfare by liberals, it’s all of a piece. Cake shops are frivolous and unnecessary, since you can bake your own cake, so you ought to no matter what. Same for flower shops, why pay someone to pick flowers and put them in a vase? They’re everywhere, after all. So there is sympathy for someone having a hard time from mean city folks, but really, they’re also city folks, so, well, you know.

Same for people getting fired from retail work and high-wage work (or any non-political job) by hyper-progressive liberals. They’re not working their own land, they’re working for a wage, it’s really their own fault for not having a homestead to live off. They should have just done that. None of this is remotely conscious or deliberately cruel and small minded. It worked really well for millions upon millions of Americans for many, many decades to think this way and live accordingly. The rapid urbanization of the 20th century was a curveball they didn’t really adjust to well.

 

Fairy cloth is real, Grimm’s fairy tales were veiled nonfiction

This is astonishing but true. One of the more fascinating aspects of this is that it puts a strong pin in the idea that oral transmission is foolproof and highly reliable. Old women were repeating stories about an industry that existed, produced seemingly magical fabric, and which was essentially dead by the 19th century due to newly rich middle class people wanting it to be available at a price they could afford.

Fairy cloth, cloth so fine it could be shut up in a nutshell, but was warm and comfortable, was altogether real, immensely expensive, and required a near-army of women to harvest the fibers and process them into the cloth. It was demanding, painstaking work, and the families that produced the cloth did not receive nearly the wages of the middlemen hawking it to sultan’s daughters and the wealthiest of European aristocrats.

There have been some recent attempts to revive it, but the plant used centuries ago is kindasorta lost and the current efforts are inferior and there is no certainty that they can figure out how to grow the right kind of plant and also relearn or reinvent the necessary weaving and processing skills in the longer term.

There is so much like this, because the beautiful things of the past required a lot of work and infernal machines cannot replicate this work.  I think it is not bad that you can find re-enactors painstakingly describing and giving examples of how people lived in the 18th and 19th century on video or streaming media.  But it is bad that we haven’t accepted the amount of manual labor involved in making the beautiful things of the recentish past enough to reclaim and restore some of those old glories.

 

Another hidden cost of modern parenting–the Mom Commute

Before I had kids, I used to look around at the fatigued SAHMs and working mothers around me and I thought (if I thought about it at all) that a lot of the things they did were optional and not really necessary to the kid-raising life.

Well, I was wrong.

The Mom commute has a long history in American society, but it wasn’t as broadly required in the first half of the 20th century. And there were still ways to avoid the worst of it in the second half via carpooling and roping in still-available neighbors, relatives and friends. And also, for a short window of time, nannies. During peak working mother, around the late 1980s and early 1990s, the first wave of amnestied Hispanic women made a labor pool for domestic work that included doing a lot of the driving. And contrary to the story about them, during that window of time, the wages they were paid were decent and many received real benefits as well. Minimum wage was very low and so (for that brief window of time), paying twice minimum wage was hard, but not completely brutalizing the old finances and the freshly amnestied immigrants were happy to get comparatively generous wages for the work. Things changed with the dotcom era, of course, but a roughly ten year window of being able to pay generously for childcare and still have a lot of money left over distorted perspective later.

Anyway, while a bit of a digression, the point is that now in the 21st century, all the social bonds and stuff have corroded and the mom commute is pretty much a requirement for all moms, even pretty rural ones. It’s not even about the dreaded activities, it’s that getting your kids around other kids and getting them the educational resources they’re supposed to have, even if they’re public schooled involves a lot of commuting (even if you can pop them on the bus in theory).

This is a pretty major fertility shredder and it’s also a reason a lot of married households want two very comfortable cars. They also need them because the Mom Commute tends to not be in the same directions as the Work Commute. The schools and kid stuff are in one part of the city/metro area/county, but the jobs (including mom’s if she works outside the home too) tend to be somewhere else. That includes teachers, who used to be able to easily work in the district their kids were in and now rarely can.

Giving up the Mom Commute really does mean for most married mothers agreeing to a truly astonishing level of isolation and dependence on mass media and social media for themselves and their children and hard limits on physical activity as well. But you never really hear about it, even though that much driving is health-damaging and poorly compatible with keeping the old figure in tiptop shape.