On and within the Longhouse
There's *something* to the preferred metaphor of the New Right. But its purveyors fall into the same identity trap as the left.
A few people have reached out to express their dissatisfaction with my piece about a “new right” influencer named Lomez getting doxed by The Guardian. They were concerned that I’d discuss the writer’s doxing without rebutting his problematic claims. I thought this was perfectly acceptable within the context of my piece, as the major outlet who doxed him also didn’t bother to rebut any of his claims. They called him fascist, sure, but they didn’t actually engage with anything he had said.
Here’s a quick paraphrase of what went down:
Left Wingers: You need to understand every issue through the lens of identity. Identity is the only thing that ever matters. Identity identity identity identity gimme gimme that sweet identity I cannot get enough of it.
Right Winger: Okay, here’s my theory about how the forced feminization of social systems has led to their dysfunction.
Left Wingers: You are a fascist and I am going to dox you.
That’s seriously all there was to it. It was very stupid.
But, it was stupid in a way that perhaps actually does warrant a full response, if for no other reason than that this sort of obvious hypocrisy is now so commonplace. You probably don’t need me to point out that if the identity poles were reversed—if Lomez had blamed social dysfunction on a thinly wrought conceptualization of masculinity or whiteness—his writing would raise no hackles; he would not have been doxed. Hell, he might have even gotten published in a prestigious centrist or left-wing outlet.
Lomez invited especial ire because his identity-based piece was not poorly wrought. I daresay it is decently wrought. He did exactly what he was told, applied the methods mandated by today’s left to social analysis in a manner far more creative and rigorous than 90% of the writers they approve of could ever aspire to, and yet he came to the exact opposite conclusion of what was desired.
So, alright, let’s enter the ol’ Longhouse and see what’s going on. I’m not going to dig any deeper into Lomez’ writing because I’m not writing a book about him. Nor I am going to concern myself with any of the response essays spawned by his original—they all appear to be from right-of-center sources, and my purpose here is to figure out why, exactly, this particular essay was so profoundly upsetting to the left-liberal mainstream it warranted it a public doxing from a major news organization. I am seeking, I suppose, not so much to rebut Lomez or his concept as I am to use it at a skeleton key for understanding one of the many vicious pathologies that have come to define the left in the twenty-twenties.
The essay in question was published by First Things, a semi-monthly, semi-scholarly journal of religious philosophy that cannot be easily grafted onto the largely superficial left-right distinctions of contemporary American politics (more on said superficiality in an upcoming post).
Lomez begins by acknowledging that western cultures and political institutions appear gripped by a mortal torpor. He then explains that the titular longhouse is a nebulous metaphor based on the design of pre-Industrial communal dwelling spaces that were, supposedly, matriarchal in structure:
The historical longhouse was a large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian. In online discourse, this historical function gets generalized to contemporary patterns of social organization, in particular the exchange of privacy—and its attendant autonomy—for the modest comforts and security of collective living.
The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.
Here we should pause to acknowledge the unintentional similarities between the deployment of this metaphor and the rather weak and self-serving style of historicism that’s come to dominate left-liberal analysis. Much like the assertion that pre-colonial Africans and Indigenous Americans just so happened to share the exact same gender politics as a twenty-first century Sarah Lawrence graduate, there’s very little evidence that these structures actually were dominated by overbearing dames. And even if there did exist a preponderance of such evidence, any educated person whose brain has not yet been rotted by culture war would acknowledge that the semi-matriarchal communities of 200+ years ago would not have come with the same gendered associations held by those of us who obsess over such matters in contemporary western nations. But I digress…
Lomez continues by pointing out the growing achievement gap between men and women in these United States. Ladies are living longer and graduating college much more frequently. Outside of STEM and professional sports—areas in which achievement is at least hypothetically measured by set, objective standards—the good-paying jobs that still exist in this country are those suited to stereotypically feminine skillsets. He shares the staggering fact that women make up nearly three-quarters of persons employed in Human Resource offices. I must admit, this is something that deserves deep and genuine analysis. Lomez suggests, quite plausibly, that this is sign that the comportment standards of white collar employment—which, more often than not, is very minimally concerned with achievement or competence or even the necessity of the positions filled—must therefore align heavily with feminine preferences.
From there, Lomez engages briefly with the gender analyses of Richard Hanania and Johnathan Haidt, suggesting there exists a fundamental split between how societies are organized—and especially how conflicts are initiated and adjudicated—in structures run by men vs. those run by women. This assertion would have gravely pissed off feminists and even the most run-of-the-mill liberals as recently as 2010. But, again, it’s now a perverse inversion of prevailing left-identitarian arguments. Most self-described feminists would now agree that of course there’s a fundamental difference in how men and women perceive the world. Many would go so far as to suggest these perceptual differences matter far more to determining one’s gender (or even sex) than biological realities. Their only argument with Lomez would be that he’s romanticizing the governing style of the wrong side of the split.
Per Lomez:
Jonathan Haidt explains that privileging female strategies does not eliminate conflict. Rather it yields “a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is a greater tendency to respond to an offense by mobilizing social resources to ostracize the alleged offender.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of free speech and the tenor of our public discourse where consensus and the prohibition on “offense” and “harm” take precedence over truth. To claim that a biological man is a man, even in the context of a joke, cannot be tolerated. Instead, our speech norms demand “affirmation.” We are expected to indulge with theatrical zealotry the preferences, however bizarre, of the never-ending scroll of victim groups whose pathologies are above criticism. (Note well, however, that the “marginalized” aren’t necessarily at home in the Longhouse, as evidenced whenever non-white leftist women decry the manipulative power of “white women’s tears.”) Further, these speech norms are enforced through punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups––social isolation, reputational harm, indirect and hidden force. To be “canceled” is to feel the whip of the Longhouse masters.
And, uhh, I mean he’s not wrong about anything here. Both the fringe and mainstream left have absolutely abandoned free speech as a foundational principle, and they’ve largely (if cynically) done so by prioritizing the abstract “safety” of people folx who would wither and die become unalived if they were exposed to a bad word or an incorrect opinion. Only a rank liar or someone who’s spent the last 15 years in a coma prolonged non-conscious medical state would disagree with this. You don’t get to pressure medical organizations into calling vulvas “front holes” and deny that some serious, insane bullshit has been going on.
If you live, work, or otherwise associate with people who exist on the left, you’ve no doubt experienced something along these lines. Perhaps what was supposed to be an earnest discussion of some municipal or workplace issue was overrun by pronoun announcements and points of personal privilege. Maybe an essential meeting was derailed by claims that not enough people of certain identity markings were “being centered,” and then, once a call was made to center the concerns of such people, you experienced the shrill caterwauls of being accused of forcing the vulnerable to do any kind of work. If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to left-liberal politics since 2015, you have absolutely seen the valid concerns and arguments of people being dismissed with prejudice because they emanated from human beings who were deemed too white, too male, or not trans enough—and you’ve no doubt experienced the opposite, where the dull or counterproductive or even incredibly evil musings of some mutant were treated with the utmost respect, because they came from a person possessing a virtuous skin color, genital configuration, or perversion.
The only way to deny this is to embrace a vulgar inversion of the exact variety of identity essentialism proffered by Lomez. If this essay of mine somehow gets enough views, my detractors will no doubt discuss it in such terms: the so-called “dysfunctions” I’m describing are actually the materialization of long-overdue progress; a desire for so-called “order” or “decency” is nothing more than an atavistic fetish for whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, etc.
So… here’s my conclusion: the “longhouse” does exist, and it could potentially serve as a useful analytical mechanism. But it would be much more properly understood as a symptom and perpetuation mechanism of dysfunctions, rather than a root cause. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s not necessarily feminine in nature—the abstract application of a sense of femininity to its dictates is merely a means of making its reactionary and stifling nature palatable to the identity-obsessed liberals who control our cultures and politics.
The least charitable reading of The Longhouse is that it's a vulgar inversion of left-liberal identity politics: one side attributes dysfunction to the presence of whites and men, the other says it's because systems have been feminized. This simply does not work in any material sense. But I do not feel that an honest observer cannot say there’s nothing to the concept. If anything, its popularity among relatively conscientious “new right” figures can be explained by the fact that most of our social and political systems are so obviously and proudly broken that it’s fair to assume that their decayed states are the result of some nefarious plan: the intentional destruction of everything that made society tolerable, the inevitable result of seeking to burn everything down because you cannot stand to admit to the accomplishments of those who came before you.
So, yes, there’s something there. But everyone—left and right—should be advised to avoid understanding this something in the vulgar identity terms proffered by the hideous morons who presently control our discourses. You cannot fairly say that the horrors of a financialized economy or perpetual militarization are due to the inherent femininity of these structures. You can, however, say that identity politics have been cynically deployed to prevent all inroads to reforming these structures.
You can also say that the rules of engagement of left-identity politics now apply to all forms of public discourse, and have begun capturing most professional and political institutions. But is any of this inherently feminine? No. Absolutely not.