I am currently, for some reason, reading Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Kobes De Muz. Her whole premise is that White male evangelical masculinity, typified by John Wayne, and now emblemized by the Donald, is the source of all the evil we see in the American West. I am also, alongside her book, reading Stuart Jeffries’ stellar book: Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. Jeffries, in a very well-written way, is describing the histories of the German dudes who developed what we call, today: Critical Theory. I just came across a passage that summarizes De Muz’s whole book quite well:

As an adult, Fromm became steeped in the work of the nineteenth-century Swiss Lutheran jurist Johann Jacob Bachofen, whose 1861 book Mother Right and the Origins of Religion provided the first challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy that patriarchal society represented a natural state of affairs and thereby validated capitalism, oppression and male hegemony, as Fromm’s biographer Lawrence Freidman argues. Reading Bachofen also encouraged Fromm to reflect that the mother-child bond was the root of social life and that in a matriarchal society there was no strife, conflict or even private property, reflections that were decisive for his developing socialist humanism. In Bachofen’s description of matriarchal societies they functioned as what Fromm called ‘primitive socialist democracies’, in which sociability, generosity, tenderness, religiosity and egalitarianism prevailed.[1]

This is the ethos that De Muz is attempting to promote, as the alternative to what she would like to deconstruct: i.e. White [evangelical] patriarchy. This is the ‘positive’ side of critical theory. It has identified the negative side that requires deconstruction as: White patriarchal society, given greatest expression in Western Capitalism. Once it’s ‘all burned down,’ the prescription, according to De Muz, and other critical theorists (like Antifa, BLM et al.), once we get through the revolutionary stage, is to rebuild the global society based upon a matriarchal model wherein equality and equity rules and reigns supreme; a society ruled by the vagina rather than the penis, to put it starkly. Somehow, this sort of re-normed society breeds equality for all, and a utopia the world can finally thrive in. It is, as Fromm would have hoped for, a socialist immanentized eschaton wherein all is beautiful and good. But we have to get through the birth pangs first; you know: burning down cities, livelihoods, lives, so on and so forth. Then mama bear will come in and fix it all. Be warmed and filled.

[1] Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London/New York: Verso, 2017), 50.