The Incoherence Of Wifeguy Radicalism

Bourgeois domesticity is fine, but it isn't a revolution against the system

The Right has fallen in love with an Apple ad. The left-leaning tech giant’s latest commercial celebrates a nice white family in which a deaf dad watches his daughter grow up and learn how to play a guitar. Upon watching his teenage girl unwrap a guitar at Christmas, the dad puts in air pods that allows him to hear his daughter play music. It’s a nice, inoffensive ad. But to many conservatives, it represents a revolution.

In their eyes, this Apple ad isn’t simply trying to sell a product. It’s marketing conservative family values to the entire country. Right-wing influencers–both mainstream and dissident–took this as a major victory. This was a strange take. Plenty of corporate ads feature nice happy families, even though an all-white family is less common than before. An advertisement with a straight white family is a low bar for political victory. It’s especially weird considering it comes from Apple, which has aggressively pushed wokeness for many years. One ad ahead of the country’s biggest shopping season shouldn’t wipe away the tech giant’s many years championing DEI and censorship.

The ad’s ecstatic reception, along with the fawning over the “wifejak” meme, exemplifies the Right’s attempt to portray middle-class domesticity as both an act of rebellion and a sign of feral masculinity. Conservatives have always sought to uphold this principle, but in more appropriate terms for what it entails. National Review did not paint responsible dads as dangerous barbarians. The Dissident Right tries to differentiate itself from the old conservatism and to satisfy the longings of its audience. It’s way cooler for a guy to see himself as a bold rebel than as “Mr. Mom.” Thus, we get the rebellious image of bourgeois domesticity.

Families should be celebrated, and responsible dads deserve praise. But they are not warriors re-enacting the Iliad when they go Christmas shopping, nor is the regime going to arrest them for firing up the grill at the family barbecue. Placing middle-class domesticity at the center of your politics makes one a normal conservative, not a dangerous extremist. Accepting this would change how the Dissident Right perceives itself. Instead of a radical alternative to conservatism, the DR would stand as a more internet-literate version of conservatism.

Influencer Benny Johnson exemplifies this“radical wifeguyism.” In a recent post, he declared:

Be a rebel:

- Get married

- Start a family

- Pass on your values

- Save culture

This is how we win.

It’s fine to celebrate family life, but it’s hard to see what this is rebelling against. The federal government and most corporations offer generous benefits to workers who have kids, including lengthy maternity/paternity leaves. Democrats endorse these policies. Advertising always showcases families, even during the era of peak woke. Some of those families would’ve been gay or mixed-race, of course. But the latter point wouldn’t bother some of the radical wifeguys as they have a non-white wife and/or don’t see a racial component in their ideology. Family, regardless of color or creed drives their self-conception. It’s not important to produce white children, in contrast to ethnonationalists.

Many conservatives believe the “regime” is avowedly anti-family. This isn’t quite the case, at least depending on what it means to be anti-family. The Left pushes certain items such as gay marriage that do upend traditional family values. But most liberals aren’t bothered by normal families. Many of them are married to a person of the opposite sex and have kids they care about. Fringe elements on the Left, such as some climate alarmists and feminist spinsters, hate kids, But this is a message Democrats do not promote themselves and it’s kept to the margins. They tell cat ladies that their choice is ok, but they still push for greater maternity benefits. If they were persecuting families as imagined in the right-wing imagination, liberals wouldn’t cheer on expanded parental leave.

Rather than defying the system, having a family is just less frequent among young adults compared to the past. It can almost seem like some kind of statement to have kids in our age. But it’s still not a political act. It’s just something you do.

The push to make fatherhood seem edgy and dangerous seems logical. The Right wants to encourage more family formation. Maybe pretending it’s guerrilla warfare against libtards sells this vision to men. But, as I’ve written in the past, marriage decline isn’t due to men not “stepping up.” Even if young men were convinced marriage makes them one of Achilles’s Myrmidions, it wouldn’t solve the increasing education and income gap between young men and young women.

This is less about convincing young men to marry and more about extolling the men already married. The Online Right’s audience is older than it was in the past, yet it still wants to feel young. Many of its middle-aged adherents are bored, but not too unhappy, with domesticity. They don’t want to revolt against it–they just want some more excitement. Presenting this lifestyle as a radical adventure makes sense in this context.

Celebrating families is good, but can lead to ridiculousness. I’ve seen many ludicrous posts about family men fantasizing about doing civil war activities in between picking up the kids from tee ball practice and shopping for groceries. Like much of the online sphere, this is just people daydreaming about fantasy scenarios to escape the mundanity of ordinary life. It’s harmless if not taken seriously. Sadly, these posts are often taken seriously. Much of our side wants to believe that they are warriors in the great crusade against libtardism. But family life has other ideas.

The Online Right’s preferred masculinity, at least according to its rhetoric, is not that of the responsible, yet dull family man. It’s that of the Homeric hero, the Western gunslinger, and the knight-errant. The conflict between these two masculinities is represented in the Western The Magnificent Seven. The peasants living at the mercy of Mexican bandits exemplify male domesticity. They are good, honest men who deeply care about their children and strive to put food on the table. At the same time, they’re risk averse and lack the capacity for violence to defeat the bandits on their own. They turn to gunslingers, who lack a home and a family. The gunmen demonstrate a hard masculinity in their mastery of violence and devotion to honor. But their lifestyle, as many of them lament, prevents them from having a family. The wifeguy enthusiasts imagine that they are the gunslingers when they are the villagers.

Civilization depends on men like the villagers to function and prosper. It’s just not that inspiring of an ideal nor does it make for great stories. However, it is good and necessary/ The villagers’ own sons complain about their fathers’ inferior masculinity to the gunslingers in The Magnificent Seven. This draws a rebuke from their heroes, who see the virtue in the peasants’ stable lifestyle. We live in a much safer society than that of the film’s villagers, so we really don’t have to deal with these issues; it's merely interesting to note the dichotomy between the two masculinities.

Marriage and kids makes people, especially women, more conservative. This is one of the many reasons it is a good thing. But the key word here is “conservative,” not right-wing radical. Being a responsible dad means you need to maintain a good income and good social reputation. Your primary duty is taking care of your kids and ensuring they have a stable home. Right-wing radicalism can threaten this. It can cost your job and your good name. It’s also likely to piss off your wife. I know of several divorces following doxes. Women, even very “based” women, don’t want their peers to think they married a “racist.” They also don’t want to lose the financial support for the kids. The last thing in the world a wife will sign off on is their husband getting into a gun battle with federal agents on the way to pick up the Christmas tree.

Middle-class domesticity gives women tremendous power to “moderate” their men.

Parents still care about important stuff. Thousands of parents across the country protested Critical Race Theory, gender insanity, and lunatic COVID mandates in schools. They will vote for tough-on-crime policies that make their communities safer. They will oppose Section 8 housing and other liberal experiments in their area.

However, they’re not open to radicalism. They don’t want the regime to crumble and witness gun battles in their neighborhoods. They want order and stability. They don’t want to upend everything–they simply want a few changes here and there. It’s a conservatism of a limited, practical vision. These people don’t care about how everything went wrong after 1945, 1789, or 1688. They don’t want to hear about how liberal democracy is inherently bad and we need the Habsburgs to rule. Most aren’t bothered by demographic change and wince at the mention of “white identity.” (They know any racial consciousness will jeopardize their social position.) They just want fewer taxes, cheaper groceries, relatively safe streets, and nice vacations. They’re not ones to long for grand visions. That stuff sounds weird around the office cooler.

Mainstream conservatives, who solely focus on electoral politics, understandably embrace middle-class domesticity as the highest aspiration. But it doesn’t make much sense for the Dissident Right, which is not dedicated to campaign work. It’s a loose intellectual movement supposedly focused on big ideas and civilizational trends. Its aspirations and principles are outside the confines of mainstream Americans. Few within the DR believe in “live and let live” and are inspired by the dreams of middle-class normies. The DR proclaims itself as radical and edgy, not as moderate and safe. Its politics is not about securing a comfortable retirement at a country club. It strives for higher goals that give meaning and community to its adherents.

Jünger, Nietzsche, and Mishima and other authors popular among the DR were extremely hostile to middle-class domesticity. Their romantic idealism did not end with white, hetero visibility in advertising. Their radical alternative to normiedom is what drew many people into right-wing politics, not wifejak memes about singing the “Wheels on the Bus” in the family car.

Embracing middle-class domesticity makes the DR more conservative and less radical. If normie family life is at the core of DR politics, its politics would adjust itself to its new constituency. This constituency doesn’t want radicalism–these folks simply want to be left alone to raise their kids.

If that’s what people desire, they should be honest about it. It would only require them to stop pretending they’re members of a Minivan Männerbund and accept they are the online arm of conservatism.