Trailer Park Chic

The Right shouldn't idolize downscale dysfunction

Ever since Donald Trump won in 2016, prominent commentators have cast the Right as the voice for the working class. The “New Right” obsesses over the assumption that conservatism is now synonymous with the working class and the movement must change to reflect this.

There has been a benefit to the Right’s working class fixation. It’s made rightists less enthralled to free market dogma and more concerned with nationalist issues. At the same time, it has produced a fair amount of cringe. It’s persuaded some conservatives to adopt a pseudo-Marxism, and it’s made others become firmly anti-middle class (despite being middle class themselves). 

But what might be the most pervasive cringe element may be the celebration of working class dysfunction as noble behavior. They’ll see behavior commonly associated with a magical demographic, but conclude it’s “based” if exhibited by a white prole. This phenomenon is Trailer Park Chic. The Left’s Radical Chic makes them fawn over non-white militants, regardless of their faults. Those militants are revolutionary heroes in their eyes. The Right’s trailer park chic just makes conservatives pedestal poverty as superior to middle class living. Their heroes don’t even need to be conservative–they just need to be poor and demonstrate “anti-bugmen” behavior.

A viral clip drew out the trailer park chic within our sphere this week. A RW account shared a video of a young mother of four making food for her kids in a mobile home. The video attracted the attention of mainstream Right figures like Matt Walsh and several dissident right accounts. The majority agreed this woman was awesome and a model for all women. People saw in her as the manifestation of the Anglo-Celt race, a salt-of-the-earth pioneer, a trad queen and a defender of home and hearth. Some even recommended that people should move into a trailer park to find a trad woman just like this young lady.

This was a lot of hyperbole over a mom just making food. 

Eventually, reality intervened and undermined the frontier matron perception. In other TikToks, the young lady revealed she allegedly does OnlyFans, identifies as a sex worker, celebrates her abortion, proudly boasts she will never baptize her kids, brags about smoking weed, and shows off her body count in pics with her kids. It’s unclear if her kids are all with the same man, but it doesn’t seem a father is around. Needless to say, she doesn’t meet the typical definition of trad. Yet, many right-wingers persisted in defending her as an ideal woman.

This social media moment resembles the hoopla over Waffle House Wendy a few months ago. Wendy was a Waffle House employee who brawled with some angry black customers at her workplace. The video of the fight was entertaining, but nothing more than that. Some right-wingers saw it as something much bigger and more important. They saw Wendy as a valkyrie doing battle against the forces of darkness. They saw a heroine to lionize and philosophize over.

Unfortunately, the real Wendy wasn’t a white warrior queen. She speaks in Ebonics (or AAVE, as it’s now called), loves smoking weed on the job, sports noticeable tattoos, and had a kid out of wedlock with a black man. When people pointed out these traits, many white knights galloped to defend her honor. The “Swedish” writer Malcolm Kyeyune denounced those who would shake their heads at this as bourgeois bugmen. Kyeyune saw Wendy as a great avatar of the American working class and an exemplar of Cajun identity. 

It should be noted that neither the Trailer Park Mom nor Waffle House Wendy sought this status. Neither one is a right-winger (especially the trailer park tiktoker). They’re just random people who were in viral videos. They’re just being who they are. 

But there is at least one person who embodies downscale chic and chooses to be a conservative leader. That person is none other than Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. Boebert has a complicated private life. In just a few months, she proudly announced she was a grandma at age 36 (her teen son had no plans to marry the baby’s mother), filed for divorce from her husband, and was accused of trying to seduce a married man with money and gifts. These latest events, along with her long list of gaffes and strange behavior, create the impression of someone who may not be the best representative of conservatism. However, none of this has diminished her standing among the Right. Some have even celebrated the fact she’s now a grandma. Apparently, teen pregnancy outside of marriage is now BASED. 

Life happens and people should make the best of the situation. It was wrong for liberals to mock Boebert for her complicated life. But that doesn’t mean conservatives should encourage more single teen moms. Conservatives are supposed to want responsible people to have children within marriage. It’s why Sarah Palin pushed for her then-teenage daughter to marry the father of her child when she was John McCain’s running mate. Palin recognized it looked bad for conservatives to celebrate a teen pregnancy outside of marriage. 

That was then. This is now. 

Boebert is currently in a cat fight with Marjorie Taylor Greene over dueling impeachment articles. Greene, an oddball herself, declared to the media she called her rival Republican a “little bitch” on the House floor. As conservatism becomes the ideology of downward mobility, its political feuds resemble The Jerry Springer Show.

Working class whites are constantly attacked by the media for being backward rubes and evil bigots. They’re one of the few groups you can demonize and caricature in our politically correct society. Conservatives are right to defend them against the smears of the Left. But that doesn’t mean we should pretend they’re not without problems or that their vices are actually virtues. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign won over this demographic by being honest about their problems. Globalism had taken their jobs away, the opioid epidemic had taken their young away, and mass immigration had taken their country away. There were no paeans to the nobility of trailer parks or neck tattoos. Trump promised to restore the old America where working class life was much better and healthier.

This sentiment was backed by Charles Murray’s 2011 work Coming Apart, which documented the horrible decline of the white working class. Drug abuse, broken families, evaporated community life, declining religiosity, and poor economic prospects were all covered by the book. Murray showed that working class white pathologies were beginning to resemble that of the inner city. There was nothing to celebrate in that book. Further evidence to this grim picture was added by mounting reports of the ravages of the opioid epidemic, as well as the disturbing study showing the high rate of deaths of despair among middle aged, working class whites. Life was so bad for these folks that they were literally drinking themselves to an early grave.

The Right has supplanted reality with a rosy view of downscale life in America. Right-wingers now encourage people to join the downscale by not going to college and moving to a rural area. Blue collar life is either depicted as a 1950s fantasy that no longer exists, or the current pathologies are presented as freakin’ AWSUM. The only time the plight of downscale whites is acknowledged is when posters need to predict that a revolution or collapse is just around the corner.

A lot of blue collar folks do have great lives and are perfectly happy with their situation. But those are the ones avoiding the pathologies that hurt the downscale the most. 

Instead of cheering on downward mobility, conservatives should stress the bourgeois values that made America great in the first place. Those values are held in contempt by our current society. It’s why many people dress like shit, sport face tattoos, smoke weed in public, and talk like rappers. Some conservatives, in their desperate bid to pose as working class heroes, celebrate this behavior as superior to bourgeois standards. Those standards are fit only for bugmen–real Americans act “magical.” This leads these same conservatives to demonize the middle class, an idiotic proposal considering the middle class is the core element of the American Right.

We should defend the working class and sympathize with their plight, but we shouldn’t indulge in trailer park chic. It’s as ridiculous as the Left’s radical chic.