Based Camp： Tradwives are a Progressive Conspiracy
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
186.2383
Summary
In this episode, we discuss the rise of the corporate family, a social experiment that was popular in the 1950s and 60s, and the impact it had on the way families were organized and lived. We talk about how corporate families replaced the traditional family structure, and why this is such a big deal.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
this psyops campaign around trad wives. It's a fun aesthetic. And yes, it was a model that
00:00:07.020
was popular within certain classes of American society around the 1950s, but it was in the 1950s,
00:00:13.320
a fairly new, and it turns out short-lived social experiment. And that you're not actually going
00:00:20.120
back to any sort of a traditional model of family whenever you're atomizing the family.
00:00:25.780
Yeah. Well, and it's, it sounds to me like you're describing it also as the first step
00:00:31.920
in the atomization of everyone. Like first you separate out the corporate family into the nuclear
00:00:38.420
family, and then you just separate out the man and the woman. You just pick them off one by one.
00:00:43.340
We've gotten to a point where no one's even that incentivized to get married.
00:00:50.600
Hello, Simone. It's wonderful to be here today. What are we talking about?
00:00:57.360
A trad wife is a woman who attempts to emulate the 1950s ideal of a wife that we now see in sitcoms,
00:01:05.380
where you typically have a family dynamic in which a woman stays at home, takes care of the house in
00:01:13.580
terms of cleaning, in terms of gardening, everything like that, and child rearing. And the husband then
00:01:19.860
leaves the house to go to an office and be a breadwinner for the family.
00:01:25.320
This, of course, is a progressive scam. And let's talk about what I mean by it being a progressive
00:01:32.800
scam, because I think a lot of people can hear that. And they're like, no, this is definitely the
00:01:37.560
way things used to be. And they are right. For a specific, very constrained geographic group,
00:01:44.640
it was a common way of living. Specifically, upper middle class to upper class Americans
00:01:52.620
from the 1920s to the 1930s to the 1970s to maybe the 1980s. So you're really dealing with a half
00:02:03.740
century period where this was common. And really only in the Americas at any sort of large level.
00:02:10.260
And the reason, so first, let's talk about why this was even possible in America.
00:02:16.620
During the economic wealth that came with the War II period in America, specifically,
00:02:23.200
America was just in a uniquely wealthy state vis-a-vis the rest of the world,
00:02:27.620
because most of the developed world had just had all their infrastructure basically destroyed and
00:02:31.440
was rebuilding themselves up again. And America had done a number of things during that period that
00:02:36.060
put it in a really good economic position, which means you could afford to have families living off
00:02:42.360
of one person's salary, even though this was not the traditional way of doing things. The traditional
00:02:47.480
way, so before the 1920s, the common marriage style, especially if you go before the 1880s,
00:02:54.520
right? So if you expand this time window a little bit, it was something like 80% of Americans were in
00:02:59.220
what is called the corporate marriage structure, which is very-
00:03:03.060
Corporate family. Yeah. Corporate family, which is very different from a nuclear family.
00:03:06.680
So how would you describe a corporate family, Simone?
00:03:09.740
A corporate family is typically a husband, wife, their children, and an extended family and employee
00:03:16.200
network. So in terms of the archetype of the corporate family in modern media-
00:03:21.860
Yeah. Well, it runs some kind of business. Like they're all maybe working on a farm or a brewery or
00:03:26.460
a garment manufacturing business. It's basically a cottage industry business, a from-home business.
00:03:33.060
Everyone works on collectively, meaning that the kids are helping out probably as soon as they're
00:03:37.160
old enough. There are aunts and uncles that are involved. In fact, the very house from which we
00:03:41.780
are filming this podcast in different rooms was for five generations occupied by what could be
00:03:46.680
described as a corporate family. And we've met the family, like the youngest generation of that
00:03:51.780
family that used to live here. And they described the various types of people who lived here. And it was
00:03:56.700
always multiple generations. There would be a grandmother and grandfather living in the house,
00:04:02.040
or just one surviving grandmother. There would be aunts, often maiden aunts, who would also be
00:04:06.400
watching kids. There would be kids. And there would be additional, the occasional additional farmhand
00:04:13.500
And live with the family. So the employees of these types of businesses were incorporated into
00:04:19.580
Well, they were still employees though. So I think a really interesting and unexpected
00:04:23.180
place where you can see this play out is with the Addams family. Lurch is their butler, is an
00:04:28.960
employee of the family, but he's still very much a part of the family. He's not clearly treated like
00:04:33.680
staff in the show. And you can see that very clearly.
00:04:37.620
Yeah. And I think that the reason why the Addams family chose to show that is because the family,
00:04:41.960
actually the house, the old Victorian style house that they were in was supposed to be considered
00:04:50.500
And out of date. Yeah. Just like the corporate family model.
00:04:53.660
During the time that the cartoon strip had come out, the original cartoon strip,
00:04:57.720
those Victorians, we now see them as spooky mansions, in part influenced largely by the Addams family,
00:05:02.920
but they were really just supposed to be like terribly out of touch with the current times.
00:05:07.940
To the extent that what was horrifying about them is that they did not bend the knee to current social
00:05:16.840
mores. Oh, you don't send your kids out to school? Oh, the husband doesn't go out and get a job? Oh,
00:05:23.840
No, the husband works from home and helps raise the kids and has a loving relationship. Those things
00:05:28.720
within the Addams family were actually supposed to partially be what made them horrifying because they
00:05:34.080
so deviated from the social norms of the time. And I think that this is one of the disservices that
00:05:40.400
the current Addams family does with the family is what made the Munsters an interesting family is
00:05:45.600
they were supposed to- You mean the Addams family?
00:05:49.360
What made the Munsters an interesting family is that they were a family of monsters trying to live
00:05:56.340
like the average American family of the time. What made the Addams family horrifying is that they
00:06:02.700
were totally normal humans who lived so deviantly from traditional social values that it made them
00:06:12.060
monstrous and fit in among monsters. So what I think that shows you is how much society turned against
00:06:19.940
the model of the corporate family as soon as, in the 1920s, this is when it really became common,
00:06:24.560
which was wage labor. Wage labor where males could leave their houses and the ending of the
00:06:30.480
nuclear family happened when female wage labor started. So really it was a model that was created
00:06:35.120
with the advent of male wage labor with jobs that were prosperous and in a limited geographic region
00:06:42.020
where jobs prosperous to support an entire family on one salary existed. And then it ended with the
00:06:48.340
rise of female wage labor. But the reason I say it's a progressive conspiracy,
00:06:54.560
is because it was very socially forward thinking in its time period. The idea that a man would just
00:07:03.280
abandon his family like that was considered. And if you want to frame this in conservative
00:07:09.600
language, the first foot in the door with the people trying to destroy the traditional American
00:07:17.300
family happened when they got the men out of the house, when they left just the kids and the wife
00:07:26.920
alone, trying to handle this whole scenario without the guy there, that is when everything began to fall
00:07:32.960
apart. That is when the door was opened to the corrupting influences that led to the degradation of
00:07:39.960
the American family. I guess it's easier for outside forces, be it academia or the state or some other
00:07:48.260
influencer to start to own people's ideologies and lives when they become atomized, right?
00:07:53.580
Yeah. Well, they atomize the American family unit and this model was pushed by Hollywood,
00:07:59.140
by the elite. When you look and you say, didn't America used to be like this nuclear family? You're
00:08:05.100
pointing to leave it to beaver, right? Created by the Hollywood establishment. Where do you think
00:08:12.180
these things were coming from? Right? So even if you say it was in a conservative language, which we
00:08:17.380
are conservative, but I think sometimes our audience might not be as conservative as we are. It is in many
00:08:23.720
ways more nefarious than any sort of like dual earner model, which economically, there's just no realistic
00:08:31.700
way to support family without, for the vast majority of Americans, without a dual earner model. These
00:08:36.740
online influencers who are pushing like, oh, your average American can go back to this model of a
00:08:41.640
trad wife where you're surviving off of one income. I don't know where these people are living. You have
00:08:47.000
to be incredibly lucky to have that kind of an income. And even if you are that lucky, you are
00:08:53.940
severely limiting the number of kids you can have through doing that. One of the things that we say
00:08:59.020
that was really positive about COVID is it really unlocked work from home in a major context. Now
00:09:05.520
you're seeing some CEOs react negatively to this. I love it. They never tout out statistics. Like
00:09:10.780
we've actually run statistics at our companies. It's infinite. It's two X better to have somebody
00:09:15.300
working from home in terms of their- If they're an A player, if they are a B or C player, often they
00:09:20.340
become much worse. Right. But with work from home, we can have this model again, to some extent,
00:09:25.780
we can at least have the proliferation of it within the people who desire it from their family. Yes,
00:09:30.420
you might be taking a salary cut, but, you know, getting to spend all day working together
00:09:34.180
and on your various hustles. That is one thing about the gig economy. We talk about the gig economy
00:09:39.060
as if it's this totally new concept, but that's what cottage industries were. They were weird little
00:09:44.720
gig economies. They might not have been selling your tapestries and cakes on Etsy, but you were selling
00:09:51.760
them at the local market. And now we view these markets as like quaint places that traditionally
00:09:57.300
that was the Etsy and the Amazon store of our society. Well, but I think that's, what's really
00:10:01.980
encouraging. The pandemic was devastating and really hard for many people, but it also did,
00:10:07.360
I think, start to bring back the corporate family, bring back couples and families who worked
00:10:14.260
together and have become a little bit more sovereign as a result. And depending on how you look at it,
00:10:20.200
a lot of the way that it's framed in mainstream media is, oh my gosh, these people have to have
00:10:24.920
five jobs to scrape together. But also, oh my God, these people are not dependent on a sole source
00:10:32.520
of income at this point. If one of those shuts them down or something, they have other sources of
00:10:36.780
income. They are more able to raise kids at home. They're more able to have flexible schedules.
00:10:42.940
They are more able to begin building things that they actually own. Yes, people may start by like
00:10:48.720
working for Uber or delivering for HelloFresh or whatever it may be. But over time, we're seeing
00:10:53.960
more and more families create their own businesses, their own consultancies, their own design firms.
00:10:57.560
This is our social networks we're talking about. Yeah.
00:10:59.740
And we do live in sort of small town America. So we're not talking out our butts here. This is
00:11:04.280
definitely something we are seeing in our communities.
00:11:07.440
And this isn't even, so it's both people with like with only high school education and it's also people
00:11:12.120
with MBAs who are literally creating fix-it businesses because they're so lucrative.
00:11:16.280
So I think it's also really interesting in that this is very democratizing. Whereas when you look
00:11:21.780
at breadwinning type careers, that's also one of those things where there's like a lot of elitism,
00:11:27.460
a lot of classism, a lot of like education gatekeeping.
00:11:31.500
Because yeah, they had these systems where they would filter people based on their sort of class
00:11:35.840
status, which to an extent was signaled by the university you got your degree from. And now when
00:11:41.160
you are competing with people, my Stanford MBA doesn't mean a lot if I'm competing with somebody
00:11:45.980
who's just working on a company that they're building out of their home against me, right?
00:11:50.080
Because these home-based businesses succeed based on you having product market fit, you providing a
00:11:55.640
business, be it plumbing, fix-it, consultancy of some sort, whatever it might be, dog walking,
00:12:01.720
I don't care, that people want and need and it's a good service. You know, that does not depend
00:12:06.580
on your credentials. That depends on your ability to deliver and your ability to meet genuine demand.
00:12:12.400
And that's awesome. So it's really cool to see that we're moving away from atomization.
00:12:18.740
It's interesting that I think it's also part of what some might argue are like recessions or
00:12:24.140
civilizational decline, like all this stability that we thought that we had is disappearing.
00:12:29.560
But I think it's also really, people don't realize how unstable it is to have a stable job.
00:12:34.500
When you're your own boss, you can tell when things are getting bad, when you might need to
00:12:39.480
tighten your belt, and you can also have more control over how things go. Whereas when you're
00:12:44.820
working for a big company, you don't have control over how well or poorly it's run. And when you get
00:12:51.640
laid off, you often have no warning, there's no control, and all of your income depends on that
00:12:55.920
This is actually a really interesting thing that happened to us. So a lot of people could say,
00:13:00.500
well, it's really silly that both you and your husband have the same job, basically,
00:13:06.260
Going into the pandemic, we were running a chain of travel agencies, and we had to cut our own
00:13:09.760
salary to nothing for about a one and a half year period. And people could think that would be pretty
00:13:14.880
economically devastating to us. And it could have been, but I guess we just decided, okay, now we're
00:13:20.580
applying for new jobs. So we continue to run our existing company. And people were like, well,
00:13:25.340
we have like hundreds of employees at our company. And the last thing I would do is fire any employee to do
00:13:30.540
an economic downturn before cutting my own salary. And so we kept doing what we were doing in terms
00:13:35.860
of running the company for free, and then took on side hustles to try to pay for things and to
00:13:40.880
maintain our lifestyle. But that was something that we were able to do because we had already built a
00:13:46.760
cadence around working together. So yes, you are more economically vulnerable in a way in that you're
00:13:54.720
working together and your single source of income can fall off. But it does encourage you to build multiple
00:14:00.100
income streams in a way that it's because you're more efficient when you're working with somebody who you
00:14:05.300
really get along with, you can typically squeeze more work out of the two of you with less effort than you can
00:14:11.020
when you're like working on a group project with students you don't really like. And that was always my
00:14:15.320
experience of working in a traditional office. It always felt like working on a group project with people I didn't
00:14:20.260
really like. And so I was incredibly inefficient. But when I was working with people who were family
00:14:24.680
to me, and I think that is why in corporate families, employees get treated more like family
00:14:29.780
is because that is the way that you sort of see your larger corporate unit. So when you're working
00:14:35.060
with people who are like family to you, you can squeeze more productivity out of the same time,
00:14:40.340
which then leads you to take on additional jobs. And working out of the home also allows you to do that.
00:14:46.420
You look at us, we technically run multiple projects, right?
00:14:51.900
But anyway, this is a really long tangent to the point that this psyops campaign around trad wives,
00:14:59.300
it's a fun aesthetic. And yes, it was a model that was popular within certain classes of American
00:15:04.460
society around the 1950s. But it was in the 1950s, a fairly new, and it turns out short lived social
00:15:12.960
experiment. And that you're not actually going back to any sort of a traditional model of family
00:15:23.060
Yeah. Well, and it sounds to me like you're describing it also as the first step in the
00:15:27.940
atomization of everyone. Like, first, you separate out the corporate family into the nuclear family.
00:15:34.940
And then you just separate out the man and the woman.
00:15:38.900
We've gotten to a point where no one's even that incentivized to get married. Rates of sex are
00:15:45.000
plummeting. All sorts of things are shifting. And now we're seeing probably an unprecedented rate
00:15:58.240
I wonder if we do see like more close to some kind of civilizational collapse where
00:16:05.220
unemployment reaches 80%. Do you think that we might actually see
00:16:10.320
oddly a necessity-based return to corporate family-style marriages?
00:16:17.160
I think one of the reasons why people got married a long time ago wasn't because they were seeking
00:16:21.520
sexual or romantic partnership. It was because they needed financial security, that they needed
00:16:28.500
someone to work on a business with, to have that security, kind of like share resources.
00:16:34.920
And I wonder if we're just going to see more of that if we ever hit as a society rougher times,
00:16:41.320
like more people, maybe not even romantically involved in the beginning, but perhaps over time
00:16:46.500
as they sort of grow together and have aligned incentives, forming corporate families and
00:16:51.360
ultimately finding a lot of satisfaction there. Who knows what we could expect?
00:16:54.560
I hope that's the direction we're going. Because I love being in a relationship with
00:16:59.760
you and you. Am I thrilled with... I mean, I do want to proselytize this marriage structure
00:17:06.460
because I think it works very effectively for the other families we know who have adopted
00:17:10.940
it. And it is increasing. And so I think a lot of young people, when we talk to young
00:17:16.060
men, a lot of them feel like they just, they don't have a shot because it is a lot on a young
00:17:20.280
man to say, go out there and earn everything for family. And that's the only way-
00:17:23.660
It feels unfair. It would breed resentment. Here's the thing. When a couple doesn't work
00:17:26.980
together, the man who's busting his ass all day working is going to come home and see
00:17:33.180
that his wife was just home all day. I don't know, like cleaning a little bit. It seems really
00:17:39.060
easy. Right. And then the wife is, hold on. Like I've been vomited on by an infant. The like
00:17:45.500
this huge mess was made. I'm bored. I'm not intellectually stimulated. So like she's stressed out.
00:17:51.020
She's not happy. She's actually working pretty hard. And then she is not appreciating the hard
00:17:56.760
work that her husband's doing. He's off at the office. He's off doing fun business meetings.
00:18:00.800
It creates a lot of resentment on both sides because they don't under the, each partner
00:18:05.480
doesn't understand each other, doesn't appreciate the other's work and also feels underappreciated.
00:18:12.620
I couldn't agree more. And I appreciate you, Simone.
00:18:17.900
But I appreciate you because I know the work you're doing. It's exactly the work I do. Like
00:18:20.840
the only big division of labor we have is you take kids before like one and a half. I take kids after
00:18:27.180
And that's true. We actually, so I think, and this is not to say that corporate families
00:18:32.180
are these communes where everyone does exactly the same thing. It's different percentages.
00:18:41.140
You handle the gardening, you fix everything. I, I clean everything inside the house. I typically
00:18:48.060
do most of the group or family cooking. I put away the dishes, et cetera.
00:18:52.240
And there's times a day where I'm almost always looking after the kids. And there's times a day
00:18:54.920
where you're looking after the kids, but always when the kids before like one, you're looking
00:18:59.520
Yeah. I have the really little ones and you have the bigger ones. They sort of apprentice under
00:19:02.820
you and they sort of get carried around by me all the time. So yeah, I mean, I think
00:19:07.140
that there, that to say that a corporate family is not trad in many ways is incorrect because
00:19:14.400
there is still tons of gender dimorphism. There are still tons of like tradition, traditional
00:19:19.560
emphasize that you shouldn't do a corporate family just because it's trad.
00:19:25.060
Oh yeah. Well, you shouldn't do anything just because it's trad.
00:19:27.480
Yeah. Yeah. You can look to traditional things for different social models that at one point
00:19:32.400
worked and that may work again, but doing something just because of the way it used to be done
00:19:39.380
can be a really bad model for how to live your life. But also I think broadly, we can all
00:19:46.060
agree that like whatever society is doing right now, isn't working.
00:19:49.660
Yeah. I'm just saying it's not Star Trek, you know, like.
00:19:52.780
No, but what I mean is it's just not working. I didn't say it's not working. You can look
00:19:56.260
to the past for some ways to fix it, but you likely want to tweak them to fit within a modern
00:20:00.220
social context and within your personal, social, and economic context. I love you. We do need
00:20:05.460
to get to the next podcast and we're not going to squeeze it in.
00:20:07.960
I love you so much, Malcolm. Looking forward to talking again.