Slurring The Trads

One of my self-imposed obligations as a blogger that frequently comments on culture is to share, whenever I encounter them, new buzzwords or phrases. Those who consider themselves on the cutting edge of cultural discourse, either as influencers or sharers, have shown a remarkable propensity for rebranding their old and stale ideas with catchy new terms. The message, one echoed in recent plaints by our Commander-in-Chief over the public's persistent pessimism about the economy, is that marketing is key to the success of progressive ideas and actions.

They're not wrong.

Trendy terms work. In many ways. They signal to the like-minded that you're "of them," they stand you out from the so-last-week crowd, and they convince you that you're on the right side of history.

Especially since many of them are derogatory in nature.

The most recent, to me at least, is "trad."

As in "traditional." A stand-in for "conservative," I first saw it in reference to reported increases in the number of younger women who sought more old-school relationships with men. As in "tradwife." Per Wikipedia:

[T]ypically denotes a woman who believes in and practices traditional sex roles and marriages.

Feminists are, of course, outraged, because they think that choosing (yes, choosing - free will, no coercion, pursue your own happiness) something other than what the current-generation feminism guidebook calls for is a betrayal of the cause.

I won't delve too deeply into the tradwife movement here - you can read about it at the hyperlinked Wikipedia page, or just search the Internet. What blog-spired today was the use of "trad" in a snippet about raw milk:

[R]aw milk, which is now trad- or conservative-coded.

Above, I noted that many of the Left's neologisms are intended to be derogatory in nature, and trad certainly fits that description. Trad rejects the Left's narrative. Tradwives don't embrace the "do it all myself, don't need men for anything" message and rejection of gender norms at the heart of fourth-wave feminism. Raw milk rejects regulation, gives (as noted in Politico) “a giant middle-finger to the experts,” and harkens back to an older era of American individualism. All this now makes it "alt-right," with those good, progressive-minded folks who are all about organic and non-GMO hypocritically eschewing nature in this instance.

The specter of oppression is intended to haunt "trad" with sinister suggestions of barefoot-and-pregnant-in-the-kitchen or Handmaid's Tale religious theocracy.

This all misses the point. Trad, today, is a choice, not a coercion. That the people who scream "my body my choice" are unhappy with people choosing trad reveals a hidden truth - they don't believe in your right to make the "wrong" choices.

I covered the right to be wrong here, and I discussed how "choice," for the Left, is a very narrowly-bounded "freedom" here.

Being trad is similarly not something the Wokefolx are willing to allow without ostracism. Proving, yet again, that they don't actually care about their fellow citizens' rights and liberties. You and I are only of interest to them when we conform, because conformity bolsters their numbers and reinforces their power.

They picked the wrong nation in which to build their homogeneous, NPC utopia. Americans are an ornery bunch.