Between Fantasy and History
The Family and the Far Right
November 3, 2026
Gender, sexuality and the family are key for global far right politics. As a political formation, the far right gathers its intense , unpredictable energy through appeals to desire, rage, and resentment rather than through policy or economic claims. For this reason, it is in relation to the family—a domain we experience as deeply personal—that the far right’s cultural reach has grown. Crucially, this reactionary political project operates under a conception of family that, when considered against the background of historical reality, is little more than a fantasy. In the past ten years, this fantasy of the family has been organized around a few key commitments: pronatalism, the nuclear family, biological sex, patriarchal regimes of sexual property, and ethnopluralism. These interlocking rhetorics are articulated by fractions of the right in distinctive ways yet they all can be understood as reactions to conjunctural contradictions.
Though they indeed have a certain affective coherence, these rhetorics should not be apprehended as the blueprint for a social order that the far right could implement through a programme of governance. In fact, a liberatory politics of gender and sexuality must reveal the gap between the far right’s fantasy and the historical reality against which it is constructed in order to affirm an alternative horizon of possibility.
As the far right has become committed to its version of familialism, there has been a revival of family abolitionist ideas among Marxist-Feminists. The shared timeline for these divergent projects is instructive: both familialism and family abolition are responses to the diminished conditions for family-making in the twenty-first century. Both are haunted by the memory of the nuclear family. This model—a male breadwinner, an unwaged housewife, home ownership, nuclear procreation—was, of course, always a minority arrangement. It was extended to only a section of the industrial working class, and enacted its stabilizing and legitimizing force on that stratum of working-class life for only a relatively short period of time. Nonetheless, the nuclear family ideal enjoyed some ambient acceptance. Its moral injunctions were felt as commonplace, even by those who lived outside of both its protection and its violence.
Today, however, the decomposition of the family is imbricated with broader shifts in sexuality, gender, and intimate life. Now, households require two incomes, marriage is somewhat optional, home ownership is outside of the reach of many, and the ideological force of heteronormativity has weakened. New habits, orientations, and expectations have emerged as the social prohibition on casual sex for women has waned, dating apps have become ubiquitous, gender transition is on the radar for more people, and experiments with polyamory are on the rise. Equally, as contemporary critics of the family have shown, the private household must bear greater burdens and many more people live alone and are responsible for their own social reproduction with minimal support from the state. Altogether, the capacity to form private households at all is not guaranteed.
While the promise of the family is one of intimacy, comfort, care, and stability, the truculent rhetoric of the far right indicates familialism’s foundational misogyny.
Of course, family abolitionists are conscious of this distinctive historical condition. As Alex Stoffel observes: “Psychoanalysis teaches us that things often become present only as a perceived loss.”1Alex Stoffel, “End of the Rainbow: Sex, Empire and the New Right,” rs21, August 14, 2025, https://revsoc21.uk/2025/08/14/end-of-the-rainbow-sex-empire-and-the-new-right/. Stoffel goes on to argue that while the male breadwinner family now lacks social salience, most proletarians still live in family units, “albeit in reproductive units that resemble the fragmented and extended family relations of the 19th century [rather than] the bourgeois domesticity of the 1960s.”2Stoffel, “End of the Rainbow.” Similarly, Sophie Lewis observes that “the case for family abolition is strengthened, not weakened, by the possibility that the family is a mere bit player in today’s social factory in labor terms.”3Sophie Lewis, “Destroy the Family to Realize Its Promise: Abolition as Care Communization.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 92 no. 4 (2025):1019–42, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sor.2025.a981027. Lewis and Stoffel both note the rise of prisons and detention centers as alternative sites through which nation states organize social reproduction for those cast out of the labor market. But for obvious reasons, the family, even in its more diffuse forms, remains central. Here, however, I want to supplement this analysis by attending to the limits of the family at this historical juncture.
First, given the cultural appeal of the far right and their electoral success, I suggest we need to examine their fantasy of the family and to consider the profound limitations on their ability to realize it, even when in government. The gap between rhetoric and reality offers opportunities for a strategy that deflates the far right’s bombastic claims by subjecting them to scepticism. Second, beyond the family, we must contend with the many worse ways capitalism “solves” the problem of social reproduction. We must turn our gaze beyond the ordinary private household to grasp what has incubated in its shadow. This work is needed not to recuperate the family, but to make tactical assessments of how to respond both to the far right and broader social relations under which it thrives. To assert a liberatory horizon that resonates with present contradictions, we must attend to both the persistent fantasy of the family and the innovations of late capitalism as the family loses its social force.
The Fantasy of Family
Though the far right is preoccupied with forms of real and imagined deviance (gender transition, the sexual abuse of children), they retain a psychic dependence on the nuclear family as the imagined horizon of social organization. Of course, the rhetoric of the family is politically promiscuous, articulated across the political spectrum—socialists are as likely to refer to hardworking families as those in the political center.4Some on the left have gone beyond habitual references to hardworking families and advocate making explicit attempts to raise birthrates. For a useful critique of this dynamic in the US context, see Robin Peterson, “Against Left Pronatalism: Social Democracy Won’t Defeat Capitalism or Patriarchy,” Spectre, March 4, 2025, https://doi.org/10.63478/NCLF3RHY. But a certain extravagant aesthetic of heterosexuality and domestic family life has been developed by the far right through digital media. The digital content of the “manosphere” markets various genres of masculinity, promising power, success and freedom from an imagined “woke” conspiracy against men. While many recognize the manosphere’s claims as warped, ridiculous, or predatory, the rise of gym culture and wellness and a renewed fixation on the body as the site of moral improvement shows the ways in which its preoccupations dovetail with a broader structure of feeling. Similarly, though the tradwife has no real demographic presence and is better understood as a genre of digital content, the appeal of highly stylized videos of women who claim to be tradwives indexes a broader, if inchoate, set of desires. Notably, the influencers of the manosphere rarely live in the nuclear family. Rather, they often have multiple partners and depict themselves as unencumbered by the limitations of familial domesticity.5The 2026 Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere gives some insight into the domestic and sexual arrangements of key manosphere influencers. Adrian Choa, dir., Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, (The Mindhouse Productions, 2026), Netflix. Rather, they endorse family as an essential constraint for society at large, while advocating freedom from all constraint (not least, the family and monogamy) for an elite class of hypermasculine men. Though they endorse “tradition,” war and industrial labor, they perform a carefully constructed and contemporary masculinity organized around consumption, digital platforms, and the pursuit of attention. Similar claims are articulated by manosphere influencers across nations, languages, and genres. In this way, digital mediation generates connective tissue between far-right movements, allowing for certain fixations, motifs and conspiracist logics to become salient across multiple national contexts.
This preoccupation with gender and sexuality as central to the far right is part of a shift towards a more organized and connected global movement. As Stoffel observes, the far right has tempered forms of racial chauvinism—including of the white supremacist kind—with appeals to ethnopluralism: “Ethnopluralism posits that the world consists of multiple, coexisting ethno-cultural regions and advocates for the preservation of the boundaries between them.” The advantage of this pivot is that it allows for far right movements to campaign on the exclusion of migrants while forming allegiances with the far right in the countries from which these migrants come. Of course, there is a long history to such alliance-building, as Paul Gilroy has traced in his analysis of the links Marcus Garvey sought to build with the Klu Klux Clan. All such attempts share an investment in the dream of racial purity. In the historical examples offered by Gilroy, political leaders brokered these hypernationalist allegiances, presenting themselves as immune from the corrupting influence of crossracial contact.6Paul Gilroy, “Black Fascism”’ Transition, no. 81/82 (2000): 70–91, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i357466.
A widescale return to the nuclear family, if such a thing is possible—and I am not persuaded that it is—would require a substantial reconfiguration of labor power, regimes of accumulation, and state welfare.
Ethnopluralism has a central but implicit agenda for sexuality and gender, one in which the family is mobilized as a metonym for the nation and the natural site for the expression and transmission of racial-national identity. Despite its surface egalitarianism, ethnopluralism dovetails with the conspiracy theory of “the great replacement,” which posits that white Europeans will be replaced by fecund and devious migrants unless borders shut and birth rates go up. As such, women’s reproductive capacities are once again vital political concerns, with a pronatalist agenda being articulated across the right. This agenda has gained a new prominence in the United States, where they have branded themselves as “Natalists.” According to Leslie Root, they comprise “an alliance of right-wing racists, misogynists, evangelical Christians, and weird Silicon Valley philosopher-kings.”7Leslie Root, “Non-natalism: A case for being against pronatalism,” Spectre, March 10, 2026.https://doi.org/10.63478/TBJ0GXDG. This alliance is not necessarily coherent, but its shifting ecology is certainly given ballast by the legislative power of Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are the most prominent pronatalists in the Anglophone world. The former has described himself as the “fertilization president”; the latter expresses regular concern about childless cat ladies. This provocative idiom confirms an attempt to subject the domains of intimate life to the same aggressive, bombastic, and spectacular modes of political intervention that the far-right deploys for the racial other. While the promise of the family is one of intimacy, comfort, care, and stability, the truculent rhetoric of the far right indicates familialism’s foundational misogyny.
The Limits of Legislation
The right-wing obsession with proper gender roles, women’s bodies, birth rates and marriage is offered as an attempt to revive the nuclear family. It attempts to capitalize on widespread discontent with the more diffuse social habits that have superseded this order. But the nuclear family form was not the simple result of family as ideology—rather the family was the site of a complex contestation between organized labour, employers, and the state. As M. E O’Brien observes:
Against the functionalism of some Marxist feminist theory, there is little evidence that the male-breadwinner family form was an inevitable outcome of capitalist development, nor that it was engineered and implemented by employers at the end of the nineteenth century. The majority of employers lacked direct control over workers’ nonwork hours, choice of family, or domestic arrangements. The working-class family was not engineered by capitalists to serve their interests.… This family form was a contingent outcome of class struggle.8 M. E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (London: Pluto, 2023), 117, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.3508398.
The wages and welfare that were gained through class struggle, including those that consolidated and generalized the family form, have been subject to a sustained counter attack. As Melinda Cooper notes, the alliance between neoliberals and the new social conservatives has revived the poor-law traditions of social welfare, with biological kin called upon to shoulder the burden of social reproduction and legal penalties for those who attempt to evade this obligation.9Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 68. Further, deindustrialization and austerity have undermined both the material basis of the male breadwinner family and the ability to sustain a private household more generally. Debt now functions as the primary means to resolve this contradiction. A widescale return to the nuclear family, if such a thing is possible—and I am not persuaded that it is—would require a substantial reconfiguration of labor power, regimes of accumulation, and state welfare.
While obstinately ignorant of the mechanisms of working-class power and the social contestations through which the fetishized family form was won for a section of industrial workers, some far right governments (particularly in Europe) have tried to engineer a family-oriented society that imposes higher birth rates, fixed gender roles, and prohibitions on gender nonconformity from above. Contra to Leslie Root’s description of pronatalism as “an attempt to impose an ideology…without significant financial outlay on the part of the state,”in Hungary, Orban put his money where his pronatalist mouth was.10Root, “Non-natalism.” Fidesz legislated family benefits for women that give birth, personal income tax exemptions for families with three or more children, extended paid parental leave, and loans for couples intending to have children. These policies were designed to exclude Roma citizens and other poor racialized minorities, while raising the birth rates among white Hungarians. For a brief period, it appeared his gamble of spending upwards of 5 percent of GDP on profamily policies was paying off, as the fertility rate rose from 1.25 (babies per woman) in 2010 to 1.59 by 2020. His approach helped to cement his key position in a far-right ecology: Orban’s pronatalism was lauded by Giorgia Meloni and Trump cites Orban’s IVF policy as an inspiration for his own intended legislation. But the rise in births was short-lived and Hungary’s fertility rate had fallen back to 1.31 by 2025.11“What one country’s experiment says about attempts to boost birth rates,” BBC, June 16, 2026, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yzdr4ygdno. The initial bounce may simply have mirrored the same ordinary fluctuations seen in comparable economies in this period, such as the Czech Republic. Alternatively, as Eva Fodor (codirector of the Democracy Institute at the Central European University) has argued, the policies might have merely persuaded people intending to have children anyway to do so a little sooner.12“What one country’s experiment.”
In Italy, while Meloni’s rhetoric has been laser-focused on family values, her interventions have failed to stem the birth rate’s decline. In fact, birth rates hit a new low under her presidency, and the number of Italians emigrating has soared.13“Italy’s births set to sink to a new record low in 2025,” Reuters, October 21, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/italys-births-set-sink-new-record-low-2025-2025-10-21/. Indeed, one might wonder if at least a few Italians are leaving precisely because of Meloni’s virulent campaign against queer families. In the United States, the legislative form of pronatalism has been predictably blunt and literal. In late January, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”14“Trump’s transportation head says money for construction projects will flow to communities with high birth rates,” Independent, February 6, 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/sean-duffy-trump-transportation-birth-rates-b2692142.html. As Root observes, however, “most family policy—from child tax credits to paid parental leave to universal preschool—simply does not raise birth rates by much.”15Root, “Non-natalism.” Which is not to say that these interventions don’t do anything: they may well shift everyday life for some, make family life easier, or, perhaps, keep women in situations that they would prefer to leave. They also have an obvious ideological impact, including in their failure. Even when their policies fail to move the needle, the crisis rhetoric that the far right so assiduously exploits can once again be reasserted.
Crucially, however, the far right continues to introduce prohibitive legislation. In office, Meloni has revoked the rights of same sex parents to be named on birth certificates, legislated against surrogacy (even if undertaken abroad), and is introducing a bill to prevent access to gender-affirming care for minors. In the United States, attempts to legislate against gender transition have taken shape in “bathroom bans,” the prevention of gender affirming care, and bans on sex education. The overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022 has curtailed access to safe and legal abortion and over a dozen states have banned it entirely. Nonetheless, far right governments cannot make people conduct themselves according to a fantasy of heterosexual life, whether through tax incentives or threats of incarceration. Of course, they can exact a steep, if unpredictable and uneven, cost to those who find themselves at the sharp end of these legal prohibitions. But while the threat of state sanction may push people to hide their transgressions from the law, this is not enough to reshape a set of social and sexual habits, desires, or practices. This is because none of them derive from law; they flow from life as it is lived within a set of historical circumstances.
The measures needed to discipline society into the far right’s fantasy simply cannot be implemented; the Fordist family was neither the result of a simple exercise in ideological domination nor a clever policy. It was the short-lived outcome of complex struggles.
Despite the story the far right tells, their attempts to legislate gender, sexuality and family life—whether through tax breaks or abortion bans—do not mark a return to an older set of social relations. The terrain is now decisively different. Capital’s power to discipline us into the nuclear family, heterosexuality, or even fixed gender roles has dramatically diminished. On the left, we have often framed this as the result of social movements—of feminism and gay liberation in particular—but we shouldn’t understate the postwar changes to social relations that made this transformation possible. As the late Christopher Chitty observes, “although this ongoing crisis of modern sexual categories may initially have produced a utopian sense that societies were moving beyond rigid binary systems, such celebrations of intransitivity have missed the ways in which gender and sexual flexibility have also been forced upon subjects as a consequence of precarity.”16Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 176. As Chitty implies, crises in production and accumulation are also crises in reproduction, the family, and gender roles. There may well be new freedoms to be found in this iteration of late capitalist social relations, but they are rarely experienced without their own ironic undertow. In the current moment, we must be attentive to new hidden abodes of social reproduction, obscured not by the ideology of bourgeois privacy but by a more naked and unaccountable form of power.
Beyond the Family
a. Border Regimes and Mob Violence
Violent regimes of social reproduction have emerged in the wake of deindustrialisation and austerity. In the aftermath of the Fordist family, we have seen the emergence of regimes that supplement the family (such as market solutions to food, care, and so on) and the expansion of regimes that actively prevent the formation of private households or domestic intimacies (such as prisons). A brief historical contrast drawn from the UK border regime is instructive. In the 1960s, as now, racial antipathies often took shape as fears about sexual transgression, with concerns about migrant workers (especially from South Asia) forging relationships with white women shaping the political landscape. Conservative MP Sir John Smyth warned, “If we do not allow families to come into the country as units we shall have all sorts of trouble with women. The female element is absolutely essential, and the sooner the men here have their wives with them the better I shall be pleased.”17Quoted in Evan Smith and Marinella Marmo, Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control: Subject to Examination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 152, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137280442. Their belief in the stabilizing force of intraethnic marriage persuaded the UK government to issue visas to fiancés and wives, who would act as a mechanism of racial containment. It was assumed racial minorities organized into homogenous nuclear family units would be a viable object of state management, even if demographically more numerous than the single men whose labour was sought.
A much more virulent moral panic about sexual transgression dominates political discourse in Britain today, with a sustained conspiracism that presumes migrant men (in particular Black or Muslim men) are serial sexual predators who prey on white women and children. Neither Labour nor Conservative governments, however, have sought to “contain” single racialized men through the mechanism of the family. In fact, spousal visas are now subject to a minimum earning threshold of at least £29,000 (which is above the median salary for women) and many work and study visas prohibit family migration. Instead, carceral solutions to social reproduction are used to contain migrants, for example those who work in agriculture often live in dormitories, barracks, or caravans. The conditions of these visas, which tie workers to a specific employer, prevent migrants from forming romantic intimacy or establishing any form of domestic privacy. While in their analysis of similar labor camps in South Africa, Danyal Griffiths and Juliana Gleeson argue that these sites function as supplements to the family through the labour discipline they enact, the forms of indenture to which migrant agricultural workers in Britain are subject likely preclude sending remittances to sustain a family, even if that is the initial intention.18K. D. Griffiths and J. J Gleeson [Danyal Griffiths and Juliana Gleeson], “Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for its Abolition,” Ritual, 2015, available at https://www.isr.press/Griffiths_Gleeson_Kinderkommunismus/index.html.
For those awaiting asylum claims, conditions are even more degrading, with migrants forbidden from working while accommodated in repurposed hotels. These function as spaces of what Irene Peano calls “minimally subsidised reproduction,” with cursorily provided food and laundry facilities and heavy restrictions on all social freedoms.19 Irene Peano, “The Camp, the Zone, and Sovereign Sediments: Querying Paradigms Through the Politics of Made-in-Italy Agribusiness Operations,” Anthropological Theory 24, no. 3 (2024) 261, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137280442. These hotels have become sites of far-right obsession and are targeted for harassment, protests, and arson—often catalyzed by the claim that migrants housed in these hotels have been making sexual advances towards young white women.
Instead of the old story that men need wives in order to keep them within their ethnic or racial community, now migrant men are confined to semicarceral spaces and their sexuality is policed by the mob. Within the ethnonationalist vision of the far right, family is a privilege afforded to the native rather than the usurping other. It is nonetheless worth observing this shift in migration policy offers a window into the likely limitations of far-right governance. As discussed in the previous section, there is little evidence that the fantasy of the national family against the racial other persuades people to live their lives in a particular way, even when backed by substantial policy changes; this fantasy incites violence rather than domestic intimacy. Indeed, as Richard Seymour observes, “feel-good pogromism” is central to the appeal and methodology of the contemporary far right, which operates on the basis of discharging resentment through violence.20Richard Seymour, , Disaster Nationalism. (Verso, 2024), 21. Despite its rhetoric, it is the mob, rather than the family, that shapes far right praxis.
b. Household Economies
In a recent essay on Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda Cooper observes that the billionaire class—who have an outsized significance to the contemporary far right—are reviving the household economy through their lavish domestic arrangements, which include long-term, live-in servants (whether drivers, sex workers, cleaners, or legal advisors). The household economy is one that is at odds with the bourgeois family—here, the patriarch will “gladly transgress the conservative taboos against adultery, incest and intergenerational sex because all members of their household have the status of servant, whatever their blood relationship.”21Melinda Cooper, “Epstein Family Values,” Equator, Feburary 14, 2026, https://www.equator.org/articles/epstein-family-values.
Given the violence the far right can mete out, both legislatively and through pogromist violence on the streets, their inability to engineer society to meet its fantasy is not necessarily a source of hope. Their defeat is not our victory. But there are opportunities to be found in carefully attending to the conjuncture as we find it.
As the multimillionaire class grows, this form of organizing social reproduction in the Global North may be more representative of changing social relations than at first appears. As Cooper notes, ‘While the nuclear family posits an ideal separation between home and market, personal and work life, master and servant laws assume a complete fusion between the two spheres.’22Cooper, “Epstein Family Values.” It is not merely that the market enters the home, but that the terms, rhythms, and methods of distributing access to the means of life are transformed. Moreover, given that the household economy is present anywhere domestic service is commonplace, it would be wise to also attend to similar arrangements in the Global South. This is particularly the true in the case of India where caste mediates and naturalizes the organizational and ideological structures needed to maintain household economies, not only for the very rich but for a substantial section of the Indian middle class. The depth and endurance of India’s far right regime may indicate that the fascistic social relations inherent in the household economy can engender and sustain broader political movements.
Similarly, the Kafala system in the Gulf—in which migrant domestic labor is “tied” to a particular family and subject to highly unaccountable forms of power—makes widespread adoption of the household economy possible. Significantly, Gulf cities, in particular Dubai, play a prominent role for the circuits of consumption among manosphere influencers and other right-coded digital celebrities. As Catlin Doherty observes, the city is one in which “countless revellers [play] at the lifestyle of oligarch wealth, saving up for a year to be waited on by modern-day slaves for a fortnight.”23Caitlin Doherty, “Everything Else,” Sidecar (blog), July 18, 2025, https://doi.org/10.64590/wd2. While patriarchal status in the household economy will remain out of reach for almost all, its unaccountable hierarchies are a totem of the far right’s most potent desires.
Conclusion
An engagement with the fantasyscape of the far right is essential, not least because their ideas about gender, sexuality, and family have real purchase. According to a recent survey of twenty-three thousand people across twenty-nine countries done by King’s College London, 31 percent of Gen Z men agree that a wife should always obey her husband and 33 percent say a husband should have the final word on important decisions—numbers significantly higher than men from the Baby Boomer generation.24“Almost a third of Gen Z men agree a wife should obey her husband,” King’s College London, March 5, 2026, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/almost-a-third-of-gen-z-men-agree-a-wife-should-obey-her-husband. But there is an important discrepancy between the cultural and the material terrain. The measures needed to discipline society into the far right’s fantasy simply cannot be implemented; the Fordist family was neither the result of a simple exercise in ideological domination nor a clever policy. It was the short-lived outcome of complex struggles. In its wake, the private household takes many different forms, largely characterized by debt, multiple incomes, and precarity. Methods of organizing social reproduction beyond the private, domestic sphere have proliferated. These arrangements too are patriarchal, sexually violent, and unaccountable. These too are a Faustian bargain for many. They don’t always turn on the offer of love, but they do offer opportunity—even if just the opportunity to reproduce yourself for another month or another day. Given that the far right is tied to powerful fractions of capital, we can assume that carceral forms and household economies will continue to proliferate and that the capacity to form stable families (even if defined solely as private households comprising kin in any configuration) will continue to diminish.
Lewis argues that the diminishing role of the family in the “social factory” should not deter family abolitionists, precisely because the horizon of family abolition is to realize the promise of the family: to supersede its form by generalizing the care, love, and mutuality it promises. I want to suggest, however, that sustaining this horizon depends on our ability to ground the project of family abolition in a more fine-grained assessment of the conjuncture. In this historical moment, we are seeing a kind of inverse supersession—that is, the realization of the family’s unspoken threat. The household economy turns on unaccountable forms of patriarchal power; mob violence turns on the defence of women and children as racial property; and emergent carceral regimes of social reproduction harden the distinctions between those who can form private households and those who must reproduce themselves under conditions of forced communality, whether in sites of incarceration or as part of a new servant class. Our task must be to make the complicities between these brutalizing innovations and the family’s most aggressive champions visible.
M. E O’Brien posits that, in response to familialism, we should affirm that “YES, we queer and trans people ARE demanding the abolition of the family.”25Quoted in Alex Adamson, “Review of Family Abolition,” Spectre, July 3, 2023, https://doi.org/10.63478/4MN4LAL7. This call is galvanizing, but an alternative orientation is needed to respond to a conjuncture dominated by a pugnacious and growing far right. As they thrive on direct antagonism, a more deflationary approach avoids playing to their strengths. Perhaps a more precise and affectively tuned response might be to roll our eyes: even in government, the far right cannot engineer us into nuclear units; they can’t even do that to themselves. The combined force of 5 percent of Hungary’s GDP in incentives and Orban’s iron fist, cannot raise the birthrates. As fears of a global conspiracy about trans people as a threat to civilization grow, so too does the number of people transitioning. Indeed, the world’s richest man cannot prevent his child from transitioning. While the far right talk of family values, their celebrity figures (whether at the level of Musk and Trump, or in the influencer economy) are not bound to the family form. It’s not that their defence of the family is hypocritical, but that they display an attachment to the family stripped of mutuality, reduced to a set of imagined gender roles that the economic conditions cannot support.
Given the violence the far right can mete out, both legislatively and through pogromist violence on the streets, their inability to engineer society to meet its fantasy is not necessarily a source of hope. Their defeat is not our victory. But there are opportunities to be found in carefully attending to the conjuncture as we find it. If the family continues to decompose—even when given such lavish cultural treatment and offered state subsidies in an otherwise austere environment—our challenge must be to make visible the interplay between the psychic and the historical terrain. The far-right traffic in a futile fantasy that veils the market relations that render the nuclear family impossible and the private household precarious. Our own assertions of communality, care, and mutuality will find greater support if we can exploit these tensions.