Trump as an Anomaly of Feminist "Patriarchy" Paradigms

People joke that Trump is more a sloppy uncle than a strong father. Should that be taken more seriously?

This is a note I sent to a few small group chats just after Trump’s re-election, on November 9, 2024, lightly edited. I sent this to both feminists and anti-feminists, and I had productive conversations about it with both. It seemed to help people express their prior frustrations and confusions in new terms, which was what I’d hoped for. The neologism “avuncularchy” has even caught on somewhat among some of my friends, which is more than I expected. I don’t normally broach these topics in public forums, but I’d like to test the atmosphere here — so please let me know what you think in notes or comments.

Donald Trump is once again elected President of the United States, and this is naturally being viewed as a major threat and risk for feminist politics in the US and around the world. On the level of immediate ideological social aggression, Trump’s victory is emboldening “your body, my choice” meme-taunts online. On the level of eventual material political action, his administration will almost certainly cut federal support for feminist institutions both in the US and abroad [and by now it has]. From all but perhaps a few fringe feminist perspectives, such as patriarchy accelerationism and some anti-trans feminisms happy to be playing hardball against the others, this is a setback and a blow.

Trump’s victory on Tuesday was a blow and it was also, to many, a significant surprise. I want to take this moment to suggest that this surprise is not just coming from shallow, indefinite polling errors as many of the most privileged left would like to assume (to minimize any creative ideological impact of the surprise) nor any deep, inscrutable “denial of reality” that the most vicious of the political right would like to ascribe (to maximize the demoralizing ideological impact of the surprise).

Instead, I’d like to suggest that there is a definite, identifiable, middle-range error of predominant feminist theory responsible for the surprise, and also to suggest that it will be naturally correctable, not by me in this note (which will be much too short to do the work), but by better-established feminist philosophers and anthropologists who may recognize opportunities to follow up the sketchy suggestion I’ll be able to make here. [And who may also know if and where similar suggestions have already been made before.]

Specifically, I’ll suggest that several anomalies of Trump’s strength as a candidate, such as

1. His invulnerability to moral attack on the basis of infidelity and dishonesty

2. His apparently improving performance with Black men, especially relative to Obama

3. The apparent irrelevance of his unpopularity with established power structures

can all be much better understood on the basis of a sharp but limited reframing of his particular masculine identity and masculine privileges: he has not been performing the role of a Father of the US, but rather the role of its Uncle. Therefore one would do better to look at Trump’s authoritarian charisma as drawing on less fatherly, more uncle-like patterns of masculine authority. This reframing would be contrary to predominant feminist rhetoric about patriarchy on the surface, but it is in no way opposed to deeper feminist commitments to equality between men and women.

Such uncle-authority patterns are not widely recognized as normative in White, Western nations, but anthropologists have found and recognized them extensively outside of the White West. In the early-20th-century anthropology of the era of Margaret Mead, it was taken as a general truth that wherever kinship structures are reckoned patrilineally, i.e., where family identities follow the father’s line, paternal masculine authority would be socially normative, but wherever kinship structures are reckoned matrilineally, i.e., where family identities follow the mother’s line, social norms put masculine authority in the mother’s brother rather than in the father. This mother’s brother is an uncle in English and specifically an avunculus in Latin. The adjective corresponding to “paternal” for the uncle is “avuncular.”

While this “general truth” is not as general as one might like, just like so many of the sweeping generalizations of that era that have since gone out of style, it’s still important and suggestive.¹ One of Mead’s great predecessors in anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski, used it as the basis of a famous and well-grounded 1927 critique of the universality of the Freudian Oedipus complex.² In the now-very-unfashionably-titled, but for-its-time-progressive Sex and Repression in Savage Society, he provided evidence that in matrilineal societies where uncles had primary masculine authority rather than fathers, these uncles also replaced fathers in anxious nightmares and in religious myths of rebellion and punishment. These societies have typical uncle complexes rather than typical father complexes.

In light of that critique, it has always struck me as curious that, despite all his paternal qualities, Freud himself seems more commonly referred to as “Uncle Freud” in America rather than “Father Freud” in both affectionate and derisive talk about his authority among psychoanalysts even though he is normally acclaimed as “father of psychoanalysis.”³ It has also struck me that the modern US has had “Uncle Sam” as a more iconic, unifying central authority figure than its various conflicting “Founding Fathers.”

While the US is patrilineal in naming children, from a very early era paternal authority in the American colonies was much weaker than in Europe, as shown for instance in American inheritance laws and the forms of Protestant Christianity that flourished best in the early colonies.⁴ Also, significant culture-hero figures of the modern US from business to electoral politics to bureaucracy, such as John D. Rockefeller, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and J. Edgar Hoover, were each closer with and raised much more by their mothers than their fathers. Also, the 19th century beginnings of the Washington, DC society now called the “swamp” or “Deep State” by Trump were pioneered by women’s social initiative and their concerns for their sons’ and husbands’ careers, as chronicled well in Catherine Allgor’s history Parlor Politics.

Though American names are certainly patrilineal, the anthropological generalizations of Mead’s era were never watertight, and the various fragments of matrilineal-stereotyped social pattern in American society seem to be an important, distinctive feature. Certainly whatever systems of masculine authority Trump is drawing on, they have been idiosyncratically American: Europeans have not been impressed (to put it mildly).

Though plenty of his supporters do admire Trump as a father, as far as I have been able to see, the stereotype of how he raises Barron that prevails among right wing voters is one of a relationship of indulgent respect for his son (for instance “lets him play video games,” “asks him which podcasters to talk to”) that is less typical of the (Mead-era anthropological) patrilineal father figure and much more typical of the less authoritarian (Mead-era anthropological) matrilineal father figure. Trump’s authority to the dissident right does not come from his rectitude as a patrilineal father figure (again, in that old anthropological sense of that figure), and this has undermined attempts to politically discredit him on the basis of his failure to live up to those ideals of rectitude. The mother’s brother figure in a matrilineal society, per Mead-era generalisms, is simply not held to a strict standard of sexual fidelity, for instance.

On another side: when Obama exhorted Black men to support Kamala in the recent election there was a loud, whether or not consequential or substantial, backlash by Black men supporting Trump to the effect that “Obama wasn’t their father.” “I’ve got a father, and you aren’t him” was a typical line. Yet I didn’t see much evidence that Trump was being treated or respected as a father of that sort either. Rather, these Black men were rejecting any attempt to use paternal authority to tell them what to do while respecting that Trump refrained from using that paternal authority: Trump didn’t command his Black supporters but rather rambled and cajoled and made deals with them; he acted avuncular rather than paternal, and this did not trigger the same sort of backlash. The Black men supporting Trump strongly didn’t want a political “daddy,” but they were not going to complain in the same way about having a political uncle. Trump was certainly relying on masculine authoritarian charisma to appeal to Black men, but it was a specifically less paternal, more avuncular form of masculine authoritarian charisma.

Thirdly, Trump’s anti-establishment charisma also matches the mythic patterns once ascribed to matrilineal societies (in old anthropology) better than it does the mythic patterns ascribed to patrilineal societies (in the same anthropology). Trump tends to denigrate and minimize patrilineal inheritance in his opposition to establishment figures, mocking the pretenses to legacies among the Bushes, Cheneys, and Bidens, for instance, but also to be relatively unfazed by mockery of his own family’s legacies. Though Trump’s father was rich and he sometimes talks about his love of his father, particularly at events they once shared like the Al Smith dinner, his father’s past personal authority is made no substantial part of his own authority in his political rhetoric. Whereas Obama talked of “Dreams from My Father” and was thus explicitly casting his anti-establishment efforts as vindications of his patrilineal inheritance of powers and grievances, Trump tends to speak as if hard work and present dealmaking are his sources of powers and grievances. While this could be argued to be just ideological presentism, it’s also more in line with the old Mead-era stereotypes of self-presentation in matrilineal societies.

These three make a very quickly sketched, incomplete suggestion of a handful of ways of understanding that part of what has been so surprising about Trump is that his masculine authority is so little based on patrilineal inheritances, paternal authority, or paternal rectitude. The type of masculine authority he wields might be much better understood as an avuncular authority rather than a paternal authority, and for better and for worse, up to this point, predominant feminist theory has been focused more specifically on opposing systems of paternal authority. Thus feminists find themselves on the back foot and surprised when Trump’s avuncular authority prevails in political competition despite their efforts to counter it with strong opposition to paternal authority.

I do not think this is an intractable or essential problem with feminism, however. I think that this could be very naturally incorporated into future feminist theory. Malinowski’s old critique of the Freudian theory of universal patriarchy might be brought in to motivate new toy structuralist feminist theories of matrilineal but masculine-dominated “avuncularchy,” to coin a somewhat dreadful neologism, and then post-structuralist critiques once applied to structuralist understandings of patriarchy could apply just as well to mature those toy structuralist theories of avuncularchy into more believable final products.

The US itself seems to me to mix both avuncularchy and patriarchy in a particularly interesting way. And where there are no systems of age-based or kinship-based older male authority at all but feminists still find themselves confronted with apparent systemic gendered oppression, I might also suggest it could be worthwhile to theorize “puerarchy” or “fraternarchy” in contrast to both, to better separate out the distinctive importances of age and kin roles from gender roles. Given contemporary patterns of divorce and of neglect of young men by their fathers and other male relatives, I suspect the Gen Z alt-right is socially structured by systems of puerarchy more directly than by systems of patriarchy.

In any case, while Trump’s re-election has been a blow to feminist hopes and a surprise to many, it does not seem to indict the hopes themselves and the surprise seems like something to learn from rather than to minimize and deny or to maximize and despair over. I hope my suggestion will be taken in the spirit of solidarity with the perennial challenge to simultaneously stay committed to democratic processes and also committed to idealistic minority hopes not yet shared with the democratic majorities.

November 9, 2024.

Thanks to all earlier readers, and particularly to

Lydia Laurenson

for making space for earlier private discussions of this essay.

1. For anyone who has strange feelings reading this sentence, I’m with you: I’m far from settled in deciding what these fashions mean or why they move the way they do. Lorraine Daston’s work in Rules: A Short History of What We Live By does a good job of mapping out the territory that I think is still untamed, here.

2. For this essay, there’s no need to have an especially clear idea of what an Oedipus complex is. It’s more than enough to know that it’s a hypothetical emotional pattern developed through a boy’s precocious competition for his father’s sexual privilege and authority, specifically centered around the boy’s frustrating contrast of sexual desire for his mother and fear of his father. The most important thing here is just that Freud claimed that this son-father complex was universal and was the universal root of universal dream imagery patterns and universal mythic imagery patterns, but then Malinowski showed that in other societies with different less-paternal masculine authority patterns, different dream patterns and myth patterns were also found. So Malinowski argued that there was less universality than Freud had claimed on several levels, but he agreed with Freud that childhood family structure still determined the forms of dream and myth.

3. I’m also aware of various teasing “Daddy Freud” jokes, but I think of them as a very different sort of talk, worth thinking about elsewhere but minimally relevant here.

4. For checking and investigating these claims, if you’re unfamiliar, I usually recommend starting with the first chapters of Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform by William G. McLoughlin.