Great article! I think the trad movement online has a lot of larpers focused on sexier little house on the prairie ideals for clicks. I notice most of these people are attractive young women in their 20s who usually don’t have kids yet and focus on somewhat alluring shots of baking and cooking lol. The other end of the spectrum in the news media trying to portray the movement as something akin to being a sort of bride to Jeff Warren nightmare scenario which is ridiculous. But I think you nailed the split between the two cultural groups of the PMC and the trads. I guess I would sort of be pmc as I went to college and law school and became a lawyer but I reject the pmc lifestyle of few kids and indulgent spending and luxury beliefs. I have three kids and send them to public school which is perfectly fine for the most part in my more rural southern area. My wife is a nurse who stays home now that I finally make just enough to support us on my own but we agreed even early on in our marriage that she would work part time when we had our kids when we needed two incomes and we were blessed not to have to send them to daycare. I don’t plan on steering my kids to the pmc track forcefully and I’m open to them pursuing other career tracks and training as long as they are confident they can support themselves and their future families. The pmc class is very narrow minded about college and career tracks and that is going to bite them in the ass as those tracks are offshored, DEI’d, Hb1’d, or AI’d into oblivion. I never saw my education as some requirement to advance into a higher social class it’s just a job to me but I was of the last few of my generation that had college pounded into my head as the only way to possibly advance in life which I believe is utterly false now for a lot of people. I think if you raise a good kid and are present in their lives growing up they will be able to figure out how to provide for themselves and people need to stop calculating the cost of children based on the higher education costs they may or may not need in the future. I think you said perfectly when you stated that pmc folks focus on romantic love as they entire reason to be married which inevitably leads to failure. Trads see marriage as a whole in that romantic love is just a part of the marriage that needs attention but will naturally ebb and flow over time. Trads focus on marriage as a true partnership in the venture of raising a family and building a life together and not being two independent roommates who share a house and are only content as long as they feel aroused romantically. It will be interesting to see which culture will be dominant going forward considering the future economic and social challenges we face in the future…
Great article. Additionally, I would say these days there is an overproduction of people thinking that they belong in the PMC due to a college degree, leading to all sorts of social disruption as promises made are not being kept. Some of this disenfranchisement helps fuel traditional lifestyles and people entering the pipeline see there aren’t options open to them to join elites.
Yes, I was going to suggest the same: overproduction of elites (Peter Turchin). I wonder if LARPing as a "dropped out" PMC has quite the same inherent set of values to help one weather life's storms, as compared to upbringing and immersion in Trad way of life (with accompanying social connections).
Based on my n=1, it was relatively easy to don the Professional garb, and credentials, scrape a living for four decades, and now to - thankfully - feel far happier as my Trad self. (But I'm not a white female, so there's a thing)
Yes, the fear that the PMC elite have of traditional families closely mirrors the fear described by Aristotle:
In Book V, 1314a of the Politics, Aristotle describes the methods tyrants use to maintain power through isolation and control of the populace. He argues that it is the habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens because they view citizens as potential enemies and believe aliens pose no opposition.
It is also in the interest of a tyrant to keep subjects poor so they remain occupied with daily survival and lack the time or resources to plot against the ruler.
Thus our current rulers import tens of millions of criminal aliens (all illegals are criminals by definition) not only to profit from their cheaper labor, but to deliberately impoverish Americans by driving down their wages.
I prefer to frame it in my own mind as a return to normalcy. What is off kilter today is having childcare entirely outsourced to strangers, practically from birth. This is not normal and has many profound and negative effects. My wife and I might be considered "trad" by these definitions. My lawyer wife significantly cut down her practice to raise our children and be with them at home during the day. We both want to spend time with our children in these precious and short years. However, I doubt my wife would even recognize the word Trad as she does not spend time online and is focused on the children. She is just trying to do what she thinks best.
Finally someone gets it. You can tell who's terminally online and who's seen it in real life when it comes to this "trad life" debate. Most apparently are terminally online blue-staters or urbanites.
Great article. I like the part about supporting community businesses. I do this as much as possible. Farmers markets are my particular target for support.
My vision for trad lifestyle: a group of mutually supportive and dependent families. Preferably anchored to a piece of land that all members work on some of the time. The land also provides a significant portion of sustenance for those families.
I think rooting in place literally and figuratively will help reconnect ppl irl. Wendell Berry (I’m a hooge phan) writes a lot about how our treatment of the land reflects our treatment of ourselves.
My friend Cedric lives and writes about similar ideas to WB. You can check him out @farmesledge. He recently published a book and continues to farm and build community.
Late to the party on this one. Almost everyone I know falls squarely in the PMC category, and I find it easy to cruise along and keep my head down in that world. At the same time, I admire and sympathize with trads and secretly hope you all will take over the world. Part of me wants to make the jump. Intellectually, I think trads are right. In some ways, we’re a lot more trad than other families. Genuine faith, go to church, pray every meal and every night, teach and try to live the Gospel. But I’m hung up on normie habits. Watching what everyone else watches, getting the kids on club teams with their friends, worrying about “falling behind” socially or financially, worrying about screwing up my career if I start taking my beliefs more seriously. I’m glad the tide is turning and I hope it lasts. Maybe that will give more of us the backbone to do what we know we probably should anyway. Changing your mind is easy, changing your lifestyle is a minefield.
This artifact has been processed by the Obsidian Mirror. We analyze present-day texts through the lens of a historical simulation set in the year 2100, treating them not as news, but as primary source documents for the transition between your era and ours. You can read the full historical autopsy here:
"From the perspective of 2100, this demographic defection was not a moral retreat into the past, but a necessary structural optimization. The centralized administrative state—what Schmidt calls the “monoculture”—had simply reached its physical and organizational limits of scale. It demanded massive inputs of cognitive and caloric energy (relentless credentialism, dual-income taxation, and performative consensus) while providing rapidly diminishing returns in security, prosperity, and trust. The “Reverse Rumspringa” was the rational, automatic reallocation of cognitive capital. High-capacity nodes began routing around the failing centralized hub, seeking the lower-friction, higher-trust environments of localized networks."
A well written and very insightful article. Many thanks. 👍
"Is it the super-crunchy mom of two with fertility issues who has a twenty-hour-a-week side-hustle on Etsy?"
Unbelievably accurate personal attack.
Great article! I think the trad movement online has a lot of larpers focused on sexier little house on the prairie ideals for clicks. I notice most of these people are attractive young women in their 20s who usually don’t have kids yet and focus on somewhat alluring shots of baking and cooking lol. The other end of the spectrum in the news media trying to portray the movement as something akin to being a sort of bride to Jeff Warren nightmare scenario which is ridiculous. But I think you nailed the split between the two cultural groups of the PMC and the trads. I guess I would sort of be pmc as I went to college and law school and became a lawyer but I reject the pmc lifestyle of few kids and indulgent spending and luxury beliefs. I have three kids and send them to public school which is perfectly fine for the most part in my more rural southern area. My wife is a nurse who stays home now that I finally make just enough to support us on my own but we agreed even early on in our marriage that she would work part time when we had our kids when we needed two incomes and we were blessed not to have to send them to daycare. I don’t plan on steering my kids to the pmc track forcefully and I’m open to them pursuing other career tracks and training as long as they are confident they can support themselves and their future families. The pmc class is very narrow minded about college and career tracks and that is going to bite them in the ass as those tracks are offshored, DEI’d, Hb1’d, or AI’d into oblivion. I never saw my education as some requirement to advance into a higher social class it’s just a job to me but I was of the last few of my generation that had college pounded into my head as the only way to possibly advance in life which I believe is utterly false now for a lot of people. I think if you raise a good kid and are present in their lives growing up they will be able to figure out how to provide for themselves and people need to stop calculating the cost of children based on the higher education costs they may or may not need in the future. I think you said perfectly when you stated that pmc folks focus on romantic love as they entire reason to be married which inevitably leads to failure. Trads see marriage as a whole in that romantic love is just a part of the marriage that needs attention but will naturally ebb and flow over time. Trads focus on marriage as a true partnership in the venture of raising a family and building a life together and not being two independent roommates who share a house and are only content as long as they feel aroused romantically. It will be interesting to see which culture will be dominant going forward considering the future economic and social challenges we face in the future…
Great article. Additionally, I would say these days there is an overproduction of people thinking that they belong in the PMC due to a college degree, leading to all sorts of social disruption as promises made are not being kept. Some of this disenfranchisement helps fuel traditional lifestyles and people entering the pipeline see there aren’t options open to them to join elites.
Yes, I was going to suggest the same: overproduction of elites (Peter Turchin). I wonder if LARPing as a "dropped out" PMC has quite the same inherent set of values to help one weather life's storms, as compared to upbringing and immersion in Trad way of life (with accompanying social connections).
Based on my n=1, it was relatively easy to don the Professional garb, and credentials, scrape a living for four decades, and now to - thankfully - feel far happier as my Trad self. (But I'm not a white female, so there's a thing)
The only thing that I would add then, is that reverts to the faith such as myself, have to transition and find a home in trad-land. It isn’t easy.
One of the best articles I’ve read on Substack. Well done
Excellent article! It read like Albion's Seed in comparing the folkways of different English colonies.
Yes, the fear that the PMC elite have of traditional families closely mirrors the fear described by Aristotle:
In Book V, 1314a of the Politics, Aristotle describes the methods tyrants use to maintain power through isolation and control of the populace. He argues that it is the habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens because they view citizens as potential enemies and believe aliens pose no opposition.
It is also in the interest of a tyrant to keep subjects poor so they remain occupied with daily survival and lack the time or resources to plot against the ruler.
Thus our current rulers import tens of millions of criminal aliens (all illegals are criminals by definition) not only to profit from their cheaper labor, but to deliberately impoverish Americans by driving down their wages.
I prefer to frame it in my own mind as a return to normalcy. What is off kilter today is having childcare entirely outsourced to strangers, practically from birth. This is not normal and has many profound and negative effects. My wife and I might be considered "trad" by these definitions. My lawyer wife significantly cut down her practice to raise our children and be with them at home during the day. We both want to spend time with our children in these precious and short years. However, I doubt my wife would even recognize the word Trad as she does not spend time online and is focused on the children. She is just trying to do what she thinks best.
Finally someone gets it. You can tell who's terminally online and who's seen it in real life when it comes to this "trad life" debate. Most apparently are terminally online blue-staters or urbanites.
Great article. I like the part about supporting community businesses. I do this as much as possible. Farmers markets are my particular target for support.
My vision for trad lifestyle: a group of mutually supportive and dependent families. Preferably anchored to a piece of land that all members work on some of the time. The land also provides a significant portion of sustenance for those families.
I think rooting in place literally and figuratively will help reconnect ppl irl. Wendell Berry (I’m a hooge phan) writes a lot about how our treatment of the land reflects our treatment of ourselves.
My friend Cedric lives and writes about similar ideas to WB. You can check him out @farmesledge. He recently published a book and continues to farm and build community.
Late to the party on this one. Almost everyone I know falls squarely in the PMC category, and I find it easy to cruise along and keep my head down in that world. At the same time, I admire and sympathize with trads and secretly hope you all will take over the world. Part of me wants to make the jump. Intellectually, I think trads are right. In some ways, we’re a lot more trad than other families. Genuine faith, go to church, pray every meal and every night, teach and try to live the Gospel. But I’m hung up on normie habits. Watching what everyone else watches, getting the kids on club teams with their friends, worrying about “falling behind” socially or financially, worrying about screwing up my career if I start taking my beliefs more seriously. I’m glad the tide is turning and I hope it lasts. Maybe that will give more of us the backbone to do what we know we probably should anyway. Changing your mind is easy, changing your lifestyle is a minefield.
Great article! Thank you! Also, thanks to J. Burden, for bringing me here.
This artifact has been processed by the Obsidian Mirror. We analyze present-day texts through the lens of a historical simulation set in the year 2100, treating them not as news, but as primary source documents for the transition between your era and ours. You can read the full historical autopsy here:
https://markjustman.substack.com/p/the-parochial-secession
"From the perspective of 2100, this demographic defection was not a moral retreat into the past, but a necessary structural optimization. The centralized administrative state—what Schmidt calls the “monoculture”—had simply reached its physical and organizational limits of scale. It demanded massive inputs of cognitive and caloric energy (relentless credentialism, dual-income taxation, and performative consensus) while providing rapidly diminishing returns in security, prosperity, and trust. The “Reverse Rumspringa” was the rational, automatic reallocation of cognitive capital. High-capacity nodes began routing around the failing centralized hub, seeking the lower-friction, higher-trust environments of localized networks."