How the American Cycle Explains Katie Britt, Tradwives & the GOP

Screenshot via C-SPAN

Last week, my social media became bombarded with discussions about the “Tradwife” phenomenon, and then these discussions went up another level after Alabama Senator Katie Britt gave the Republican Party’s response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. Now, I’m going to enter into this growing discussion by describing how the American Cycle and Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction explain the tradwife controversy.

Tradwife stands for “traditional wife,” and this tradition harkens back to the 1940s and 1950s, when white men were the sole breadwinners for their families, and their wives stayed at home and handled all of the domestic duties. They took care of the children, cooked all the meals, kept the house clean, and they did so while radiating a joyful demeanor and calm appreciation of their working husband. Today, most American families rely on the income of both spouses, and even then they often do not have the financial stability to own a home or save for retirement. The financial insecurity and anxiety of modern-day life has made many Americans yearn for the seemingly blissful domesticity of the tradwife as a form of escapism. 

When Republicans speak about American traditions and profess to “Make America Great Again,” the 1940s and 1950s are one of the time periods they are harkening back to. This is why the Republican Party felt it made sense for Britt to give her speech from her kitchen. Even though Britt is a senator and her household is dual income, she needed to show that she was a continuation of this tradition.

The problem regarding this tradition and the tradwife phenomenon has nothing to do with Britt’s bizarre speech that has been widely panned. The problem with the tradwife is that it exists to provide a genteel façade for a way of life that is fueled primarily by racial violence and division.

In my theory of the American Cycle, I have broken down the history of the United States of America into four stages or eras, and I describe how this nation has gone through the cycle twice. The first stage of the American Cycle is the Founding era. This era is the creation of the United States, and during this time America’s founders created a democracy that included ethnocide—the destruction of a people’s culture while keeping the people. The transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery explicitly worked to destroy African culture while keeping African people so that they could be enslaved and generate wealth for white Americans. At the founding of this nation, chattel slavery was America’s main form of ethnocide.

By building a nation with ethnocide and racism built into its founding fabric, this society will cultivate people who will believe that their way of life must be a democracy that also embraces ethnocide. 

At the turn of the 20^th century, the United States began the American Cycle anew because we could not transcend our ethnocidal roots, and now Jim Crow and segregation became this nation’s new iteration of legalized ethnocide. Jim Crow is America’s second Founding era. The tradwife derives from this era and it is no different than Americans yearning for the alleged peacefulness and hospitality of the pre-Civil War, antebellum South of the first Founding era. 

When American conservatives speak about tradition, they are talking about the traditions of each of these Founding eras. These conservative traditions, such as the tradwife, are incredibly controversial because they can only be legitimate ideas if we either ignore or encourage the violence that fuels each of these eras.

Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction highlights how Western civilization likes to create binaries where one entity is supposed to be naturally superior to the other. Through deconstruction, Derrida proved how these binary divisions were not natural, and instead were fueled by violence, both physical and psychological.

For centuries, Europeans believed that speech was a higher level of communication than writing. Likewise, Europeans also professed that men were superior to women, and that Europeans were superior to all of the other races on the planet, and these divisions were fueled and maintained by both physical and psychological violence. The hierarchical divisions professed by the Western world are only legitimate if these divisions are “natural.” Essentially, the division must be something that naturally occurs in the world, and cannot be something that Europeans are actively creating. 

If Europeans have actively created these divisions and have arbitrarily oppressed anyone or anything that they perceive to be the “other” so that they remain atop of their hierarchical binary, the legitimacy of their ideas, philosophy, and beliefs will rapidly crumble. Their ideas will crumble because it will become evident that their main idea is violence. Therefore, the violence that fuels the division must be concealed, minimized, or made banal; so that we are led to believe that the division is naturally occurring and their ideas are peaceful.

The tradwife was born during Jim Crow, but Americans prefer to believe that the horrors of Jim Crow exist apart from and not a part of the seemingly peaceful American nuclear family with the white picket fence and traditional wife who stays at home and joyfully manages all of the domestic tasks. 

We do not want to believe that the exclusively white neighborhood had a covenant and refused to sell homes to Black families. We do not want to believe that these white Americans fought against desegregation, and might have spit or hurled abuses at Black children as they attempted to attend an integrated school. We want to ignore the fact that the tradwife probably paid a Black woman to handle many of the domestic chores, and that it was pretty easy for her husband to have a stable middle class job because America was structured to help ensure that Black Americans had the low paying jobs. We do not want to believe that these white people probably did not think twice about calling a grown Black man “boy.”

Our society wants white dominance to appear to be calming, stable, and natural; and we want to talk about how during these eras of American life—the founding of America and Jim Crow—our society was supposedly less divided. This narrative exists to erase the violence that fuels the oppressive binaries of the founding eras because once we forget about the violence, we can yearn to return to that status quo. 

Americans often describe these overtly divided eras as not being divided because once the violence has been erased from the narrative, a narrative of white unity becomes the new narrative of the society. White unity then equates to American unity even though violence and legalized division and oppression are in fact the status quo of the Founding eras. As with the tradwife phenomenon, people will choose to escape into a palatable façade of white supremacy if they have been fooled into believing that it is peaceful and natural.

The Republican Party’s understanding of American tradition was on vivid display during and after Biden’s State of the Union address. Through Britt and the iconic photo of the exclusively white GOP members (see above), they attempted to make the abnormal appear normal; and through the constant heckling of Biden, they continued to attempt verbal violence to create division.

Tragically, this nation was built upon the violent binaries of Western civilization and these concealed, ever-present divisions have been our traditions and status quo for far too long. My hope is that Reconstructionism can help us make better traditions.