Carole Cadwalladr recently published a piece in the Observer entitled ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy: 20 Lessons for the Post-Truth world’. This is an amazing piece: written by someone who appears to be a tri-cross between David Lammy, James Delingpole and, say, Judith Butler or Catherine MacKinnon or someone similar, i.e., she seems to believe all the usual thoughtless political precepts familiar to us from the anti-Trump, anti-Brexit, pro-Covid Guardian, while exhibiting a conspiratorial mindset worthy of the Delingpod (and this is a good thing), all of which is articulated in feminist manner, hence her happy adoption of the word ‘broligarch’.
Everyone else is inventing words, so let me try. I would like to coin a new word: ‘Defemition.’
What is a defemition?
A defemition is a definition designed by feminists to insinuate that males are misogynists and that misogyny is the grand conspiracy of our time and that almost any activity carried out by males, whether it is progressive or reactive, is a contribution to that conspiracy.
A defemition = a definition + feminism + defamation.
What is an example of a defemition?
The word ‘mansplaining’.
The word ‘mansplaining’ takes a neutral thing, ‘explanation’, and somehow manages to insinuate that whenever a man ‘explains’ something he is in fact perpetuating misogyny by assuming ignorance on the part of his interlocutor, especially any female interlocutor. Typically, this female interlocutor is imagined to be silently nursing both a grievance about being spoken down to and a sense of smug self-satisfaction because, of course, she knows more about the subject than the ‘mansplainer’. This female interlocutor says not a word, but then broadcasts to the world that she has been the victim of another episode of ‘mansplaining’.
Defemitions work, probably, because men find them amusing.
And, yes, ‘broligarchy’ is another example of a defemition. ‘Broligarchy’ seems to be over a decade old, but it is finally entering public consciousness. Why?
At first I thought this was a term of abuse: a sort of up-dating of the old word ‘patriarchy’. The word ‘patriarchy’ is a favourite word of feminists. It is designed to insinuate that almost all order before John Locke was misogynistic. You know, Locke refuted Robert Filmer, the author of Patriarcha, who had argued that all title to rule came by descent from Adam. But in the 1980s feminists managed to suggest that in fact almost all order since John Locke has been misogynistic too. This was the triumphant argument of Carol Pateman’s The Sexual Contract, which claimed that original paternal patriarchy had been replaced by a much more sophisticated fraternal patriarchy based not on status but on contract. I cannot be bothered to reread the book to see how persuasive the argument was: what was persuasive about the book was that it very reasonably pointed out that most political philosophers before J.S. Mill spent exactly no time reflecting on women. Machiavelli said fortune was a woman, Aristotle said a woman was a sort of child, and so on.
I think that behind all the modern maunder about ‘patriarchy’ is the dim post-Pateman conviction that all order is sophisticatedly patriarchal and that no amount of men genuflecting to feminism or letting women into the bar, the universities, or parliament will ever prove otherwise. The system is unconsciously masculine to the core. This is a belief in the form of an absolute presupposition: it cannot be argued with.
So what is the broligarchy?
Shall I quote Cadwalladr? Her article has been quite successful. One finds excerpts of it all over the internet. It is garbled and hasty and a bit nasty: also pert and not above a certain non sequiturish “I’ve-won-the-argument-already” manner. Also, some of it is not exactly true: she seems to believe that Trump is going to prosecute journalists, academics and probably doctors. Some of it is good: a sort of Jordan Peterson for the centrist Dads, although she almost always blurs her point by adducing a terrible example, e.g.:
- Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris.
Great precept. Terrible example. (What about COVID-19?) Anyhow, she continues with some fairly sensible para-Petersonian precepts.
- Don’t buy the bullshit… Pay in cash… Find allies in unlikely places… There is such a thing as truth… Find a way to connect to those you disagree with… Take the piss…
As I read this I can hear the strains of “I love Delingpole…” in the background. Fine. And Cadwalladr’s Twelve Rules for Life is no more objectionable than Jordan Peterson’s. But the whole salad is dressed in the harsh vinegar of Trump Derangement Syndrome 2.0:
- When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as Secretary of Defence, and a Secretary of Health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.
Confusing, I know. Is Trump going to do it, or not? Or is Cadwalladr’s belief that she is being told something (that she has not been told) sufficient evidence that it is being done? (And is her writing meant to be the subjunctive, or in some new hypothetical-inevitable, mood?)
In the midst of all this we have the word ‘broligarchy’. And, as I said, this is not a term of abuse, believe it or not. At least not by intention. It is a term of analysis. “To name is to understand,” she explains. Broligarchy is:
- McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools.
Broligarchy is the name of the new stitch-up whereby “Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi”. Let’s read on: “Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble.” Cadwalladr cites Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and points out that everyone is being “surveilled” at all times and thereby allowing corporations to turn their data into property to be sold to the highest bidder. She chiefly wants to attack Thiel, Musk, Trump and Vance – she wrote an article earlier this year pointing out that Vance is a Thiel creature – but although she does mention Facebook, she never admits that Facebook did engage in an algorithmic conspiracy against the public, and that Musk at X, on the other hand, did try to open the books to reveal the algorithms, i.e., give the game away. I do not understand why Musk is worse than his rivals since he has made it his business to admit what is going on. It is as if admitting-what-is-going-on is worse than doing-it.
This is the explanation then. Broligarchs is a word for Bezos, Jobs, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg types. As such, it is not interesting, and was not interesting before the summer of 2024. But now that Musk has gone rogue, embraced the politics of the dark side, and joined Trump, it is now a very sharp term which can be used to decorate the fears that centrist dads and childless cat ladies have about a global conspiracy. No, no, no, not that global conspiracy of the globalists (Covid, Net Zero, etc.). No, the other one, the global conspiracy of neoliberal, technofeudal, misogynistic, data-stealing, billionaire buddies who want to rape Mars, block Mexicans, deny the Climate Emergency, and sow the foundations of Washington DC with salt before building a Doge’s palace where the White House used to be.
Now I think Cadwalladr and those who agree with her – for instance, Prof. Julie Posetti, Natalia Antaleva and Brooke Harrington of the Atlantic – have a point. There is good reason to remain vigilant about Musk and Thiel. But there are two caveats. One is that surely we should remain vigilant about all the data-stealing, rent-seeking billionaires, and not just the single one who is on the political Right: we should also keep an eye on the hypocrites on the left. The other caveat is that it is surely irrelevant that these are ‘bros’. This makes it seem as if the problem is not what Musk, Zuckerberg et al are doing, but their sex – the patriarchy, the broligarchy. It’s the men, stupid. Well, saying that is stupid, stupid.
Our feministocrats seem to be very fond of running the following three very different things together:
- The activities of a few rich billionaires of the Thiel and Musk sort.
- Standard toxic masculinity, unconscious misogynistic bias, as found in Rory Stewart, Gary Lineker, etc.
- The Tate-Peterson attempt to ‘rewild’ you.
These are not the same thing. Call Musk and Trump ‘oligarchs’, Cadwalladr, if you want to say something serious about them. If you call them ‘broligarchs’ you are weakening your argument, by making it about boys. And I think you’ll find that the Tate-Peterson boys/bros and perhaps even the Stewart-Lineker boys/bros might be provoked by your language to go over to the other side.
One speculates as to whether there is a form of cognitive assonance-out-of-dissonance (some sort of Bernard Hermann Psycho chord) that goes through the rewired feministocrat brain every time our commentators see any one of the three. They see “Musk” (money) and immediately think “Tate” (influence) and “standard toxic masculinity” (ubiquity), and the Psycho chord plays. Or they see “Peterson” and then, in what for most of us would be a non sequitur, they think “Trump” and “My husband/boss/son”. Psycho chord: especially for the husband.
My advice to cultural critics on the Left is that they should stop lumping everything together. Words like ‘broligarchy’ just increase the chances that we on the other side will use words like ‘feministocracy’. Is that what you want? If you have a particular comment to make about ‘surveillance capitalism’ then make it elegantly, as Zuboff does in her book, Surveillance Capitalism. Do not make it into a vast intersectional floor-is-lava whereby everything male is thrown into a laundry basket of mixed metaphors along with Trump, Musk, and Tate.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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