What does a naïve fascination with Laura Ingalls Wilder have in common with this week’s projected election of a literal Fascist government in Italy? I hear the knives coming out among my few regular readers even as I write this. Yet I contend that America’s attachment to a beatified past reflects the same sentiments that have installed Giorgia Meloni as Italy’s next presumptive Prime Minister.
Smarter critics than me have written about cottagecore, a design aesthetic based on a supposedly better agrarian past. From the architecture and artwork to the now-notorious “prairie dresses” briefly sold at Target, the cottagecore ethos lionizes a time in America’s past when people lived simply, ate food from their own gardens, and didn’t busy themselves with sleek design. Many cottagecore enthusiasts have attested their loyalty to Wilder’s Little House books.
Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t simply write her simple novels to entertain children, though. She wrote at the urging of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who probably served as unbilled co-author. Lane was also one of the founders of Libertarianism, the political philosophy holding that everything would be better if rules and regulations were unilaterally rescinded, and everyone were free to follow their internal moral compass.
Ingalls’ Little House books are replete with messages of self-reliance and autonomy. Repeatedly throughout the novels, the characters learn the importance of swallowing their complaints, working hard, and not asking anybody for help. The characters are resolutely unmoored from community, with the assistance which community entails. One novel commences with the family moving west, claiming their motivation was that too many people were around.
Contrast that with Peter Weir’s 1985 movie Witness. Forced from a Back-East city to harbor among the Amish, detective John Book (Harrison Ford) learns the exact opposite lessons which Wilder taught: restraint, sharing, community. Important moments happen when he learns, for instance, to sip his lemonade, not guzzle it. I can’t be the only American who considered decamping to Amish Country after watching Book participate in an Amish barn raising.
Cottagecore espouses rural simplicity, but not a communitarianism. It’s all Laura Ingalls Wilder, no John Book. Adherents believe, to a greater or lesser degree, the popular White American myth of autonomy and rural solitude. But real early rural life was deeply communitarian, because it needed to be. Besides, as historian Nancy Isenberg writes, the Ingalls family probably moved west, not to avoid crowds, but because richer Whites chased them off the land.
Meanwhile, as Americans of every political hue romanticize Oregon Trail pastoralism, Italians have elected a presumptive PM whose own party calls themselves “heirs of Il Duce.” Giorgia Meloni promises to reinstate nearly the entire Mussolini policy agenda, because that ended so well last time. Mussolini literally gave global nationalism the shorthand name of Fascism, and provided the political blueprint that Hitler duplicated and expanded upon.
Meloni cites the endless panoply of evil-bringers which American and British audiences will recognize: immigrants, “globalists,” homosexuals. She promises to restore lost national greatness that definitely existed in the vaguely defined past: make Italy great again, if you please. Fundamental to small-F fascism is a belief that things used to be good, but now they’re not— though that goodness, and that lost time, are always fuzzy and intangible.
Italy isn’t alone in yearning for a more authoritarian past. Vladimir Putin has lamented the Soviet collapse, and attempted to regain Russian greatness by repeating Stalin’s greatest sin, oppressing Ukrainians. Britain’s new PM, Liz Truss, announced her own good-old-days policy by slating Thatcher-level tax cuts, and global currency markets responded with scorn. Because if there’s anything Europe needs, it’s 1980s-level unemployment and labor unrest.
As I’ve recently written, popular culture keeps looking backward because, I suspect, it’s leery about whether we have a future. But in pulling focus outward to encompass the larger social terrain, that seems to be a widespread attitude outside Hollywood, too. From gingham dresses to brownshirts, our discourse is dominated by nostalgic longing for a beatified past that never quite really existed. Just ask anybody who survived Jim Crow.
I understand this fear of having no future. Look outside your window: it’s blazing hot and getting hotter, and we’re running out of clean water. Capitalism has created intense poverty, but rosy-eyed alternatives don’t fix injustice, they move it around. A small handful of centibillionaires are so wealthy they’d rather flee Earth than fix its problems. It’s easy to feel like there’s no future. But if we don’t find our future soon, the future will surely find us.
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