RETVRN rhetoric is everywhere. It’s at the height of its power, the same way woke stuff was in 2019. If you at all follow right wing world on Twitter or elsewhere, you are familiar with a certain kind of pining: Let’s go back to a rural way of life. Let’s reassert traditional gender roles. Let’s erase the Sexual Revolution. Let’s RETVRN.
Beneath this idea is another one: an image (some would say a mirage) of Real America. Real America has barns. It’s in the heartland somewhere, away from the grasp of the ever-menacing coastal elites. You can hear crickets at night there. And people exist in a kind of pastoral idyll, making babies and canning their own yams.
I’m very familiar with the RETVRN fantasy. In fact, I’ve tried it three times. And that’s only in my adult life. I am originally from a rural area. I have hillbilly blood. My grandpa had a rifle hanging over his kitchen table that he used to shoot groundhogs in his garden with. I know bucolic settings — down to the tick bites, the gut-wrenching loneliness, the lack of opportunity and the complete dearth of anyone within 300 miles to have sex with.
I’m also familiar with the beauty — the way nature can heal things you never thought would get better, the way living in daily contact with farm animals can somehow set things right in your soul. I would never deny this. But I have serious misgivings about this lifestyle — or the Benedict Option, as Rod Dreher would say — being the antidote to modern alienation. In my experience, it only increased it.
The first time I tried to RETVRN, I was living with an older man I was in love with on his farm. It was a property that had been in his family for centuries. The sound of a rooster was his only alarm, and his commute through the woods to his groundskeeping job on another estate was a hell of a lot better than my 45-minute subway ride had been. I remember hearing the owl at night there, and thinking that I would never go back to New York, that I no longer had any interest in social media, or even working, for that matter. But after about two years, I found myself wandering through his woods listening to crappy Drake songs that reminded me of my stupid hipster friends and feeling nostalgic toward my crappy retail job. And weirdly, in the middle of the night, when one would think I’d be communing with the healing sounds of wildlife, I would often go on my phone and read Gawker (the old one). I needed life. I needed messiness. I needed gossip, competition, intrigue, company. I needed the city.
The second time I tried to RETVRN, I went upstate. It wasn’t the area of New York state I was originally from, but an artist colony nestled in the Hudson Valley. And these folks, reacting to the Don’t Tread On Me’s that surrounded them in that alt-right era, were not just woke but some form of mutant woke on speed. EVERYTHING was about smashing the patriarchy and being an artiste and community-supported agriculture. Birkenstock chicks looked at you sideways if you wore heels. People fought over leeks at the farmer’s market.
And often, on a Friday or Saturday night I’d be alone, on my phone. Watching panel discussions on YouTube or chatting with old friends in the city on Instagram. A lot of the people I met upstate weren’t very driven (aside from the hardworking farmers starting their own businesses). They mostly wanted to stay in at night, cooking something slow and organic, or knitting. No joke. There wasn’t a sense of raging ambition — of careening toward what God is calling you to do at all costs, of sacrificing everything for a beautiful unreachable goal. They wanted to be comfortable.
I went back to the city. I needed it. And the city treated me well. I found friends, other freaks and weirdos who cared about making it, hustling, and were a constant source of encouragement and stimulus if the going got rough. They knew how to tell you to apply for food stamps, if you needed to. How to get over that one girl or guy and “diversify your portfolio.” They knew how to tell you to not give up.
The last (and most recent) time I tried to RETVRN was last fall. I decided to go back to my homeland in red rural New York and reclaim my roots. I lived with relatives — an older couple, Christian conservatives and Trump voters, and truly the best, most welcoming people I have ever met. Their patience was infinite, their goodwill toward others unmatched. They’re the kind of people you see a picture of when you look up “salt of the earth” in the dictionary. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches after church on Sundays, and listened to Willy Nelson on drives to Walmart. They accepted me, and far from finding it strange that I liked to sit in their attic and write for hours every morning, found me a special chair and wooden desk that had belonged to my great-grandfather. They were everything to me. Someday I’ll write much more about them.
But there, too, most of my deepest relationships and interactions took place online. Twitter and Substack were the places I could find others who shared my interests. People who understood my references. People to talk about Orwell with. Or Mahler. Or that quip Christopher Hitchens made in that one interview with that one annoying feminist. I couldn't find these things in my local community, as meaningful as it was. And I needed these things.
What the RETVRN people are missing is that it’s all Real America. Yes, Real America is a homestead in rural Pennsylvania with a banner that says FREEDOM attached to it. But the studio where Puff Daddy and Mase recorded “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” is also Real America. The truck where 53 migrants died in San Antonio this summer is Real America. Double-masked yoga ladies in Lululemon are Real America. Some dude scratching his balls and playing video games in his parents’ basement in suburban California is Real America. A dominatrix receiving her favorite client at lunchtime in a Midtown Manhattan dungeon is Real America. All of this is as real as raising your own kids and growing your own vegetables.
I’ll tell you what doesn’t feel real: living in a place so isolated that almost all of your interactions take place online, even though you moved there to escape Being Online. Trying to go back to a version of the past that doesn’t exist. Hanging out with other people on Zoom as you each lead lives in remote locations sealed off from modernity. That’s not the antithesis of the tragedy of the atomized individual — it’s its natural conclusion.
I remember a night several years ago when I drove to the city from upstate. It was a full moon and my Dad had just had surgery. I was scared and aware of mortality and I needed to feel alive. I ended up in front of the McDonald’s on Delancey Street in the arms of a close friend. She looked at me with concern as I cried. “I think you’re too isolated up there,” she said. “I think you should come back here. There’s a reason people live in cities.” We rode the subway back to her place, and a stranger gave me a brown napkin to blow my nose in. I was home.
The hard-fisted Right loves to bang on about family, but family can be a tyranny of its own. Yes, perhaps most people would be happier if they got married young and had a bunch of kids. And living close to one’s family of origin for most people is a positive thing. But what if your family is fucked up? What if one or both of your parents are abusive and you need to get away from them to survive? What if you spend your childbearing years in drug or alcohol addiction before finding recovery in your 50s? Does your life then have no redemptive qualities for the procreation-obsessed Right? Will the girlboss vs. tradwife warriors ever wear themselves out? There are other paths to being a fulfilled woman — devoting oneself to being an artist or joining religious life among them. Why is this almost never acknowledged?
Even Jesus wasn’t a family fundamentalist. He said there are sometimes higher callings:
For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:35-38)
One might call this radical individualism. And make no mistake, it is individualists who will suffer (and are suffering) if woke tribalism or postliberal communitarianism truly take hold. Anyone who doesn’t fit into a category will suffer. Transgressive artists will suffer. Gays will suffer. The non-procreative will suffer. The biracial will suffer. Anyone who still believes in the profound American ethos of self-determination will suffer.
RETVRNing is as regressive as segregated dorms, as fantastical as Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness schemes. And I’m sure the RETVRN-tards will call me a liberal cuck or cocksucker or whatever, but I’m here to tell them that the country people they fetishize and aspire to emulate do not share their philosophy at all. I know because I came from those people. And although my seventy-year-old red-county second cousin would never describe herself this way, she is essentially a classical liberal or small-l libertarian. She does not want to control other people. She does not want to bludgeon them into submission. She and her husband, with their eagle sculptures on the mantle and homemade apple pies on the counter, are the embodiment of the “live and let live” energy that defines this country — or used to. This sacred flame must not be forgotten. It is everything that makes us who we are.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the homesteading section at Barnes and Noble over the years. It’s usually right next to the prepping section — you know, the books about how hoarding 700 jars of beets will save you from the Great Reset or whatever. And even though I live in a city now, there’s still some part of me that does want the whole baby-on-hip and chickens running underfoot thing. Part of what drives me crazy about the RETVRN folks is that on some level I agree with them so much. I’m not against trying it again — maybe in a year, I’ll be writing these screeds from somewhere in West Virginia. But I have to find the right person to do it with, or finally have the courage to recede Thoreau-like into the ether on my own. Someday I’ll get it right.
