What’s the deal with crunchy moms voting right?

And I ADMIT that I secretly love trad wife vibes

Let me just start by saying that YOU ARE WELCOME HERE regardless of your political affiliation. I’m about to dig into mom politics, but stick with me: my message is ultimately a call for unity.

Like every other mom influencer, I have a total obsession with tradwife culture. I love it and I hate it. Mostly, I feel like we are talking about it TOO much, but after reading this article by Sara Peterson yesterday I couldn't help but chime in again. 

In a nutshell: Rudy Jude is partnering with Ballerina Farm. If those names mean nothing to you, let me catch you up real quick:

Ballerina Farm is a massively successful Instagram account and business owned by Hannah Neeleman and husband Daniel. I wrote about Ballerina Farm more extensively in a previous post, but in sum, she’s Mormon, a mother of eight, clearly has some very conservative social values, and is considered Queen of the Tradwives (if you have not followed the tradwife movement, it’s all about women embracing domesticity and “traditional” gender roles). Her account recently became a lightning rod for feminist controversy after a viral article was published about the dark side of her glossy social media appearance (namely, the burnout of trying to raise eight children with little help). The article was pretty biased and a bit predatory, but it did highlight some of the core issues with tradwife culture and social media. The key take-away here is that many feminists consider Ballerina Farm and the tradwife movement to be problematic. The other major take-away is that Hannah Neeleman and husband are obviously right-wing, politically-speaking.

Above: Hannah Neeleman and family

Rudy Jude is an independent fashion brand owned by Julie O’Rourke. She makes amazing plant-dyed clothes using sustainable, organic materials. She has this gorgeous, crunchy-mom aesthetic: her feed is full of photos of her with her children making flower crowns, baking bread, wearing her lovely organic clothes through pregnancy. People mostly associate her with the crunchy left. 

Above: Julie O’Rourke, owner of Rudy Jude, wearing one of her signature sets

I am particularly obsessed with Rudy Jude because I also launched and operated an organic clothing brand for mothers for a little over a year. I was pissed off that brands were not making sustainable (and attractive) clothing that fit through pregnancy and worked for nursing, and I thought I could fill that gap. It was kind of a disaster. I knew nothing about the industry and let me tell you, the business of making clothes, especially if you want to be sustainable and ethical, is the WORST. But Rudy Jude seems to be a success, and for the brief year that my business was operating, our clientele had a lot of overlap. 

Looking back, my brand (Hera it was called) had a bit of a tradwife aesthetic. This was totally unconscious. I think that by trying to create beautiful clothes from organic materials that were designed to fit pregnant bodies, they just kind of came out that way. I also gravitated towards some tradwife influencers to help promote the clothing (I honestly did not know of the term at the time - had it even been invented?) because their aesthetic aligned with mine. They were all very nice and very enthusiastic about promoting a brand whose core values were sustainability, ethics, and giving mothers more options for dressing through their childbearing years. 

Some of the first pieces I launched with Hera: made form organic cotton and Indigo-dyed using only botanical ingredients.

But anyway, the point is that this partnership between Ballerina Farm and Rudy Jude became kind of a panic headline because moms were like, WAIT, IS JULIE A REPUBLICAN?? 

We really have no way of knowing, nor do I think it matters, but what I DO want to talk about is the merging of the crunchy left and the right (something known as horseshoe theory, identified as far back as 1972 and discussed extensively in this 2022 Atlantic piece) because I think it is fascinating. Political lines are being redrawn. Lefties are defecting to the right en masse. What is happening here?

Above: Julie O’Rourke promoting Ballerina Farm’s protein powder (from Sara Peteron’s article)

A lot has already been written on this topic by people far more knowledgeable on the subject than I am. What I am sharing here is not an expert opinion or deep historical or geopolitical analysis of how this plays out, but just my personal observations of what I see in my own communities (online and offline). In fact, I tend to take issue with a lot of the “expert” analysis on this topic because I think it generally serves to antagonize rather than unite.

Growing up, my family was oh-so-crunchy and, at the time, that was a very left-wing thing to be. We cared about the ENVIRONMENT and WELLNESS and so we shopped at the local health food store, brought our own bags and consumed only organic food. My parents believed in outdoor free play and no TV. They evaluated the quality of a preschool based on how dirty the kids were at the end of the day. Because we attended crunchy school, pretty much everyone we knew and hung out with was also crunchy, and to my knowledge, they all voted Democrat. They fucking LOVED Bill Clinton. I remember moms in my neighborhood practically dancing in the streets when Bill was reelected (I was 8). 

These days, a lot of the people I knew growing up no longer identify as Democrats. A lot of them wanted to see RFK Jr in the white house in 2024. As this brilliant post by themamattourney points out, even before RFK Jr defected and threw his weight behind Trump, he had long been supported by the MAGA superPACs. So I think it’s safe to say that RFK Jr was a right-wing candidate. 

In my opinion, the crunchy-mom support for RFK is really all about vaksines (misspelling this seems to be a best practice on the world wide webs these days so the algorithmic overloads do not penalize you). Crunchy moms do not like vaksines. It goes against the wellness part of the crunchy-mom mandate. When Covid happened, there was a lot of vaksine-pushing by the Democrats and that drove many crunchy moms to the right. RFK Jr’s platform was pretty much all about vaksines. I honestly do not know what else he stood for. Even some of the crunchy moms who wanted him in office did not know what else he stood for. They just really, really don’t like vaksines. Now that RFK Jr has withdrawn from the race and endorsed Donald Trump, I’m sure some of his fans will vote Republican. Some may also vote for Harris. I know others who have said they will not vote at all.

The not-liking-vaksines thing goes hand-in-hand with the homeschool thing. Again, I have not done deep research on this, but anecdotally I know many mothers who choose to homeschool because they cannot send their children to school if they refuse to give them vaksines. This is, of course, not the only reason mothers choose to homeschool, but it’s a big one.

Another crunchy-mom reason for defecting to the right is hope for peace. The hippie movement (hippies were the original crunchies) was anti-war to its core. Many modern-day hippies actually view Donald Trump as the peace president. Moms in my community have told me that they will always vote for the president who they believe is least likely to start a war, because mothers feel the pain of war worse than anyone else. It’s true that Dick Cheney and the neocon republicans responsible for the war in Iraq have publicly endorsed Kamala Harris. Does that make Harris a war hawk? I don’t know.

That’s not all though. It’s not that simple. These things are never simple. And that’s why it’s so interesting. Here’s where it gets a little less obvious:

Crunchiness is all about doing things the more “natural way.” Trust me, I know. That is why so many crunchy moms love my account. That is also probably why (in part) I myself got so obsessed with researching hunter-gatherers and the evolution of motherhood. I was raised in a crunchy family and I wanted to know more about what the “natural way” really is!

Conservative, religious and right-wing groups care a lot about preserving traditional family values and gender norms. The whole tradwife thing is really built around this. And “traditional” and “natural” intersect in some interesting ways. Both the tradwives and the crunchy moms seem to care about natural, unmedicated birth (that’s actually a Catholic thing that goes way back. My very-Catholic grandmother was a free-birther with all four kids because she believes in Original Sin). They also care about breastfeeding, about baby-wearing, and increasingly about free play and no TV. 

One of my big battles on Instagram is combating the idea that tradwife motherhood is actually a return to something more “natural” for the human species. As I point out in this reel, hunter-gatherer mothers space births about four years apart, they rarely have more than four children, they have abundant help from the community, they spend 50% of their waking hours in leisure (no less than men), and they are the primary “economic” providers for their families (gathering provides the majority of the calories in hunter-gatherer societies). However, I do concede that in other regards, Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm is doing things the hunter-gatherer way. She is a free-birther. She baby-wears and breastfeeds. She actively involves the older children in household chores and care of the younger children (this is a very hunter-gatherer thing to do, as I have spoken about here). She is all about the farm-fresh food and spending time outdoors. 

Another component of this is that a lot of moms, crunchy or not, are very disillusioned with mainstream feminism, which is associated with the political left. To be honest, one of my first thoughts after becoming a mom was “Oh my God, feminism needs a rewrite!” Prior to pushing out a baby, I was happily on-board, not just with feminism, but with the Sheryl-Sandberg-Lean-In version of it that so many mothers (and other feminists) are now desperately against. When that book came out in 2013 I was 25-years-old and in a phase of life where career was ALL that mattered to me. I thought it was SO COOL that I was one of the ONLY WOMEN willing to be a total slave in the private equity consulting industry, working 90-hour workweeks and deflecting low-key sexual harassment left and right. In defense of Sandberg, that book did do a good job of highlighting the major obstacles that a certain brand of (often privileged) high-achieving women face in the workplace. After my son was born, and even more so after my daughter came along two years later, I realized that I no longer had any interest in being a tech-boss-bitch and began resenting the fact that I felt so much societal pressure to cash in on my Stanford degree in the most lucrative way possible. All of that to say, I GET why moms are disillusioned with mainstream feminism and this is part of the reason why some of them are sliding to the right. 

I also want to talk about a second, less-discussed “pipeline” to the right. In my last post, I talked about the surprising partnership between the data-driven parenting guru Emily Oster and The Free Press. Regardless of what you think of The Free Press, it’s pretty obvious to me that they are (mostly) right-wing. Bari Weiss is probably not voting for Kamala Harris. Does that mean that Oster is actually a closet Republican? It’s unclear and I don’t think it matters, but let’s talk about how it happened and what it means for mommy politics. 

Once again, I think this all goes back to Covid. In 2020, Oster wrote an opinion piece for The Atlantic entitled “Parents Can’t Wait Around Forever” advocating for schools to reopen. She was, in her own words, “crucified” for it. People said she was willing to sacrifice lives for her own convenience. But, it must be said, she simply articulated something that MANY parents were feeling at the time, especially moms. Moms were absolutely crushed by the pandemic. A lot has been written about this since, and a lot has been written about how devastating school closures were for many children. In that regard, I do feel that Oster has been somewhat vindicated, but I think the whole experience probably pushed her to the right. I think it probably pushed a LOT of moms to the right. Moms are sick and tired of being the LAST demographic that policy-makers prioritize, and it’s especially aggravating when we stand up for ourselves and then get a heap of holier-than-thou moral judgment thrown at us. 

Oster fans are, in general, NOT crunchy. In fact, the crunchy demographic hates her for downplaying the importance of breastfeeding, for being a big advocate of daycare and for saying it’s okay to sleep train your baby. (Interestingly, she is a big proponent of unmedicated birth, but that is not enough to vindicate her in the eyes of the crunchies). The Oster fans in my circles are generally full-time working moms who don’t mind putting their kids in daycare, who REALLY like drinking coffee while pregnant, and who love data. Most of them were very pissed about school closures during Covid. Many of them wouldn’t mind paying lower taxes (especially in the Bay Area where property taxes for a 1000-sq-foot home are more than it used to cost me to rent a goddamn palace in the heart of Paris with friends). And maybe (this is harder to ascertain because people tend not to say it out loud) some of them are a little fed up with the left-wing political-correctness thing. 

Oster has had an interesting string of guests on the Raising Parents podcast that she produces with The Free Press, including Erica Komisar, who embodies some very right-wing ideology connected with biological mothers being the only legitimate caregivers for children, especially in the first three years. Oster did push back on this. She also had Abigail Shrier on the show, author of Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up and Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze, which ALSO came out in 2020 at the height of the pandemic. Both of those books (I think) spoke to teen moms who were on the front lines of the adolescent mental health crisis (which hit its peak during lockdown). Irreversible Damage was named Book of the Year by The Economist. In the reviews section on Amazon, the comments are full of people saying, “I am LGBT but you must read this book” or “Left-wing progressive here, every parent must read this.” The fact that people feel the need to identify as politically-left before recommending the book is interesting in and of itself and, to be clear, I do not think that reading this book automatically makes you a right-winger (or anti-trans). However, if you look at “What Customers Also Viewed” in association with Irreversible Damage on Amazon, you get some VERY conservative stuff. Amazon will also highly recommend that you read a lot of Jonathon Haidt books, including The Anxious Generation and The Coddling of the American Mind. Jonathan Haidt has also been on the show with Oster talking about the importance of free play for kids. I am a huge proponent of free play (again, in line with how things were done in our evolutionary past) but I did not realize, until I started digging into all of this, just how much the free play movement is associated with right-wing ideology. In the “What Customers Also Viewed” section associated with The Coddling of the American Mind is a book called The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us by Carrie Gress (!!!). If you click on that book, Amazon will recommend that you also read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. There is no such equivalently short path leading to Becoming by Michelle Obama (or any left-wing memoirs) despite the fact that it was also a best-seller.

Do these associations matter? Yes and no. I think it’s good to know about the affiliations of people and ideas so we can be on the lookout for (explicit or implicit) biases. Do I think political progressives need to all immediately defect from the free play movement and stop reading Jonathon Haidt books for fear of entering “the pipeline”? No.

I am voting for Kamala Harris next month. I have not been very secret about that. I believe the upcoming presidential election represents a pivotal moment for child care policy and paid leave: two issues I care a lot about. Kamala Harris has said she wants to cap child care costs at 7% of working families’ income. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have acknowledged the problem (which is progress!) but failed to put forward any real solutions, instead falling back on vague rhetoric about promoting “choice” or suggesting that “maybe Grandma and Grandpa want to help out a little bit more.” Looking at the track records of Tim Walz versus J.D. Vance on issues like paid family leave and childcare subsidies, I think it’s pretty obvious who is more likely to actually push policies aimed at helping moms once in the Whitehouse. I also care a LOT about reproductive freedom and Harris has unequivocally thrown her weight behind protecting a woman’s right to choose. There are many other reasons. That said, I do NOT agree with her on all of the issues (far from it).

The more active I am on social media, the more I have come to hate our digital tribalism. Everyone is obsessed with trying to figure out whose side everyone is on. That’s why people got so worked up about the Rudy Jude and Ballerina Farm partnership. Everyone just assumed that Rudy Jude was a left-wing brand whereas Ballerina Farm is clearly conservative! At the end of the day, these are just two moms operating Instagram-driven businesses who probably have some overlap in their customer-base and so a partnership made sense. You shouldn’t stop buying Rudy Jude clothes if you like them just because she is associated with someone who (probably) votes right. Her clothes are amazing, and anyone who is out there doing the very hard work of making sustainable, ethical garments gets my support. 

Instead of trying to constantly delineate who we are with and who we are against, what if we started trying to find common ground? I posted about this in my stories recently and got a bunch of backlash from people on the left saying things like, “how can you try to find COMMON GROUND with people who are racist and misogynist?” Sigh. Donald Trump has indeed said many racists and misogynist things. But in a bipartisan political system, all it takes is for someone to feel really strongly about one issue that aligns with a certain candidate to vote for that candidate. It does mean that they wholeheartedly endorse every aspect of what that candidate stands for.

I hope this article helps to explain why some people, especially moms, who may otherwise have quite a lot in common, vote differently. It’s not as black and white as the political machine wants us to believe. 

I am a big fan of Rebecca Solnit. In her book, Hope in the Dark, she says:

“Another binary that has become outdated is right and left…I’ve often wondered what alliances and affinities might arise without those badges. For example, the recent American militia movements were patriarchal, nostalgic, nationalist, gun-happy, and full of weird fantasies about the UN, but they had something in common with us: they prized the local and feared its erasure by the transnational. The guys drilling with guns might’ve been too weird to be our allies, but they were just the frothy foam on a big wave of alienation, suspicion and fear from people watching their livelihoods and their communities go down the tubes. What could have happened if we could have spoken directly to the people in that wave, if we could have found common ground, if we could have made our position neither right nor left but truly grassroots? What would have happened if we had given them an alternate version of how local power was being sapped, by whom, and what they might do about it? We need them, we need a broad base, we need a style that speaks to far more people than the left has lately been able to speak to and for.”

Preach, Rebecca. 

So go buy yourself some Ruby Jude clothes if you like them. But most of all, stop yelling and start listening. Start looking for commonalities rather than differences. Whether you like it or not, we live in a country where half of the population votes right. No one is all good or all bad. No political party is all good or all bad. Most humans, regardless of political affiliation, are good people.