Last week, conservative influencer Emily Wilson set the right-wing internet on fire with a video chiding women who are attracted to what she calls “trad wife bullsh*t,” saying that they will end up “trapped by a man” unless they make their own money. The video immediately magnified tensions on the right which have existed since Milton Friedman and William F. Buckely exchanged friendly fire. 

Matt Walsh argued that people such as Wilson, “despise the very things which conservatism by definition is meant to be conserving.” Libertarian Hannah Cox snapped back by defining conservatism as, “conserving constitutional rights, a limited government, and a [sic] capitalism.”

Social media platforms like X are no place for a substantive debate about anything, much less a decades-old right-wing fissure. Yet it is worth noting how shockingly fast these debates surface even under a character limit. It is obvious that while alliances between various schools of thought on what we loosely term “the right” are often necessary to win politically, only one vision will win out when it comes to determining what kind of culture we are building out of thin air, or conserving from our founding traditions. 

The word “conservative” is a term without a concrete definition, used and abused by an endless stream of influencers and “thought leaders,” either co-opting it for themselves, or offering for it absurd definitions which no one in their right minds would wish to claim. For libertarians, the term means nothing more than protecting liberty, under the auspices of preserving the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution. 

While the wisdom of adding these guaranteed liberties to our Constitution has been a whole other debate bubbling up from time to time on the broadly defined right, let us put that aside for now and agree that at the very least, liberties such as freedom of speech, association, or publication are important parts of our republic. Are these enough to build a country? 

For libertarians, the ideal culture is, to put it most charitably, one where the trad wives can freely choose to bake sourdough and be “oppressed” by their husbands alongside the gays having consensual adult sex and adopting children. It is a culture that has existed in no time or place, and one that would have had the men who wrote their treasured Bill of Rights recoiling in horror. 

Without attempting to settle disputes over the meaning of  the much-maligned “trad-wives”—a malleable social media trend that is thus incapable of concrete definitions—the ire with which certain “liberty-minded” right-wingers attack these women is quite telling. More than anything, it shows how in every society, one vision of its ideals will always win out. As others have put it, every society has a national religion, so it’s simply a matter of which one we uphold. 

Take, for instance, recent debates over gay couples adopting children they have purchased via commercial surrogacy. A libertarian view would emphasize the right of a “loving couple” to form a family through scientific ingenuity and an ample bank account, so long as this child is treated well. A conservatism that stresses the conservation of moral virtue over individualism would emphasize the ill-effects of a culture that treats children as scientific experiments and financial commodities. It would also emphasize the right of the child to grow up with one mother and one father, even at the expense of a gay couple’s “right” to form a family. In this circumstance, the vision of these two types of “conservatives” cannot co-exist—one wins and one loses. 

It is, of course, self-evident which side should win. Far more societal destruction has been wrought by legalizing gay marriage and abortion, liberalizing divorce laws, and making public schools cesspools of immorality than by any tariff on imports, which seems to keep the libertarian right up at night. The hypothetical children of the “trad wife” whom Wilson attacks will be far better equipped to withstand the slings and arrows of our degenerate culture after being raised by a woman focused more on serving her family than “making money.” Yet libertarians think nothing at all of the cultural effects that come from destroying every traditional value that built our society so long as every picayune personal liberty a degenerate brain can imagine is permitted to influence our culture.