8: Antifascist Parenting: Depression/Hope-Whiplash

8: Antifascist Parenting – Depression/Hope Whiplash Host: Matthew Remski [00:00:00] How do you know you're doing a good job as a depressed antifascist parent? [00:00:05] You teach your kid to stand up for justice even when all you want to do is crawl back into bed for the rest of the decade. [00:00:18] I'm Matthew Remski. That was a sad-trombones antifascist dad joke. Welcome to episode eight: Antifascist Parenting – Depression/Hope Whiplash. [00:00:28] No guest today, and a shorter episode too. Here’s why: last week, as the latest tranche of Epstein files dropped and the White House edged closer to an insane but predictable war on Venezuela to divert attention from the files while pursuing oil reserves, I posted a five-minute reflection on antifascist parenting and mental health to TikTok and Instagram. I said in the reel that what I was about to describe might be a familiar feeling, and then I received an outpouring of feedback that confirmed it. I wanted to follow up. So this is not sociology, but it’s a good place to start. [00:01:14] It was a meditation about the layers of a painful conundrum, and I think I can boil it down to five main points. [00:01:23] First: as an adult with anticapitalist education and values and a commitment to antifascism, you are more than likely stressed out and depressed, because you have a clear idea of what’s happening in late capitalism—from everyday exploitation to global inequality to genocide to climate chaos. You understand how intractable these problems are. You can’t close your eyes. You can’t turn away. [00:01:53] Number two: you can’t turn away from your kids either. [00:01:58] Number three: you know you cannot let your anxiety over these existential threats cloud or sour your relationship with them, even as you know they will be impacted by them. [00:02:12] Number four: when you’re overwhelmed and you want or need to dissociate, you probably won’t have time. In fact, you’ll be called on to do the opposite—to offer presence, curiosity, a sense of possibility. [00:02:29] You might be thinking of death counts in Gaza but then have to whiplash into a conversation about the Divine Beasts in Zelda. [00:02:38] The quicker you flip, the less chance there is for the kid to see you glitch. But the quicker you flip, the more you can lose contact with your own feelings. [00:02:48] A side note: I think one of the reasons that Ms. Rachel is so compelling and comforting to so many of us is that navigating this double space—and that flip—has become her job. It’s her brand. It’s what she’s known for, and she seems to have the temperament to pull it off. [00:03:04] We get some vicarious comfort from that skill. [00:03:08] But we can’t know the long-term impact of the whiplash she must feel in snapping back and forth between advocating for children in Gaza starved by the IOF, and helping with the emotional attunement of kids enjoying relative safety in the global North. [00:03:25] I do think she has an advantage in that her job requires a certain conscious performance. She’s not in those overalls and pink hair wrap all the time. It’s not just her own relationships that demand her attunement; it’s also the camera. [00:03:41] Number five: as if all of this wasn’t complicated enough, there’s another dynamic. [00:03:50] Your objective can’t be to protect the child from reality indefinitely, but to expose them to enough of reality at the proper time. [00:04:00] You have to somehow help titrate their levels of disillusionment and resilience in the right alchemical balance, while never making your own melancholy theirs. [00:04:12] Today I want to expand on this theme of emotional splitting, and also add a parallel conceptual and affective challenge many of us struggle with: the fact that a Leftist or Marxist mode of analyzing the world is driven by suspicion. [00:04:34] Once you unlock the basic logic of exploitation, you see it everywhere—and you go looking for it. You hear every institutional apologist for the way things are—from politicians to journalists to grade school teachers—through a skeptical ear. [00:04:54] Understanding the truth of capital has a social shadow to it. When you’re surrounded by people who don’t see it, or don’t want to, it can reduce the capacity for social trust. [00:05:08] You want your kid to be discerning, but you don’t want them to be isolated or nihilistic. [00:05:14] I’ll also leave behind the typical presentation format in which me and a guest dump info on you—even if it’s good info—because I want to explore this emotional territory with the objective of generating dialogue. I’ve said throughout my planning and marketing that I wanted this project to be participatory, and while that’s happening with guests and collaborations, this is a next step. [00:05:42] I’ll be calling out for comments on this episode, and there are a number of ways to get them to me. The best way—if you’re comfortable having your comments aired in a future episode—is to send me a voice message on Signal. [00:06:05] You can find me on Signal at antifascistdad.71. [00:06:10] You can also find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and DM me there. [00:06:15] You can also consider joining me on Patreon at antifascistdadpodcast. My DMs are open there. And you can follow and message me on TikTok and YouTube at antifascistdad. [00:06:31] Let’s see what happens. Maybe we’ll wind up doing a panel or three on managing this double but unified life. [00:06:43] The last housekeeping note is that the preorder link for my book is in the show notes. [00:06:51] When I sat down to write the book this podcast is based on, the first image that came to mind was that of walking a line between two worlds. [00:07:01] In earlier drafts, this section opened the book, but it got moved back because it felt a bit like throwing the reader into the deep end. But here are some excerpts. [00:07:13] If your family or caregiving life is anything like mine, you might feel like living in capitalism splits your life in two. [00:07:22] In one reality, there’s the warm, pulsing uncertainty of growth and learning that pervades parenting life: cooking, reading, music, videos; finding things, fixing things, getting places on time; calling up the stairs or down from the balcony; finding socks; resetting passwords; night sweats; terrors; texts about schedules, groceries, misplaced objects, and I love yous; keeping things clean; offering comfort; laundry, gaming, colds, COVID. Do we have tests? Bird flu is coming. [00:08:04] Constant worry, terrible sleep, and moments of stillness. [00:08:08] There’s never enough time to process all the trouble and joy, claustrophobia and gratitude, all the love that drives us on. [00:08:19] In this reality there are struggles over space, time, sleep, and attention, and the ongoing negotiation of duties and boundaries. [00:08:30] No bookkeeper can calculate what is given and owed in love and care. This is not an economy of transactions, loans, or debts. There’s no private property, despite what the kids think of their toys and devices. [00:08:45] And although so much of it is hard, I couldn’t stop giving if I tried. [00:08:51] It is the way of the world that the kids will always need something, and it will always be more than I think I have. [00:08:58] So my life pours out into theirs until there’s nothing left of me. That’s how we die but continue on in their bodies and minds and relationships, following paths we cannot imagine. [00:09:13] If we could live more fully and without interruption in this endless river of giving and grief, we might extend that logic naturally into neighborhood, community, and government. [00:09:29] We might glimpse a world in which we do not have to strategize against fascism because where would we have allowed it to fester? What inequality, resentment, need for retribution, or scapegoating would it latch onto? [00:09:46] The second reality is always pressing in, attempting to colonize this home. [00:09:55] This is the world of debt, exploitation, trafficking, layoffs, evictions. Every interaction is governed by plastic cards, numbers, numb bureaucracies, and the threat of destitution. [00:10:10] A reality where every bit of surplus value is sucked into a machine designed to devour more of the world. [00:10:18] The absurd pressure between everyday communism and capitalist brainrot seems to ebb and flow hour by hour. They are never separate. [00:10:29] Surveillance and rent-seeking seep into all private spaces. It pings on the phone through a banking app. It stuffs bills through the mail slot, alongside rent hikes or reverse-mortgage offers. [00:10:44] It guides us through the socialization of our kids into overscheduled cycles of productivity and shame. It offers us the opportunity to monetize their achievements on social media. [00:10:58] But it also tells us to pathologize the kid who isn’t hitting all the benchmarks. [00:11:04] It tells us to worry about our kids, but not how to be with them. [00:11:10] It tells us how to help our kids get ahead in a senseless world for which we are responsible. [00:11:16] It does not tell us how to help them help each other change its basic rules. [00:11:23] Every day, overt cruelty streams through the news. [00:11:27] My job demands that I pay close attention to the most disturbing stories, so it often feels like I’ve got one earbud in listening to reports about ghouls destroying the planet while trying to keep the other ear open to listen with curiosity and hope to what our kids are thinking about. [00:11:45] My body stands braced between the world and the child. How porous will I become? [00:11:54] So that’s where I started. [00:11:56] Today, my kids are more than a year older, at nine and thirteen, and fascism has accelerated to the point that trying to keep one foot on the political awareness and hypervigilance train and the other foot on the domestic platform of what kids need most at any given time—not the news cycle, not my own unprocessed panic—feels like it’s tearing me in two. [00:12:24] There’s also the isolation of it. [00:12:26] I’m part of a lot of leftist online spaces, but unless you live in unusual progressive or radical communities, you may find yourself alone in this split experience. [00:12:40] To not be alone with the stress of this double life, you have to find fellow adults who feel it as you do—adults who aren’t dissociating. [00:12:51] I understand the dissociators. [00:12:54] Given how heavy things can be, I can sympathize with the endless schedule of activities that many families preoccupy themselves with, with the outcome that they wind up with little time to think, let alone grieve. [00:13:08] I understand why Disney is a top global corporation. [00:13:13] People need a procedurally generated positive world unfolding in front of them. That’s what productivity and consumerism are: an endless horizon of virtual comfort. [00:13:27] That is the relief capitalism offers as it strip-mines the planet. [00:13:34] But if you see through it—if you know how that consumerism both distracts from and causes the destruction of workers and the world—you’ll sit there in the movie theater facilitating the child’s access to wonderment, paying for it with money you don’t have, or that might be better spent on the poor. [00:13:55] These are deeply conflicting feelings. [00:14:01] If you don’t find people who see through it with you, a fair amount of your neighborhood social time might be spent talking with neighbors about dogs or sports or cooking projects. [00:14:13] If you’re like me, you’ll have some tolerance for all that, but it also feels like how autistic people describe masking: hiding impulses and responses, tamping down honesty for the sake of social lubrication. [00:14:29] If this is tracking with you, then I want to suggest that the first issue we might actually be able to work on is the sense of being orphaned. [00:14:40] Every challenge I’ve described so far is presented as zero-sum and inevitable. [00:14:47] It’s the feeling that we ourselves are no longer parented, and that we alone are standing between kids and the void. [00:14:56] Being orphaned might be literally true for the person alienated from elders or whose elders have died. [00:15:04] It can be culturally true for deracinated white people like myself. My dad is the youngest of ten, and those who are still around are scattered across the country by college, military life, and promises of social mobility. Distances widen due to substance issues as well. [00:15:24] For many of us, the promise of postwar freedom led to an acceptance of the suburban belief that you could be just fine on your own, presiding over your private piece of the landscape. [00:15:41] So that’s one challenge to consider: how can I stop feeling like an orphan? [00:15:47] I’ll return to that at the end. [00:15:57] It’s one thing to feel like an orphan who has to be a caregiver with little backup. It’s another to feel like an orphan who has to be a caregiver with age-inappropriate tools. And if you’re soaking in a Leftist analysis of the world, your tools aren’t exactly fun. [00:16:16] One reason Chapo Trap House does so well is that it makes Marxist analysis very funny—but really too cynical for kids. [00:16:27] There is such a thing as being dirtbagged too young. [00:16:32] The feminist scholar Eve Sedgwick published an extraordinary essay called “Paranoid vs. Reparative Reading” in 2005. [00:16:44] She worked on it during a long period of cancer treatment, and died at the age of 58 in 2009. [00:16:54] I note her death because I find it compelling that she worked on a theory of generosity while staring down her own end. [00:17:05] As you get closer, you have less to lose. [00:17:12] I’m also impressed that Sedgwick didn’t have children, and yet her essay says so much about parenting. [00:17:19] Some of the most interesting parenting reflections come from feminists without kids: Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Angela Davis (through her work with the Black Panthers), bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Silvia Federici. [00:17:38] They remind me of Lenin’s idea of the “professional revolutionary,” able to work on behalf of the working class because they’re not on the factory line. [00:17:50] Back to Sedgwick’s essay. [00:17:53] Maybe you’re familiar with the sensation of paranoid reading. [00:17:57] It’s when every moment you spend in cultural discourse or news, you’re on the lookout for a problem. [00:18:07] You’re waiting to find and isolate some deception, some kind of squishiness. Nothing can be fully trusted. [00:18:17] And there’s reason for it—the facts and history are on your side. The evidence for despair is pervasive. [00:18:27] It can even be satisfying to collect it. [00:18:32] Sedgwick says this mode of reading emerges from the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” an idea from Paul Ricoeur regarding Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Each believed that every text that comes down to us is self-concealing and must be decoded for its repressed cruelties. [00:19:00] Marx spent years in the British Museum poring over ledger books and legal records to uncover the horrors of capitalism hiding in plain sight. [00:19:12] It’s not paranoid reading if you’re right—but there is a cost to the mood. [00:19:18] Sedgwick says paranoid reading is necessary for analyzing power, but it can be stunted by an affect that represses creativity and inhibits repair. [00:19:31] Paranoid reading is anticipatory, reflexive, mimetic, and totalizing. It believes that when everything is exposed, everything will change. Sunlight as disinfectant. [00:19:49] Drawing on psychoanalysis, Sedgwick emphasizes that a powerful motivator is the desire to avoid bad surprises and humiliation. [00:20:17] She writes that paranoid reading “sets a thief to catch a thief,” and quotes Freud: “The man of suspicion carries out in reverse the work of falsification of the man of guile.” [00:20:34] But paranoia knows some things well and other things poorly. [00:20:40] It understands vigilance against oppression, but struggles with the complexities of psychology and how people can surprise you. [00:20:52] When you’re committed to a strong defensive theory of negative affects—focused on suspicion and avoiding pain rather than openness to positive or mixed affects—you set a mood. [00:21:08] Sedgwick argues that reparative reading looks for a text’s empowering and renewing potential—what it can offer for collective healing and social change—rather than solely critiquing its faults or hidden harms. [00:21:34] She’s not suggesting naivete or obliviousness to suffering. She’s suggesting that suspicion should not be our only lens. [00:22:04] I want to read a few responses I received on TikTok to that reel about walking the line between depression and hope—or in Sedgwick’s terms, between paranoia and repair. [00:22:16] Here’s the first commenter: [00:22:19] “It’s exhausting. The tears I hide from my kids, the tension I know they must feel during certain times, feeling like I’m failing at raising them to be informed and aware while still feeling like I’m failing to maintain their innocence appropriately. It’s a whole other layer to parenting that many parents around me don’t seem to be engaging with in the ways I am. We left our red state home turf for bluer pastures, so we’re cut off from like-minded and unlike-minded family and friends. It’s all hard.” [00:22:53] Next: [00:22:59] “I’m a teacher and oh boy is this my every day. The last eight weeks I’ve been pretending to care about Beowulf while knowing my kids will probably go hungry because of the shutdown, that others may go home to parents who have been deported, and I need to be both apolitical and a soft landing place. It’s crazy. I call my mom in tears at least twice a week.” [00:23:22] Next: [00:23:25] “I’ve worried about my own nihilism passing on to my child. But when I explain certain things to my boy at an eleven-year-old level while trying to avoid selective bias, it somehow softens the weight of some things and leaves room for discussion.” [00:23:42] Next: [00:23:48] “I appreciate this post with multiple parts of my identity. I’m a PhD biologist working in climate, spending my days looking at alarming data. I’m also the single mom of two kids just starting their post-college lives, and I’m an adoptee without known ancestry or remaining connections to my adoptive family. Many of us were adopted into deeply conservative, deeply religious homes—as reflected in the regressive politics of the adoption agencies themselves. I find connection working alongside frontline communities fighting the oil and gas industry and providing them good science. Sometimes we win and stop a pipeline, and I let my kids know. When they were little and anxious about the climate crisis, I told them, ‘Mom’s on the job. It’s my job to make sure the world is safe for you to grow up in.’ That message has become more nuanced now that they’re adults. But the dissociation with other adults in my life is still real. It’s isolating. Thank you for articulating this phenomenon.” [00:24:55] Last one: [00:25:00] “I super resonate with this. I feel like I’m living two lives and I have to code switch with so many people, but the hardest is having to code switch with my own kids, while also not sheltering them but letting them be children and grow in time. It’s really hard to balance. I’ve been increasingly turning to some traditions to ground me.” [00:25:29] These comments speak for themselves, but I want to pick up on that last point: [00:25:34] “I’ve been increasingly turning to some traditions to ground me.” [00:25:41] If we’re talking about combating the feeling that there’s little backing us up, it makes sense. [00:25:47] Many of us don’t have parents or elders who are as radical as we are. Many of us radicalized against our parents. [00:25:50] Some of us are lucky and have radical elders, but they may be just as underwater as we are in navigating today’s changing fascist landscape. Or they may need care, or simply have the energy at this point in life for grandparenting. And that’s fair. [00:26:10] This generational dissipation or amnesia is not accidental—it’s the result of the active suppression of radical movements and institutions. [00:26:22] In 1940, there were 20,000 members of the Canadian Communist Party. There were 85,000 members of the Communist Party of the USA. Within a decade, much of that was wiped out. [00:26:36] Liberalism is allowed to pass its inheritance on, generation by generation. Radicalism is not. [00:26:43] If you don’t feel like you have a network behind you, it’s not your fault. They jailed or killed the radical grandparents. [00:26:54] So what about tradition? [00:26:56] I have to think that as hard as it is, any exploration of or investment in the rebuilding of revolutionary party politics would bring ego, trouble, saviorism, boredom—but also worldly support and validating processes: people pouring themselves into cooperative roles with concrete aims. [00:27:22] My mind also turns to something I didn’t touch on in last week’s conversation with David Inczauskis. I’m not boosting Catholicism here, despite the two-week streak, because this idea extends to many institutional religions that accommodate their radical flanks: Islamic socialism, the Buddhism of Ambedkar, Jewish Voices for Peace, the Black Baptist tradition and civil rights. [00:28:04] These are radical movements that enjoy institutional and intergenerational support that political parties rarely match. [00:28:10] Liberation theology surged in distinct historical waves: an explosion in the 1970s, suppression by a conservative Vatican in the 1980s, undermining by CIA interventions, and now a resurgence in the messages of Pope Francis and Leo XIV. [00:28:31] In this Church, we see a global infrastructure of community, ritual, and caregiving. It’s flawed in many ways—historically complicit in colonial and fascist projects, deluded by patriarchy, gender essentialism, homophobia. [00:28:49] But to the extent that it can provide a home and material basis for teaching liberation theology, it looks to me like a network of elders—a web connecting families and generations to a shared liturgy. [00:29:05] It has the potential to foster secure attachment: a radical politics practiced within a ritual tradition that baptizes babies, marries people, and buries them. [00:29:17] A radical politics that supports family and working life and the environment not just through policy but through myth and celebration. [00:29:25] A discourse which, because it's religious—again, I cite LT and Catholicism because of my familiarity—attempts to speak to every dimension of life and to earnestly answer the depressed. [00:29:53] These are some initial thoughts in this territory. I’d love to hear from you about how you navigate all of this in your parenting or caregiving life. [00:30:05] The best way to reach me is antifascistdad.71 on Signal. [00:30:15] Take care of each other. [00:30:21] (End.)