Zen-ish Thoughts From Victorianism to Trumpism

The starting point for all things Zen-ish is to do the best one can to note what is actually so. Not what things appear to be, not what we want them to be, not what they used to be, but what they actually are, here, now. "Virtue signaling" is about as anti-Zen-ish as you can get. It is the public performance of values one does not actually live by, for the purpose of hiding what is so, to simultaneously establish a false personal identity and a tribal affiliation that might be genuine or entirely fictitious.

When people think of Queen Victoria, they imagine the matriarch of prudish Victorian morality – a woman whose sexual reserve and exemplary motherhood supposedly set the tone for an entire age. Yet, it was the other way around. The time and place of her reign set the tone, and this was artificially projected onto her.

Modern scholarship has revealed from her own diary and other sources that Victoria was passionately and sensuously in love with her husband, and unabashed about her enjoyment of sex. She abhorred the constant pregnancies that came with it, and was not keen on motherhood, even though most of the work of raising her children undoubtedly fell to other people.

The stereotype of Victoria as the embodiment of sexual repression and the model of maternal excellence was imposed upon her by a cultural moment when evangelical Christianity surged in Britain. That movement, not Victoria, transformed sexual restraint and elevated motherhood into visible markers of moral and social respectability. The middle class appropriated the carefully cultivated outward appearance of their queen as a visible icon of their cause. She was not one of them, or one with them in spirit. She was the anti-them – a sexual enthusiast who barely tolerated being a mother.

For religious revival to align with sexual regulation and the elevation of "family values" is not unique to Victorian England. It reflects two enduring forces.

First, religion is typically very hostile to sexuality, seeing bodily desire as disruptive of spiritual focus and discipline. Historically, whenever religious intensity surges, sexual conduct becomes a key battleground. Second, sexual morality offered a convenient tribal marker for a rising middle class eager to distinguish itself from both the actually decadent and promiscuous aristocracy (other than their incorrect understanding of Victoria) and the allegedly uncivilized and promiscuous working poor. The public performance of sexual restraint (while still making secret use of brothels) allowed the middle class to claim the moral high ground in both directions, making chastity and revered motherhood and domestic life not the deep fulfillment of actual piety, but merely a shallow signalling mechanism for tribal identity.

In the present, the radical right in the United States is demonstrating the same pattern. They have put gender, sexuality, and women "knowing their place" at the front lines of cultural conflict. "Family values" are proclaimed as sacred rallying points, and transgendered persons presented as the greatest threat to civilization, while at the same time leaders and influencers within the radical right often violate the "norms" they preach, engaging in adultery, rape, and pedophilia, and excusing any manner of limitation, objectification, or harm that befalls the women they claim to honor and protect.

Why is this contradiction not fatal to the movement, or even to being the leader of the movement? Because, as in Victorian England, the actual point is not to live by these values but to use the mere proclamation of them as signals of loyalty to and identity with one's tribe. Sexual and gender "morality" then is not about morality at all, but about identity-signalling performance. Victorians and the American radical right both say, "We are respectable, unlike them. They are debauched." Gender, sexuality, and family life provide a visible and emotionally charged field for drawing boundaries. You can look at a person's marriage, dress, pronouns, or position on reproductive rights and quickly sort who belongs and who does not. Some of them sincerely believe what they say, and strive to live up to it, but in practice it turns out that saying it is much more important than living it.

If the Epstein files actually bring Trump down instead of being just another thing to be ignored (like his history of disrespect of and assault of women, his serial adultery, and on other dimensions his assault on the capital and the rule of law, his personal reliance on both illegal and "chain" immigration, his serial failures as a businessman, and his repeated acts of fraud and of failure to pay people who worked for him, and his villainization of former allies if they ever dare to counter him), it will be a significant shift indeed.

What most distinguishes today's American radical right from middle class Victorians is its existential framing. Victorian moralism served as a marker of class respectability within a stable social order. In contrast, modern "family values" rhetoric is cast as the last defense of civilization itself in a social order it is actively working to destabilize. Abortion rights, LGBTQ+ equality, and trans visibility are framed not as policy questions but as threats to cultural and national survival. This fabricated sense of emergency justifies extreme measures, because losing the sexual-gender front supposedly means losing everything.

Such dynamics are familiar in the history of authoritarian movements. Across countries and time, leaders have policed sexuality and family life not because they cared deeply about private conduct but because if they can regulate that, they can regulate every aspect of existence.

From Victorian Britain to today's American radical right, the pattern holds: an arbitrary definition of sexual morality, far from being a matter of private virtue, becomes a public badge of identity and a weapon of tribal warfare. Its power lies not in its consistent application but in its utility in dividing the world into "us" and "them."

References

Adrienne Munich, Queen Victoria's Secrets (University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851-67 (Odhams, 1954).

Leonore Davidoff & Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (Vintage, 1978).

Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects (Polity, 2002).

Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents (Routledge, 1981).

Philip Gorski & Samuel Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Oxford, 2022).

Andrew Whitehead & Samuel Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford, 2020).

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990).

Melinda Kane, "LGBT Religious Activism: Predicting Cultural Resistance and Organizational Outcomes," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52:2 (2013).

Lindsay Kelley, Meat, Identity and Gender Politics: On the Radical Right (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Emily Stewart et al., "The Politics of Gender Panic: Anti-Trans Legislation in the United States," Signs 45:3 (2020).

Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Knopf, 2004).

George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).