In a TikTok from last year, Neeleman forms and fries buttermilk sourdough donuts to a breezy Ella Fitzgerald tune, exhibiting in the process the various accouterments which comprise her signature style: copper utensils and unbleached parchment strewn over a wood-slat table; the kelly green AGA stove that her “family treasures'' adorned with a spray of artfully wilted wildflowers; an audience of flaxen-haired children, perched on a stool, on the table, on her hip. To appreciate the true impact of this scene, one might look beyond the sheer quantity of Neeleman’s 9.8M TikTok and 10M Instagram followers, which indicates less than the kind of reaction represented by the top comment on this video: “I do not want a career. I want this life.”
From that phrasing arises the question: what exactly is “this life”? Ostensibly, a life of sourdough starter and adoring children and twenty thousand dollar stoves that is crucially liberated from the treachery of professional striving. Though this translates, more broadly speaking, into a life contained within a little house on a prairie, removed entirely from professional existence or responsibility for anyone outside of the immediate family unit— in other words, tradlife.
Certainly, homesteading shares with tradlife a nostalgic orientation, especially when practiced by figures like Winger, who, in her work as a “Homestead Mentor,” encourages “ambitious people to return to their roots.” It is telling, too, that a disproportionate number of homesteader wives on social media are white, conventionally attractive women married to white, weather-beaten husbands, with whom they share a growing brood of children and some form of religious devotion. Elliott described this arrangement in The Atlantic as “the natural form of things in this lifestyle”—a welcome return, she added, to the traditional gender roles with which men and women were “designed,” but that society has “spent so much time and energy fighting.” When expressed as just one part of a broader, free-range lifestyle, this conservative vision becomes obscured beneath its mainstream, palatable packaging—packaging that particularly appeals to the disillusioned career woman looking for some alternative to the maw of capitalism. But how much of that appeal, given its entanglement with tradlife’s conservatism, paradoxically aims to repackage capitalism for her consumption?
Concealed by the pastoral idyll is the fact that the Homestead Act displaced Native Americans for profit. The earlier 1830 Indian Removal Act had already forced Native Americans in the east onto reservations, which enabled the government to seize and sell their homelands. Continuing this effort, the Homestead Act—together with legislation that incentivized the construction of railroads and universities—rapidly razed the grasslands and forests occupied by Native Americans west of the Mississippi, allegedly to benefit independent farmers and, in the process, democracy. Although the “yeoman farmer” symbolized the republic’s departure from Old World aristocracy, he also ushered in a new kind of social hierarchy: if his industriousness made him the ideal American, it also made him the ideal capitalist.