The Founding Fathers have always played an outsized role in the nation’s political thought, although American movements of different ideological stripes have tended to extrapolate lessons from the Founders that best fit their own biases. Religious conservatives, for example, bemoan the shrinking space that religion holds in the public square as anathema to America’s founding as a Christian nation. Libertarians embrace the Founders’ design of a more limited government. Historian Jill Lepore, writing about the modern-day Tea Party’s fundamentalist interpretation of the Constitution, has argued that “you can fish almost anything out” of the ocean of ideas about sovereignty, liberty, and individual rights that were hotly debated during the nation’s founding era” (see Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History, 2010).
In Raised Right, Jeffrey Dudas builds on this legacy by offering a thought-provoking thesis that ties many of the disparate parts of the modern conservative movement together through the concept of paternal authority—both in the historic sense of the nation’s Founding Fathers, who instilled in the nation’s DNA a reverence for individual rights and self-governance, and in the actual, literal notion of America’s family structure, whose strong fathers, conservatives argue, are needed to instill in their children the discipline and autonomy necessary for individuals to enjoy and practice those rights. In essence, parental-rights discourse gives American conservatives “both something and someone to believe in” (p. 38). Dudas argues, however, that “tethering conservative reverence for rights to obsession with biological and historical fathers” (p. 27) is ultimately an unwieldy arrangement, given that paternal influence stands for external domination while “the self-governance championed by Enlightenment notions of individual rights stands instead for autonomous self-creation” (p. 3).
The political effects of parental authority are clear, however: In clinging to the strong father-figure model as a way to legitimize the autonomy of America’s citizens, many Americans are by necessity excluded from attaining those rights legitimately, at least from the vantage point of conservatives. As Dudas points out in his analysis, “these exclusionary dynamics frequently align with racial and class-based inequities such that those persons disqualified from rights are marked not only by supposed family dysfunction but also by racial and class difference. Gendered, bleached, and classed, the ‘normal’ rights-bearing American citizen has conventionally been emblematic of white male privilege” (p. 5).
To demonstrate support for his thesis, Dudas employs a cultural analysis that draws on political thought, feminist critique, and law and society scholarship. His focus is not on the foot soldiers of the conservative movement, but instead on three important thought leaders who have shaped American conservatism: William Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and Clarence Thomas. These men are chosen not merely because of their clear commitment to the paternal-authority narrative in their writings and speeches—as Dudas ably illustrates—but also because each embodies a biographical paradox. All three experienced unstable childhoods marked by absent, distant, or abusive fathers—or father figures in the case of Thomas, whose very strict maternal grandfather largely raised him. (Indeed, one of the more fascinating aspects of the book is learning how aspects of their formative years later shaped these conservative icons’ political views.) Each man’s clarion call for paternal orderliness as a political guidepost is all the more palpable given that such an ideal state eluded them in their actual life. As some are wont to say, sinners make the best saints.
Dudas begins by offering a brief overview of modern conservatism’s Big Tent and how it came to harness corporate interests, racial conservatives, anticommunists, and Evangelicals (although he neglects to add that there were plenty of conservative Catholics in that mix as well). Then in Chapter 2, the author turns to a cultural and literary analysis of each of these men, who will be discussed further in subsequent chapters. His aim is to demonstrate how the theme of paternal authority is embodied in their work.
As the intellectual father of modern conservatism, Buckley’s nonfiction writings are well known, so Dudas chooses a novel path—in both senses of the term—to illustrate Buckley’s preoccupation with paternal authority. He analyzes the Blackford Oakes spy novels that Buckley began to pen shortly after the downfall of Richard Nixon, during a time when popular culture was producing highly cynical work about the American democratic experiment and its questionable defense of capitalism during the Cold War. According to Dudas, the character of Blackford Oakes, American spy extraordinaire, embodied all of the qualities espoused by the Founding Fathers, but in the figure of a handsome, magnetic heterosexual male who upheld all of America’s anticommunist virtues. Oakes’s sexual conquests, which included a fictional queen of England in Saving the Queen, establish him as dominant, reinforcing the patriarchal point of view that strong men are needed to safeguard America’s liberties.
Relying on Reagan’s memoirs, speeches, and radio broadcasts, Dudas demonstrates how his “paternal rights discourse demarcated the supposedly legitimate rights claims of America’s ‘average’ citizens from the supposedly illegitimate rights claims of its subversives—its ‘welfare queens,’ ‘wild animals,’ and ‘little criminals’” (p. 68). As a result, Reagan paradoxically championed both limited government, meant to enable citizens to realize and then exercise self-discipline, and a strong law-and-order state—or, as Dudas frames it, the “law of the Father,” which is needed to punish “the deviant rights claims of undisciplined Americans,” such as the campus protestors he encountered while governor of California (p. 70) or the lawless Sandinistas in Nicaragua he fruitlessly tried to stop while president.
Finally, Dudas makes the case that Clarence Thomas embodies for conservatives “heroic individualism,” both in his life story—overcoming a broken childhood by embracing paternal discipline in the face of a negligent mother—and in his jurisprudence. With respect to the latter, Dudas argues that the originalist school of thought to which Thomas subscribes—one that is a “daily triumph of the masculinist values of detachment, rationality, and self-abnegation” (p. 131)—ultimately leaves Thomas with less autonomy than he proclaims, because his decisions on the bench are strictly wedded to what he views as the intent of the Founders, in the case of constitutional cases, or to the intent of legislators, in the case of statutory law. In other words, while Thomas routinely claims that he is a man who has earned the right to think for himself, devotion to paternal domination in his jurisprudence actually limits such autonomy.
A major strength of Raised Right is its creativity. Critiques of the patriarchy are ubiquitous in modern feminist thought, but Dudas offers a new perspective that is fresh and thought provoking, revealing both the powerful hold that paternal authority continues to have among conservatives but also its fraught, paradoxical nature. However, his unorthodox methodology, which employs analysis of both fictional and nonfictional work with much success, is not without its weaknesses. For instance, in the book’s conclusion, I found that the depiction of Freddy Krueger of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies as the sort of ultimate defender of paternal values to be a bridge too far. I appreciate the absurdist conclusion that Dudas reaches for here, but ultimately this analogy is too distracting.
Instead, I was hoping that the author would extend more of his analysis to leaders within the current Republican Party, as he does briefly toward the end of the conclusion, written early during the 2016 presidential primaries. His take on how the GOP presidential hopefuls responded to the Black Lives Matter movement and to the riots in Baltimore after Freddie Gray’s death, using stern paternal language, only serves to make Dudas’ thesis more relevant. (One can only imagine what Dudas would have to say about the daddy issues of our current president.)
Dudas’s argument that weak or missing mothers, who must by necessity take a back seat to strong fathers in order for autonomous, rights-bearing citizens to emerge in America’s families, is underdeveloped—aside from the chapter on Clarence Thomas. It also does not ring fully true on the basis of my own analysis of conservative women, who express far greater agency when it comes to politics, often relying on their motherhood status to provide inspiration for political engagement. These fierce “mama grizzlies” also take the political education of their children seriously, which is a political role that many mothers have embraced since the start of the new nation, as historian Linda Kerber’s classic essay, “Republican Motherhood,” demonstrates. To argue that American citizens can only develop their autonomous rights from strong fathers is overstated.
Finally, I was hoping that Dudas would speak more about how religion, specifically Christianity, impacts his thesis. The stern-father model he develops clearly has a theological basis as well, and it would have been interesting to explore how his protagonists’ Catholic faith—at least with respect to Buckley and Thomas—lends itself to their views on paternalism and rights. While Reagan himself was not religiously devout per se, he employed religious imagery successfully as a political tool, and his embrace of paternal themes no doubt was effective because his theologically conservative base embraced them.
All in all, however, Dudas provides readers with an original take on how patriarchy relates to individual rights. Raised Right leads to a number of fascinating questions for both quantitatively inclined political scientists and political theorists to address in the future.
