I am grateful to Melissa Deckman for her thorough and thoughtful review of Raised Right. Her summary of the book’s argument is comprehensive and accurate, and her critiques are engaged and fair. I continue our dialogue here by way of addressing (with unfortunate brevity) some of the issues that her review raises.
Deckman accurately notes that my book was finished during the 2016 presidential primaries and thus gives only passing attention to Donald Trump’s then-growing prominence in contemporary Republican politics. And, indeed, Trump’s consistent and effective use of the exact paternal rights discourse that I analyze in Raised Right both lends support to the book’s argument that this discourse articulates the core commitments of modern American conservatism and marks, as Deckman intimates, an unfortunately (if unavoidably) missed scholarly opportunity. Happily, I have been able to make the case elsewhere that the analytic perspective developed in the book yields considerable insight into our 45th president. Interested readers can follow my efforts in a pair of 2017 essays (“Trump and the Paternal Heart” and “Great Father Rising”) that are available at the Stanford University Press Website.
Deckman also correctly employs her own expertise on Tea Party women—that is, the “Mama Grizzlies” that her book so ably investigates—to complicate the analysis in mine. She points out the absence of these women in my pages and rightly emphasizes how they consider the production of virtuous American citizens very much the province of strong mothering, not simply of stern paternal authority. On this point I can, in the first place, only plead my ignorance of her then-forthcoming book, which appeared after I had submitted Raised Right for production. But the relative newness of such a position in American conservatism also, ironically, strengthens my own contention that most prominent American conservative voices since the 1950s feared maternal influence, associating it with a host of feminine-coded characteristics that encouraged the production of supposedly emasculated, dependent men incapable of robust and autonomous American citizenship. While the matter may be increasingly contentious on the Right, modern American conservatives have rarely looked kindly upon “mama’s boys” and the women allegedly responsible for introducing them to the American polity.
Finally, Deckman wishes that Raised Right spoke more forcefully of the role of Christianity in the development and articulation of the paternal rights discourse that animates modern American conservatism. She correctly notes the importance of Catholic doctrine to the worldviews of both William F. Buckley, Jr., and Clarence Thomas and wonders if there might well be connections between their doctrines of faith and their fluencies with the paternal rights discourse. Such connections do seem to make sense; and they could potentially be explored according to the method of my book—a method that in part yokes personal history to widely shared public belief and expression. I can here only flag the matter for further consideration, while offering the conventional author’s lament that no one book can explore all potential avenues of insight. Accordingly, I am happy to count this as one of the “number of fascinating questions” that, according to Deckman’s generous estimation, Raised Right makes available for “both quantitatively inclined political scientists and political theorists to address in the future.”
