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  • Raising Your Kids Right: Children's Literature and American Political Conservatism
  • Anastasia Ulanowicz (bio)
Michelle Ann Abate . Raising Your Kids Right: Children's Literature and American Political Conservatism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010.

In February 2010, Jonathan Krohn published what could be considered a key intervention in American political discourse, Defining Conservativism: The Principles That Will Bring Our Country Back. Drawing on the works of Plato, Locke, and Jefferson, as well as other political philosophers, Krohn elaborates on the central principles of conservatism: the rule of law and strict interpretation of the American Constitution, the sanctity of human life, limited government, and personal responsibility and individualism. According to neo-conservative former NEH chair William Bennett, who composed the book's foreword, Krohn's text is an exceptional one. Before Krohn, Bennett maintains, "no single book by a single conservative has really tackled" a succinct definition of conservatism: "Not William Buckley. Not Irving Kristol. Not George Will" (xii). Krohn's book, he continues, manages to weave "together . . . so many of the core concepts that unite so many divergent aspects and brands of this [conservative] movement" (xiii). Certainly, Bennett is not Krohn's only admirer: even before the publication of his book, Krohn received an enthusiastic response at the 2009 meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), and he has since taken a vocal role in the Tea Party movement.

Krohn also happens to be a fourteen-year-old boy. To be sure, much of the attention paid to Krohn's book has been inspired by the author's young age, and both his admirers and his detractors have seen it fit to characterize him as a wunderkind. Yet one would be remiss to consider this young author as merely an exceptional case. Indeed, as scholars of childhood and children's advocates have long argued, young people, despite their inability to exercise full suffrage, are often as informed and as passionate about political subjects as their adult counterparts. Whatever its ultimate merits as political philosophy - the marginalia left by a previous reader of my library copy attends scrupulously to its logical fallacies—Krohn's book counters the conventional assumption that children are unconcerned by, or otherwise ignorant of, presumably "adult" affairs. To paraphrase former President George W. Bush, it appears as though our children is learning after all. But just what are they learning—and how?

It is precisely this question that inspires Michelle Ann Abate's significant and long-needed study, Raising Your Kids Right: Children's Literature and [End Page 88] American Political Conservatism. In this brilliant study, Abate traces the relationship between children's literature and the rise of the conservative movement in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Children's literature, she argues, is in some respects an ideal venue for the transmission of conservative principles, insofar as it tends to reaffirm traditional interpretations of categories such as gender and class, and insofar as its nostalgic value for adults particularly appeals to those who advocate a return to a utopian past. Although Abate certainly does not deny the existence and political potential of radical, or leftist, children's literature, she nevertheless insists that explicitly conservative children's books that "began appearing during the latter half of the twentieth century [have] greatly amplified" the form's role in preserving the traditional status quo (9). Moreover, she maintains, the rise of children's publishing, marketing, and programming in the late twentieth century has won the attention of various conservative authors who have become increasingly willing to bring the "soap box" to the "sand box" (22). Indeed, as Abate demonstrates, the political indoctrination of children through literature has become a pet project of "think tank" scholars, talk-show hosts, and (pace Sarah Palin) middle class "hockey moms" alike.

In order to demonstrate the increasing convergence of children's literature and conservative interests, Abate devotes each of her six chapters to a specific work of contemporary children's literature. Her book begins, for example, with a chapter that evaluates themes of personal morality and self-sufficiency in William Bennett's The Book of Virtues (1993) and concludes with a chapter on conservative visual rhetoric in early twenty...

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