Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism by Jeffrey Dudas (review)

With the exception of a handful of critics, literary studies has not had much to say about American conservatism. Since the late 1960s, the discipline has been dominated by left-of-center perspectives apparently stuck in a time warp, still fighting '60s-era battles between radicals and liberals while ignoring their shared enemy: the politically and culturally ascendant New Right. For cogent analysis of the phenomenon of conservative ascendance literary critics are forced to turn to other disciplines, especially history and political science, which have never downplayed conservatism as a cultural and political force in American life. Jeffrey Dudas's Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism is an especially welcome, albeit partial addition to the ever-expanding field of conservative studies. Although the project comes out of the fields of law and political science, its methodology is largely literary, drawing on psychoanalysis and masculinity studies. Through a series of biographical case studies, Dudas explores the political appeal of three conservative icons: William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and Clarence Thomas. Dudas addresses the central paradox of conservative studies: the extraordinary unity of the American conservative movement, a fractured coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, Christian conservatives, and neoconservatives. This coalition shouldn't be able to act in unison, or fashion a dominant political ideology; somehow, for the past fifty years, it has. Dudas locates that unity in a "paternal rights discourse" (3) shared by his three icons: a discourse that emphasizes submission to paternal authority as a mechanism for creating self-governing, rights-bearing citizens. Conversely, this discourse maligns families with "weak or absent fathers and neglectful or domineering mothers" (12), which tend, so the thinking goes, to produce other kinds of citizens in need of strict discipline by the state. This discourse shapes conservative rhetoric on welfare, taxes, and other topics. Self-governing citizens don't need welfare, and they shouldn't be taxed to support those who do.

Critical analysis of paternal rights discourse has been a mainstay of African American studies since the backlash that followed the Moynihan Report. This critique has informed some of the field's central texts, from Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" (1987) to Roderick Ferguson's Aberrations in Black (2003); these works have illuminated the American state's use of heteronormative discourse to police nonwhite populations. Dudas's originality lies, first, in his identification of an inherent contradiction between conservatives' simultaneous appeal to "the timeless dictates of the fathers" and "the self-determination rights of the children" (15). Second, the book's originality lies in its analysis of the biographical anxieties that underlie its three icons' articulation of paternal rights discourse. Buckley, Reagan, and Thomas all had abusive fathers and childhoods "characterized by instability, chaos, and above all, fear" (137); the strong fathers they invoke in their biographies and speeches are phantasmatic figures, substitutes meant to fill a personal lack. In particular, all three icons revere the founding fathers and envisage the constitution they established as a paternal force that will "achieve order and repress the chaos associated with the maternal realm" (105).

This account of conservatism is both essential and incomplete. As Loïc Wacquant argues in Punishing the Poor (2009), any good theory of political ideology must simultaneously embrace two perspectives: a materialist one that focuses on the system of production, and a symbolic one that focuses on the social categories that political elites use to manipulate and produce social reality. Critics, in short, must synthesize Marx and Durkheim. Dudas neglects the first perspective, ignoring the material interests of those who espouse conservative ideology and those who embrace it. His psychosocial account, indebted to the political demonology of cultural critics such as Michael Rogin, explains how conservatives have used familial discourse to appeal to white suburbanites anxious about racial minorities encroaching on their traditional prerogatives; it doesn't explain how those anxieties arose in the first place. As such, Dudas's book should be supplemented with accounts of the conservative movement that focus...