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>> 161 7 The Patriarchal Core of Liberalism Patriarchal authority is the core of liberalism. Governing elites lay claim to broad discretionary powers to do whatever they think necessary to contribute to public welfare, regardless of supportive or adverse public opinion. Their discretionary decision-making enables them to limit people’s liberty, to restrain public passion, and to ensure social order. Their efforts to police people ’s desire and sex lives is a major component of their contribution to public welfare because they believe, following their forbears, that sexual desire is the most powerful and therefore the most difficult passion for people to selfmonitor and self-master. Civic and governing elites believe that citizens who fail to restrain sexual desire inherently subvert liberal values and institutions. These citizens test the boundaries of liberty and permissiveness by seeking to expand the realm of individual rights to encompass nonmarital sex and sexual experimentation. Their actions have long worried civic leaders and politicians who equate unrestrained sexual liberty with individual slavery to passion , disorderly families, infectious anarchy in society, and pandemonium in politics. Historically, elites have responded to perceived threats to public welfare and good order by reasserting their traditional patriarchal authority to police individuals’ morality and behavior in the cause of securing social order and political peace. Louis Hartz, Gordon Wood, Joyce Appleby, and other notable American historians agree that the early Republic was an emerging liberal society .1 Their main message is that the new United States quickly became a society that sought to define, deepen, extend, and defend citizens’ liberty . Individual states enacted bills of rights, and the federal government added a national Bill of Rights. Neither the founders nor respectable citizens spoke explicitly about people’s sex rights, but, according to Richard Godbeer, they implicitly hosted a sexual revolution that fostered tolerance 162 > 163 be maintained and sustained, and if the new Republic was to survive as a republic. To save patriachal authority was to rescue the Republic from its own well-meaning citizens. Early America certainly underwent a transition to liberalism, as historians assert, but that transition did not entail the degradation, the defeat, or the death-knell of patriarchal authority. Quite the contrary, as American liberalism developed, especially at the state and local levels, its leading advocates still did not trust average citizens to wield liberty responsibly or to limit it appropriately without the wise guidance of respected father figures who promoted and enforced significant restraints on individuals’ behavior. Governing elites accepted, integrated, and employed patriarchal authority, images, values, and practices as legitimate means to limit people’s liberty and thereby to achieve greater social and political stability. The more respectable and influential citizenry generally applauded their leaders’ patriarchal goals, words, and deeds. Ultimately, liberalism elevated the demand for the assertion of patriarchal authority as the primary solution to the problem of social and political disorder and thereby helped to sustain liberalism rather than to undermine it. Early national American political thought joined (1) the traditional patriarchal emphasis on the authority and the duty of fathers and father figures to ensure the welfare of the family and community to (2) the modern liberal demand for liberty by (3) fostering the image of leaders’ effective governance, caring paternalism, and ability to solicit and gain the consent of the governed. For the most part, respectable Americans were hospitable to the employment of patriarchal authority to protect liberty from abuse, to promote general welfare, and to maintain public order. Their emphasis on individual rights, self-made men, economic aggrandizement, and limited government was contingent on the prior effectiveness of elites’ efforts to maintain law and to secure order. Most leaders shared the common conservative fear that the U.S. citizenry lacked the moral character, intellectual acumen, and cultural sensibilities necessary for enjoying and sustaining extensive liberty. Even otherwise optimistic liberals were convinced that too much liberty, manifested too suddenly, invited mass licentiousness—especially among the many marginal people congregating in cities and thought to be naturally prone to passionate excess. Benjamin Rush, for example, was a liberal supporter of extensive rights, the emancipation of slaves, and the Revolution itself, but he harbored deep-seated, conservative fears that lower-class whites and most blacks could not discipline impulse or effectively govern themselves.4 Most commentators and politicians, regardless of ideological leanings, associated the majority of 164 > 165 announced that they enforced rules against sexual misconduct for young people’s own good, thereby protecting youths from self-subjection to passion and lust as...

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