Episode 20: Conservatism's Daddy Issues

You've been coddling me and now I'm weak.

I need a strong father.

A culture of narcissism.

Hello, I'm Moira Donegan.

I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So Moira, what are we talking about today?

Today,

we have a really wonderful guest, a thoughtful, charismatic guy who I loved talking to,

Jeff Dudas, who is a historian at the University of Connecticut.

And he has a book raised right on the conservative movement and fatherhood and the concept of the paternal.

And I like to think of this as our episode on the conservative movement's daddy issues.

Yeah, I feel like that's kind of definitely where we ended up, right?

It was about

the book is very broad, but at its core, it is a psychobiography of three leading lights of the conservative movement and their relationship to daddy, both their actual fathers and, you know, daddy as a, as a figure, as a authority, as, yeah, as a kind of placeholder.

The daddy of the mind, you might say.

Yes, yes, the symbolic daddy.

I'm sure there's a Lacanian term for it, you know, know, the non-duper or something like that.

All right, let's get to it.

So, welcome, Jeff, to Inbed with the Right.

It's so great to have you here.

Thank you for having me.

I'm really thrilled.

Thank you for this amazing book that I've now read twice and have just been really, really.

I was telling you sort of before we started recording that I just ended up underlining and jotting down current events in the margins all over the place because it just feels so relevant just to this very moment.

And I should say that the very moment that we're recording, this is April 29th,

there are encampments on something going on 50, is that right?

US college campuses.

When you're listening to this, the situation may be completely different.

So if you're wondering what the hell we're referring to, that's the sort of state of play right now.

So in terms of getting into your book, the basic thesis of the book, I hope I'm getting that right, is that modern conservatism has functioned and has kind of become

persuasive to to a larger swath of Americans by yoking two things that almost should be antithetical, paternal rights

and self-determination.

It's about the right of parents kind of to self-determine

how they

to self-determine how they determine their offspring.

Is that right?

That you're basically, no one can tell me how to tell my children what to do.

Is that right?

Yes, for sure.

I think there is both, as you say, a kind of a literal version of that, which you just articulated, that in the sphere of the household, in particular, male authority is venerated and taken to be the gold standard of how to raise people and of how to raise young people, boys particularly, into self-governing and responsible, mature citizens at one point later in their life.

So there's both a kind of a literal biological.

version of this account, but that there's also a kind of a metaphorical investment in this notion of the rights of the fathers as well, and in the power of fathers to determine the standards according to which American citizenship will be conducted.

And so at the same moment that there's this deep investment on the part of the American right in the biological authority of paternal figures, there is also a deep investment in these kinds of metaphysical, metaphorical, historical fathers,

most closely linked linked to sort of revolutionary era characters whose desires are held to be the standards according to which American citizens are to be judged.

I mean, so one example of how this works that I sort of flashed back to while reading your book, I thought I'd bring this up just because it, again, it speaks to our present moment.

This is a quote that isn't in the book, but I thought we could start with it.

It's, and I'll just read this: In the last analysis, academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools that they oversee and support.

Now, this is Friend of the Pod, William F.

Buckley, in God and Man at Yale, basically saying that the real academic freedom is the freedom of the institution to shape the young to according to, yeah, to its own authority or its own tradition.

That is kind of an example of this discourse, correct?

Yeah, for sure.

And notice the way in which that discourse of freedom is actually very easily and almost

without complication transformed into a claim for tutelary authority.

Yeah.

It's what's being claimed here is, so we might be more familiar with the idea of academic freedom as the capacity of educators in particular to determine how to teach, perhaps how to engage in the public sphere, certainly how to study various topics of their expertise.

But

what Buckley is pointing to and which one of his sort of intellectual acolytes Ronald Reagan would also point to was this capacity of people who are in charge of things to set the conditions under which others will behave.

And so it's a claim that's almost in the guise of freedom.

right it's it's a or rather i should say it's a conditional freedom it's a claim on behalf of authority and it's those two concepts that can frequently grate harshly against one another.

On one hand, the claim for freedom, the claim for autonomy.

On the other hand, a claim for authority and dependence.

Well, it's a freedom to dominate, right, that is being ascribed to a certain class of people who are endowed with this authority, almost, as you say, on a metaphysical level.

And I love that, you know, your book, Jeff, I think really illuminates this contradiction at the center of the conservative worldview, both that we need to preserve these forms of autonomy and so-called freedom, but that freedom looks like a freedom to control and limit the freedom of other people.

So you want to tell us, just give us, before we get too deep into the weeds, you want to give us a little overview of your book, because I think you do a really great job of establishing this lineage between like, you know, three

father figures of 20th century American conservatism, William F.

Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and my near and dear friend, Clarence Thomas.

Yeah, sure.

So

the book really came out of an interest in trying to understand

the way that the various constituent parts of modern American conservatism, all these very different communities who have very different interests, including evangelical Christians and small government libertarians and kind of economic free market folks and racial and gender traditionalists like William Buckley, for example.

How it is that they have maintained consistently over the course of multiple decades to maintain a coherent movement.

Because in many ways these are constituent groups that have interests that are not only different from one another, but sometimes actually in direct contradiction to one another, particularly over the exercise of governmental authority and the different types of spheres of life in which it may or may not be appropriate.

And there's a ton of of really great historical scholarship of the post-World War II Cold War era origins of the modern American conservative movement

that document all of these relationships.

But what I was puzzled by as I did the deep dive into the scholarship was how it is that the movement managed to stay together.

It was really unclear how, given all of what one would think would be deep tensions, it was really unclear how they managed to hold themselves together.

And

what I sort of of lit upon was the way in which, on one hand, the movement, all of the constituent parts tend to venerate charismatic leaders and to hold charismatic leaders up as

the proper way to organize a community, that leadership model.

And that of these charismatic leaders who they all tended to venerate and all tended to agree upon, these leaders tended to speak a common language.

They tended to share

a very particular kind of vernacular, which

revolved around a take on the discourse of the rights-holding and bearing subject.

And the thing that distinguishes American citizenship is the capacity to have rights, or what we call the right to have rights.

And

all

of these charismatic figures, and the three who I spotlight in the book, are William Buckley Jr.

and Ronald Reagan, and then Clarence Thomas, as you say.

All three of them share this very particular language about how to talk about American democracy, about how to venerate American citizenship.

And they also

share with one another this kind of a conditional version of this language about the right to have rights, that rights themselves are properly conditioned upon particular kinds of

familial relationships and particular kinds of processes according to which Americans grow up.

And so

the capacity or the right to have rights is consistently yoked to the capacity to behave in a mature and self-disciplined way.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but something I've struggled with, and I imagine a lot of our listeners have also struggled with, is that causal connection.

What is it about the capacity to submit to authority that is understood as constituent in the conservative imagination of the capacity for citizenship.

Yeah, so this is exactly more of the point of tension.

And it's exactly, I think, the thing that I struggled with the most as I was writing the book to try to understand because

on one hand, there's the claim here that only

people who have become mature, who have shown the capacity for self-discipline and self-governance are to be people who can be entrusted to responsibly exercise rights.

On the other hand, though, there is this kind of focus upon how you get to that stage, right,

of maturity, how you get to that stage of self-discipline and responsibility that empowers one to act autonomously in a way that are governed according to, or at least protected according to, rights.

And

the thing that's so strange is that in the conservative imagination that I'm talking about in the book, in order to become the sort of responsible, mature, rights-bearing citizen of conservative lore,

you must have gone through this tutelary period of complete subjection to a very particular type of authority, which is almost always

portrayed in the terms of paternal, unstinting, masculine authority.

So one is raised into freedom through subjection.

Essentially,

is the line.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

It makes so clear also

the way once sort of conservative intellectuals sort of break out into the mainstream, that is sort of the big pitch that they make, right?

That like other people cannot be trusted with these rights

due to some kind of self-incurred immaturity almost.

So it makes a lot of sense.

I mean, for instance, one thing that I kept flashing to was the neoconservative obsession with prefacing all their writings with like letters to their children, right?

Many of whom, spoiler alert, ended up being new conservatives in their own right.

You're kind of

setting up the next generation of fail sons by like having your first essay in your book be like, a letter to my son John, right?

And a lot of them are performances, especially for the neocons, of

youthful wrong, right?

They're often like, why did I believe this?

Did I ever believe this?

So to me, it felt kind of Christian.

It was saying,

you know, I have sinned.

Here's how you stay out of sin in some way.

You can avoid these traps of

liberalism, socialism, Marxism, Stalinism, whatever, if you just don't do what I did and do what I do now,

which I think is so interesting.

One thing that it got me to, though, and it's not an objection necessarily, I know you have an answer to this, but I think it might make sense to kind of put a little pressure on this question of parental authority.

Because, of course, the other person who does this, so I was kind of sub-tweeting just now, Noran Pothoritz, right?

That's who wrote these, wrote the letter to my son John, et cetera, et cetera.

That is, right?

That is him.

I think, yeah.

But of course, Mitch Decter starts liberal parents, radical children with a letter to the young.

What is it about the paternal as opposed to the parental, right?

What is it, you know, it's not just, you're not just saying it's intergenerational.

You're saying it's intergenerational plus gender, right?

It's about paternal authority.

Can we clarify that?

Like, why is it not just moms and dads no best, but like no dads specifically know best yeah so that's it's a great question and it's that's exactly the case that we're not just talking about the rights of parents we're really or the authority of parents we're really talking about a particular kind of parental authority which is fatherly in particular

and

i think

i think it's fair to say that mothers could exercise fatherly authority,

but that it would be understood to have been exercised in the register of the paternal, according to the dictates of what is said in the conservative imagination to distinguish maternal authority from paternal authority.

And so fatherly paternal authority is valorized by conservatives as unsentimental, as tutelary, as designed, I suppose, for

they might use the language of doing this for the long term, right, as kind of a forward-thinking form of authority.

And it is meant to be a form of authority that is uncompromising as well, and that establishes over and over and over again

with no breach that, as the old TV show goes, that father knows best.

And the role of women and mothers in particular within this kind of configuration of authority is unclear at best.

On one hand, I do think it's fair to say as someone like Midge Dector or maybe the tiger mom from a few years ago.

Right, yeah, Amichua.

Amichua.

Yeah, that women are capable of exercising this type of authority, that mothers are capable of exercising this type of authority.

But it would then be understood in the conservative imagination as behaving in, as I say, the register of paternal authority rather than maternal authority.

Paternal authority is contrasted, all of those things that I talked about,

the notion of unstinting, uncompromising, kind of forward-thinking and unsentimental forms of parenting parenting and the exercise of authority contrasted with

almost the exact opposite forms of behavior that are assigned to the maternal realm.

Over-sentimentality, a kind of smothering capability in which male children, in particular, are said to be smothered by overbearing maternal authority.

Or

the ways in which this kind of maternal authority is represented as being kind of soft-hearted and soft-headed and dedicated more towards the immediate needs or wants of a child, sacrificing the long-term growth development.

But the coddling of the American mind, sort of thing.

You know, there's a moment in every episode, like at the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo, where we pull the mask off the villain and discover that it's been Sigmund Freud all along.

I think, you know, this is

clearly one strain of thought that led at least the neocons

to invest their ideological project a lot in psychoanalysis.

But that's not who you're really talking about in this book.

You're talking more about the movement conservatives.

Right.

You know, the neocons make an appearance,

particularly in that kind of 1970s Irving Crystal and then leading into like Christopher Lash's work, right, on narcissism.

Because that movement absolutely does see the kind of broad condemnations in American culture in the late 1970s of the narcissistic personality as being in league or at least in the same universe as the kinds of permissive

and overbearing, smothering kinds of authority that they want to associate with maternal...

with the maternal presence.

And we might, for our listeners, just very quickly sort of gloss all this.

There is this long line of kind of critiques of overly soft uh child-rearing or really self-making in america running i guess from you know something like reefs what is it the triumph of the therapeutic via lashes what's that called the culture of narcissism is that what it's called yeah um and then you know bloom definitely partakes of that in the closing of the american mind and as i joked earlier the most recent iteration of this i would say which I think exactly exemplifies what you were just describing about how the downstream consequences of this coddling are terrible is basically Greg Luke Kianoff's and Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind from 2017.

But there's a sustained line of books and articles that tell us that in some way there's this wrong kind of parental authority that is making Americans more fill in the blank here.

And it usually has to do with going to therapy.

When we'll go to therapy, we'll do anything but go to therapy, but as a discourse, yes.

And it really revolves around the idea that imagining that children could have any kind of autonomy to determine their own wants and needs and desires is not simply wrong-headed,

it is actually actively destructive of the possibilities of mature citizenship.

So we've talked a bit about the character of submission as a kind of tutelary period that constitutes citizenship.

Could you tell us a little bit more about the exercise of parental authority and its relation to the state in the conservative mind?

Sure.

So I think it's it's really keenly it's illustrated in a lot of different ways, but I think it's keenly illustrated in my book in the analysis of Ronald Reagan's governing style, I suppose.

And

it was a governing style for Reagan that was consistent across his time as the governor of California and also when he was president of the United States.

But

his imagination led him to

be very quick and self-righteous about exercising strong governing authority, the sort of what we might, what scholars might call a kind of politics of law and order, upon populations of first in the case of California, student protesters who are typically centered in the University of California Berkeley campus, but not only there.

And then it emerges in

even

in some ways an even greater flower during Reagan's time as president in the way that he conducts the Iran, excuse me, the Contra war in Nicaragua.

And the basic idea for him was that here you've got a bunch of kind of subversive, chaotic forces, whether they be immature student protesters on the campuses of the University of California or these sorts of revolutionaries, these Contras in Nicaragua, who are not behaving as responsible, mature

political actors.

And because, precisely because of that, they're behaving in ways that point to mounting chaos, that point to anarchy.

They are behaving in such deeply inaccurate

and irresponsible ways that

they must be disciplined with the strong hand of the father.

And when it comes to governmental force, that means militarization of police.

It means calling out, for example, the National Guard to deal with student protesters in California.

It means, in the case of the Contra war while president, it means circumventing a whole series of congressional regulations and in a series of backdoor maneuvers, funneling money from Iran to support this kind of revolutionary, counter-revolutionary force in Nicaragua, in spite of the fact that Reagan doesn't have the authority to do so.

All of these people were understood as needing to have strong

paternally coded authority delivered to them, right?

Having had the opportunity to behave maturely and having displayed their market immaturity instead, they were now subject and needed to be subject to the strong hand of the father in order to bring them back into line.

And, you know, Reagan's version of that is illuminating and it's present, but it's in a lot of ways the exact logic that is applied whenever you find a kind of get tough on crime

narrative.

It's almost always accompanied by a further projection of the community upon whom authority must be exercised.

And that community is almost always represented as immature, irresponsible, undisciplined, and in the conservative imagination, is almost always itself the product of bad parenting.

It strikes me that there's something about the conservative conception of immaturity that seems to contain a contradiction here, right?

Because the undisciplined

student radicals, say, at Berkeley during Reagan's time as governor of California or on campuses this week are presented at once as sort of coddled insufficiently disciplined children and also as a threat to order that is

serious enough to warrant like quite violent intervention, right?

And I think there's one critique of this line of conservative thought that positions that as a hypocrisy or as a kind of dishonesty, right?

Well, how can they be both?

But there is another

that maybe you would be able to illuminate for us a little bit further that would show this as something that is particular to the way that conservatives imagine this immaturity.

One of the things that surprised me, maybe the major thing that surprised me as I was working through this analysis, was the way in which it became clear to me that this kind of conservative imagination of, as I say, this mounting chaos of subversive forces that needed to be disciplined both at home and in the public sphere through the authority of government.

It became clear to me over time that this narrative was at least as much about the people doing the disciplining as it was about, and maybe more so, about the people doing the disciplining as opposed to the subject populations who were on the receiving end of this discipline.

And

what I mean by that is that it became increasingly clear to me that when someone like Ronald Reagan, for example, is expressing his deep frustrations with student protesters in Berkeley who won't abide by university policies, or when he's expressing his outrage at the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, who will no longer support American interests, right, and American business interests, for example, in South America, that what he's actually doing is confessing a kind of insecurity about his own incapacity or seeming incapacity to control this situation.

And so there's a way in which the narrative itself is this kind of confession of inadequacy on the part of conservative authority, that

we take the very presence of these supposedly subversive and chaotic forces who will not comport to order.

We are taking this personally.

We are taking this as though these are accusations or as though these are what we might call referenda on our vision of how authority should be exercised.

And so

that is what really kind of got me into the world of trying to understand

how

each of these three figures, Buckley, Reagan, and Thomas, have had themselves very freighted childhoods and childhoods in which they were in fact exposed to the exact kind of unstinting order, paternal authority, uncontrolled, unstinting, uncompromising paternal authority that they recommend for others.

But in the case of each of these three figures, it made their childhoods quite unstable, quite dysfunctional, even in a couple of cases, quite dangerous and abusive.

And so I think this is sort of a roundabout way maybe of addressing your question, Maura, but

I think that the more that we begin to understand this conservative reverence for a very particular type of authority as being about conservatives themselves rather than than about the subject populations to whom they are exerting authority, we can start to unravel a lot of what appear to be hypocrisies or what appear to be tensions.

And so that was a pretty key moment, I think, for me as I was kind of putting it all together.

Oh, this is actually about, this is more about them.

Yeah.

Or at least as much about them as it is about the people that they're castigating.

That seems so right to me.

I mean, especially with the beginnings of Reagan's first run for governor of California, right?

For one thing, this fixation on the free speech movement at Berkeley and him kind of recognizing that other people are clearly, that it's catching on as a topic.

And of course, like the fact that this is in the immediate aftermath or during the dissolution of, and this is something that some listeners may not know, of in loco parentis.

So like this is the moment when schools no longer

can exercise exactly paternal authority.

Well, they still do, but but it but sort of we're in the moment of transition.

And the reason his kind of

anti-communist talking points catch on, I think, with a broader audience in California must have to do with the fact that this transition is felt as a insult to someone's authority, right?

The schools will no longer enforce dress codes.

They will no longer enforce, you know, overnight rules about whether kids can get a hotel room or whatever who are 22 years old or whatever, right?

And I think that that's exactly right.

It is about the people who felt that certain power was theirs and feel called the

question by

this change.

One of the things that's also interesting, of course, is that on the one hand,

it's a kind of projection, but it's also, of course, an immense act of self-flattery.

I often have to think about the fact, right, that like Reagan's term for the free speech movement was always the filthy speech movement,

which isn't.

It's always so freaking juvenile, isn't it?

Right?

Like, oh, it's filthy.

Like, I don't know, maybe it sounded different in 1965, but I'm like, but that's like potty humor almost and and the way that you can tell yourself that like i am a grown-ass actor reading to these people at you know let's say you know a multi-purpose hall in san francisco about you know things that happened at the vietnam day party at berkeley and i'm gonna linger on like short skirts and dope smoking and three rock bands and and like a lava lamp.

It's not the most dignified.

No one comes off well making that complaint.

But if you can tell people, no, no, no, your prurience, your voyeurism, your overinvestment is actually a sign of maturity, right?

You wallow in these, your children wallow in these depths because they can't help themselves.

You wallow because oggling co-eds is actually good politics for the older generation, right?

Like there's also just a immense permission structure there, isn't there?

That basically...

Your immaturity is now maturity by my paternal fiat almost.

Yeah, there's a way in which, that, I mean that's all very well put, Adrian, there's a way in which the confession of one's own desires, and that's what's happening, I think, when Reagan, for example, is lauding these crowds with these graphic depictions of supposed impurities that are happening on campus and amongst college protesters.

He is He's enjoying this.

He's luxuriating.

There's a pleasure for sure that he's getting in doing this.

And his audience is also finding themselves very, very pleasure.

This is very pleasure-inducing.

They're enjoying this.

This is the confession of the desire that you can then portray as though it's a matter of concern.

Right.

My interest here is I'm concerned for these people.

And so concern becomes

the hinge, the linguistic hinge through which desire and pleasure is converted into something that is understood to be, or at least portrayed as being more high-minded and more dedicated to the sort of the public wheel.

I wonder if we might turn, if this might be an appropriate moment to turn to like kind of a methodological question, right?

Because this book like takes conservatism's account of itself pretty seriously, right?

It does not declare, as a lot of sort of like accounts of conservative thought from

left of that movement tend to do, that a lot of their professed interest is in fact just kind of like pretext or window dressing, right?

it uh and that like you know what's really going on is this other issue it does it it sort of um assumes that conservatives are are at least somewhat right about their own preoccupations and and the substance of them right so can you tell us about what it was like for you to sort of spend a lot of time uh taking these people sort of at their at their word to some degree and and and how was that as uh like a writer and and a critical uh thinker to uh to engage with.

How easy, I think, is my question within my question, my hidden question is like, how easy does it become, or how difficult does it become to take conservatives' accounts of their own movement seriously when you spend prolonged time with them like this?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, Maura, and it's one that I struggled with for a long time.

I think it's very difficult in the first place to take seriously

the self-depictions of people

with whom you don't agree, basically anything.

And it's very tempting to want to see those self-depictions and self-descriptions as as you say pretense or as cover for what they what their real interests are and

i i've tried to resist doing that because

i think when you pay attention to the way that people talk about themselves and i mean people generally, not simply American conservatives, I think you learn a lot about how it is that that they come to understand their place in the world and how they come to justify what their interests are in the first place.

And so I try not to imagine

these self-depictions and

the visions that they articulate for the Commonwealth as

sort of verbal cover for other, like real interests or as window dressing.

But by taking them seriously, I think we learn that

there's real power, in other words, in

understanding

that people are being serious when they talk.

Even if there is a degree of calculation, even if there's a degree of instrumentality,

and for sure there is, right?

Anytime a public figure comes into a situation in which they're trying to persuade a broad audience of their position, there is always going to be a factor of calculation and instrumentality in here.

How best can I put this that will seem most persuasive?

On the other hand, it's only going to be persuasive if the speaker themselves believes what they're saying.

And so I've tried to

make sure that I can balance those things.

And I think you can take seriously what people say without being persuaded by it or without being particularly sympathetic to their position.

And it is, for sure, it is sometimes difficult because

some figures, I think, in particular, some public figures in particular, are much more calculating and instrumental than others are.

And so when you encounter someone like that, it can be more difficult to remind yourself that the goal here intellectually is to take the person's words seriously.

I asked this question, and I so appreciate your answer, because I'm a journalist.

I cover the Supreme Court.

For The Guardian,

among other things, and something I have been really sort of perplexed by over the past few years is how to reconcile Clarence Thomas specifically, both as a politician, I think it's fair to call him, who is very strategic and has very long-term sort of projects, but who also has a tendency to sort of say the quiet part out loud.

And, you know, I was thinking a lot in particular when I read your book about his concurrence in Dobbs and his sort of program of future challenges to particularly like sexual gender rights and privacy precedents that he is sort of inviting in these cases for the court, right?

And this is somebody who

very clearly understands domestic patriarchal authority, and I mean patriarchal in the kind of literal sense, not just as a metaphor for state power, but really as a model of state power in some quite explicit ways.

How do you read a guy like Clarence Thomas?

And how have you been reading him in the years since this book came out?

That's a great question.

I think it was a lot easier.

I'm not sure.

I don't know if my analysis would be terribly different if I were to rewrite it now, but I will absolutely admit that he has become considerably more willing on the bench to comment on matters.

He's been considerably more willing to write concurring and dissenting opinions.

So there's more visibility, it seems to me, for his jurisprudential vision than maybe what we had before.

But there are considerable through lines with Thomas to the, I don't know, pre-2016 or 2017 version of his time on the court and his current times.

And I think the through lines have to do with his propensity to see everything through a kind of not just a patriarchal vision, but through a very particular vision of his childhood, right?

As I argue here, that

what's interesting about Thomas is that it seems like he really truly feels like everything that he needed to know about how the world works, he learned when he was eight years old.

And that everyone else is going to be able to do that.

Maybe for our listeners, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Maybe for our listeners who don't know much about the biography of Clarence Thomas and the particulars of his childhood, could you give a quick gloss?

Yeah, so Clarence Thomas was born in one of the Sea Islands or

a place near the Sea Islands in Georgia called Pinpoint, Georgia.

It's a tiny little hamlet, and

it was one of the sort of the freed slave communities during the time of Reconstruction.

His mother and his brother and he moved to to Savannah, Georgia, when he was very young.

And

Clarence Thomas's birth father left the family when he was a baby.

He never really knew him.

And

he and his brother lived with their mother who was, you know,

worked and did domestic work for local white families

and usually had to work multiple jobs just to sustain the household.

And she became so overwhelmed

with the joint project of parenting and making a living that she would rely upon her own parents, who also lived in Savannah, to do a lot of the parenting.

This is not actually that unusual of a story, right?

I mean, there's lots of cases in which extended family does considerable amount of parenting.

But Clarence always interpreted this, Clarence Thomas interprets this,

the moving into the grandparents' house is the key moment in his life.

It's the most important thing that ever happened to him.

He writes over and over again, and has said this in multiple speeches in his memoirs, because it's the moment at which he argues that he was transferred from a kind of state of maternal authority to a state of unstinting paternal authority, and exactly the kinds of things that we've been talking about.

Because his grandfather was a very strict,

very uncompromising and unstinting person

who was,

by

Thomas's account,

not infrequently physically abusive and quite disinterested in the wants and needs and desires of the grandchildren, and an extreme disciplinarian

by Clarence Thomas's accounts.

And so

it's that backdrop in which Clarence Thomas confesses that this is the most important thing that ever happened to him.

It's within that backdrop that he derives nothing but positive life lessons from this experience of kind of overwhelming subjection to external authority.

That he argues that these were the things that turned him from a kind of an insolent and lazy five-year-old.

I mean, I don't know how.

I've yet to meet the five-year-old that's not insolent.

That's

a lazy.

But in his mind,

he conjures this reality in which he is especially indolent and especially lazy, and that it is the experience of this overwhelming authority from his grandfather and his grandfather's house that he begins these life lessons that turn him into a focused, disciplined, capable person, someone capable of

deferring

the immediate gratification of their desires into long-term goals and interests.

And that experience of authority never goes away.

It becomes, according to Thomas, the key lesson of his life that he returns to over and over and over again.

Whenever he finds himself in periods of personal crisis, he recalls these lessons of harsh external authority and the character qualities that he claims they instilled in him as the bedrock foundations of his life and of his capabilities.

And then he also manages to convert that into an actual jurisprudence, right?

An actual theory of how to read law, of how to interpret law,

which is,

I found to be that was also something that I found to be really kind of a key point at which I was able to unlock a lot of things.

Is that

in Thomas's vision, what

Supreme Court justices are supposed to do is they are supposed to go back and discover the desires of the people who wrote the legislation under question.

And they are then supposed to inhabit those desires, so the wants of the fathers, metaphorically speaking,

and then to use those desires as their interpretive lenses according to which to make sense of what it is that the court should be doing.

So he continues, Thomas does, in his jurisprudence, to argue that the most important possible things that he can do are to

maintain his position in thrall to fatherly authority.

And so it's this kind of unbroken through line.

It changes venues in a certain way, but it's this kind of unbroken through law in which

subjection as a child to fatherly authority is akin to the judge's subjection to the timeless authority of the fathers in the legal text.

I mean, I love that the way you're describing it.

It also, I mean, there are a couple of things that it calls to mind, right?

One is

that this kind of, you know, we've talked about the kind of hypostatization, this almost like overemphasis overemphasis on maturity in this discourse, but it's also, of course, the opposite, this hypostatization of immaturity, right?

The fact that, you know, for instance, right now,

it seems like national media cannot grant our college students one thing, which is that they genuinely believe the things that they say they believe in and for which they are camping out on college campuses.

No, it has to be, but anything other than that.

And this promise that others are immature, of course, in the case of Clarence Thomas, is a kind of ex post facto identification with the aggressor.

It's saying he was right to do it, right?

Like the same way that, you know, Saint Augustine before his conversion is basically always like shockingly bad.

And you're like, come on, you were probably, how many pear trees can one kid really

rob?

But the idea is, right, to create this kind of particularly overemphasized base version of yourself that can then be redeemed.

And that's kind of what's happening here, right?

Like, as you say, like the idea, I was an insulin five-year-old.

It's like, yeah, or you were a five-year-old.

But the fact that we're, that, that there is this kind of emphasis on this almost, almost superhuman immaturity that would, that would have continued forever, right?

He would have continued to be a five-year-old forever had his grandfather not intervened is, of course, an ex post facto reconciliation of like, I loved this person and this person really hurt me.

And, and, yeah, it's just, it's extremely, it's extremely powerful in that way.

Yeah.

And as you say that, Adrian, I mean, it calls to mind, there is a kind of a Stockholm syndrome

to,

and it's not just Thomas.

It occurs in all of, all three of the major figures whom I investigate, and I would argue is, or I would submit is at the root of this form of authority discourse, which is we all experienced horrible positions of

abusive childhoods.

We experienced all of this kind of authority and

actually it was all good.

We didn't appreciate it.

We weren't mature enough to appreciate it.

I would also say, just to return to the case of Clarence Thomas, that the one thing that makes him unusual, I think, as compared to Buckley or Reagan, is that I think there's a certain recognition from Thomas that the unbroken line that connects his subjection to authority as to his grandfather's authority to his subjection to the authority of the founders of the Republic or the authors of the constitutional text.

I think there's some recognition of, as much as he celebrates that as a watchword of virtuous democratic citizenship, I think that there's also a sense in him that there's some regret there.

Okay.

Because he imagines himself that he's still the child, he's still a powerless child, essentially, and that he is not, by his own definition, he is not behaving as a mature, capable judge would behave.

He's cowering before the authority of George Washington or no,

you know, of the framers or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

That there's a way in which there's maybe it's, and it may not rise to the level of consciousness necessarily with him, but there seems to be some recognition of the kind of the dead-endedness of this story of progression, right?

The story of progression is that when subjected to harsh discipline and unstinting, these kinds of character quality forms of paternal discipline as a child.

And having learned those lessons properly, that there will be a point at which one takes on the mantle of maturity and capability themselves.

And instead, what seems to be happening, and I think Thomas has some awareness of that, is that

you don't ever actually get out of that relationship of tutelary authority.

Either you're

a biological child to private authority at home, or you are a metaphorically a judicial child to the timeless dictates of the authors of the text.

Either way, you are not ever yourself in a position of actual autonomy.

And so what is all the training worth?

What is all the expertise worth if at the end of the day, all you're doing is being a relay transmitter for the timeless desires of either a biological or a metaphorical father?

So this is something where I think our listeners may have made the connection already, but it's worth kind of spelling out because we started sort of with Buckley and Got a Man at Yale.

That of course, like the charge is, to some extent, Yale is too maternal.

Yale is luring young men away from their father's dictates, right?

His main charge against Yale is you take money from a bunch of Christian individualists, and then you take their sons and turn them into godless socialists, and you're luring them, basically.

You're seducing them.

And that is

a monstrous maternal authority that's being imagined there.

And I think that that's pretty key here, too.

That on the one hand, there are paternal authorities that sort of get venerated and that one understands oneself always already in subjection to.

But then there are these maternal, this illegitimate maternal authorities that basically are trying to seduce you with you know uh their promises of of uh you know knowledge or free love or whatever it is yep or easy wealth or

um yeah i i think that's exactly it this is a a common sort of culture war line um about universities right um

that students go off to the to universities and and apparently in the the more elite the university, the worse apparently, the malady,

sort of the culture war line.

That

they go off as sort of well-disciplined, proto-mature human beings.

And after, I don't know, three days on an old campus, they're brainwashed into a series of

immature political positions, crazy kinds of beliefs,

just completely transformed, totally different.

They've been corrupted intellectually and emotionally.

And there is the sense that

their proto-maturity has been the source of, according to which they've been preyed on by these sort of nefarious forces who have been engaged in this sort of mind control game or exercise.

You know, I mean, countless, I mean, how many undergrads can recall going home after their first semester, their first quarter, and getting in the mildest of disagreements with one of their parents, which then become

a major conflagration?

And it might be tempting to say, well, maybe this is just people who are experiencing sort of quasi-independence or independence for the first time in their lives, and they're, you know, coming to their own, coming into themselves.

That would be, it seems to me, a fairly anodyne and obvious way to interpret the situation.

But according to the conservative imagination, no, what's happened here is not the ordinary process of maturation, but rather this kind of nefarious

outside and external control that elites, in this case, intellectual and cultural elites, have exerted upon

otherwise proto-mature and capable citizens.

They were all brilliant 16-year-olds, and now they're 19 and infected with the woke mind virus.

Exactly.

It's a kind of a story of degeneration, of growth in reverse almost.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

I think this might be a great place to stop.

I think you guys just landed on it so beautifully.

Jeff Dudas, thank you so much for being with us.

I find myself really envying your students.

You've got such a great pedagogical model that I feel like I was just like taken along on a beautiful stroll through a weird landscape.

So thank you.

I will say more.

Some years ago, I ditched PowerPoint and went back to just kind of

a much more discursive kind of approach.

And

students were, you know, they were kind of alarmed at first.

There are no like...

PowerPoint slides up there for them to pay attention to.

But I mean, it's been something that

I think was a good move pedagogically for me.

And

so,

you know,

I

enjoy engaging in this way.

It's working.

It's working.

You're very good at it.

And I likewise envy your students.

And I'm thrilled that you're doing your part to undo the PowerPointing of the American mind.

The Med with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalthas.

Hello, I'm Moira Donegan.

I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And this is Embed with a Right.

It's usually whether we like it or not, but.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

I have life co-you've done it so many times that I call you a better tagline.

Oh my God, you've been coddling me and now I'm weak.

I need a strong father.

Culture of narcissism.

All right.

Okay.

I'm going to do this.

I'm going to do it right this time.

Okay.