Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism (The Cultural Lives of Law) - Softcover

Dudas, Jeffrey R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1503601722 ISBN 13: 9781503601727

Verlag: STANFORD LAW BOOKS, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

How has the modern conservative movement thrived in spite of the lack of harmony among its constituent members? What, and who, holds together its large corporate interests, small-government libertarians, social and racial traditionalists, and evangelical Christians?

Raised Right pursues these questions through a cultural study of three iconic conservative figures: National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr., President Ronald Reagan, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Examining their papers, writings, and rhetoric, Jeffrey R. Dudas identifies what he terms a "paternal rights discourse"-the arguments about fatherhood and rights that permeate their personal lives and political visions. For each, paternal discipline was crucial to producing autonomous citizens worthy and capable of self-governance. This paternalist logic is the cohesive agent for an entire conservative movement, uniting its celebration of "founding fathers," past and present, constitutional and biological. Yet this discourse produces a paradox: When do authoritative fathers transfer their rights to these well-raised citizens? This duality propels conservative politics forward with unruly results. The mythology of these American fathers gives conservatives something, and someone, to believe in-and therein lies its timeless appeal.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeffrey R. Dudas is Associate Professor of Political Science and Affiliate Faculty of American Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Cultivation of Resentment: Treaty Rights and the New Right (Stanford, 2008).

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Raised Right

Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism

By Jeffrey R. Dudas, Austin Sarat

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5036-0172-7

Contents

Preface, 
1. Raised Right, 
2. Something to Believe In: Modern American Conservatism and the Paternal Rights Discourse, 
3. Penetrating the Inner Sanctum: William F. Buckley Jr., Paternal Desire, and the Rights of Man, 
4. "The Greatest Nation on Earth": Ronald Reagan, Fathers, and the Rights of Americans, 
5. All the Rage: Clarence Thomas, Daddy, and the Tragedy of Rights, 
6. A Nightmare Walking: The Haunting of Modern American Conservatism, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Raised Right

William F. Buckley Jr.'s task in 1970 was no less daunting than it is now. The "patron saint" of modern American conservatism, Buckley had taken it on himself to expose "the flesh and blood of conservatism in America." On one hand, the felt need for an exploration of "the conservative position: its attitudes, its tones" was testament to the improbable success of American conservatism over the previous fifteen years — a success that was rooted in his 1955 founding of the definitive conservative periodical, the National Review. Defying the predictions of mainstream, Cold War–era commentators who insisted that a liberal "consensus" had overtaken American life, Buckley and his colleagues had stood "athwart history, yelling Stop." Indeed, by 1970, those consensus voices, so ubiquitous in the 1950s, had disappeared, lost in the domestic and international turmoil of the 1960s. Far from marginal, the American conservative movement in 1970 was soon to reach full flight. A taking of stock was thus in order.

But, on the other hand, Buckley knew that articulating a satisfying definition of American conservatism was perhaps a fool's errand. After all, conservatism was, like all other viable social movements, made up of a dizzying array of constituents and approaches to governance — most of them in tension, and sometimes in outright rivalry, with one another. Buckley's intent when founding the National Review was to make American conservatism intellectually rigorous and respectable; he meant to provide American conservatism with a distinctly modern identity. But given the fractious nature of its members, this was no small feat. How, exactly, to distill a common essence from the motivating impulses of large corporate interests, small-government libertarians, social and racial traditionalists, and, eventually, evangelical Christians? What did these populations have in common? What made them all identifiably "conservative"?

The answers to these questions, Buckley knew, were critical. Without a common set of commitments around which to gather — without something, or someone, to believe in — the burgeoning American conservative movement was in constant danger of implosion. And so, Buckley, wary but undaunted, set about to define "what conservatism is."

Buckley's definition of American conservatism proceeded according to "processes of exclusion." And because he knew "who is a conservative less surely than I know who is [not]," Buckley was confident in his exclusions: Ayn Rand and the followers of her atheistic dogma of "objectivism"; Robert Welch and the conspiracy-mad denizens of his John Birch Society; the anarchist, state-hating followers of economist Murray Rothbard; and, most painful, former National Review authors such as Max Eastman and Garry Wills, who had both criticized Buckley's characteristic sanctification of American conservatism with Christian principle. These exclusions allowed Buckley to sketch "the confines of contemporary conservatism" so that after twenty-three pages of text, he was able to deliver on his goal of defining American conservatism. Modern conservatives, he declared, shared a "spirit of defiance" that issued "from distinctively American patterns of thought, from the essence of the American spirit." American conservatives, Buckley opined, "dragg[ed] their feet, resist[ed], kick[ed], complain[ed], hugg[ed] on to our ancient moorings."

Those "ancient moorings," it turned out, were built with specifically paternal anchors. Indeed, the "American spirit" transmitted the "faith of our fathers" to the present day, bringing their paternal disapproval, in particular, to two of the twentieth century's most troubling trends: its "beatification" and concomitant "integration" of the state "as a member of the American household" and its reigning intellectual cynicism, which gave rise to the "trauma of self-doubt." Modern American conservatism accordingly channeled the "certitudes" of the American fathers; it "intellectualized" paternal desire in order to resist "the twentieth century's" attempts to rearrange the "American household." Linking conservative purpose to the spectral dictates of "the founders of the American republic," Buckley rejoiced:

In the past fifteen years in America a literature has emerged which taken together challenges root and branch the presumptions of the twentieth century. The intuitive wisdom of the founders of the American republic ... is being rediscovered. ... The meaning of the spirit of the West is being exhumed; impulses that never ceased to beat in the American heart are being revitalized.

But what was this "intuitive wisdom of the founders of the American republic"? What were the "certitudes" and "rediscovered ... impulses" that fired the "faith of our fathers" and coursed through the defiant "American spirit"? Buckley identified them in 1955 as the "fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to the neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic." They were, in short, the individual rights that are sacralized in our founding documents — the rights according to which American government was founded and legitimized. Cocksure, nontraumatic belief in the dictates of both paternal influence and individual rights: this, according to its undisputed intellectual founder, was the distinctive, unifying creed of modern American conservatism.

But this is curious. Paternal influence, with its spectral transmission of the timeless certitudes of the fathers, stands for external domination; the self-governance championed by Enlightenment notions of individual rights stands instead for autonomous self-creation. The one gestures toward control, the other toward freedom.

What are we to make of a political movement that celebrates both submission to paternal will and defiance to ascendant social, cultural, and political orders? A movement that not only champions such a paradoxical creed but, according to its "patron saint," requires its presence as the catalytic force that harmonizes its fractious member populations? More: What does it mean for those public figures whom the movement champions as its heroes, who both contain within themselves and publicly articulate such warring impulses? Indeed, what does it mean that modern American conservatism is founded on, and regenerates itself, paradoxically, through a paternal demand for rights?

Raised Right approaches these questions through an interrogation of the shared meanings that inform American life. In so doing, it eschews study of the formal, institutional dynamics — the elections, interbranch relations,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD LAW BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1503601722
• ISBN 13: 9781503601727
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande