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Thursday, April 21, 2005

The United States as single-parent family
Posted by Jill | 6:46 AM

While reading Sidney Blumenthal's Salon article on the shared medieval vision of George W. Bush and Pope Ratso I, one that advocates strong, central, dictatorial authority, it occurred to me that there is a fundamental inconsistency in a worldview that makes a lot of noise about two-parent families, but runs the state as if only Daddy matters; that the softening influence of Mommy makes us not well-rounded, but weak.

In essence, these two men advocate the state (or church, as the case may be) as a single-parent family, with Daddy having sole custody. And said Daddy should be like Robert DeNiro in This Boy's Life or Robert Duvall in The Great Santini -- tough, arguably abusive, a central authority Who Must Be Obeyed. In this model, Mommy either doesn't exist or has been cowed, some might say beaten, into submission.

George Lakoff's 2003 article on framing a Democratic agenda was much derided on the right for its distillation of the conservative and progressive worldviews into the Strict Father and the Nurturant Parent models.

Both the stated Bush Administration goals, and those of the new pope, follow the Strict Father model nearly to the letter:

In this view, the world is a dangerous and difficult place, there is tangible evil in the world and children have to be made good. To stand up to evil, one must be morally strong – disciplined.

The father's job is to protect and support the family. His moral duty is to teach his children right from wrong. Physical discipline in childhood will develop the internal discipline adults need to be moral people and to succeed. The child's duty is to obey. Punishment is required to balance the moral books. If you do wrong, there must be a consequence.

The strict father, as moral authority, is responsible for controlling the women of the family, especially in matters of sexuality and reproduction.

Children are to become self-reliant through discipline and the pursuit of self-interest. Pursuit of self-interest is moral: If everybody pursues his own self-interest, the self-interest of all will be maximized.

Without competition, people would not have to develop discipline and so would not become moral beings. Worldly success is an indicator of sufficient moral strength; lack of success suggests lack of sufficient discipline. Those who are not successful should not be coddled; they should be forced to acquire self-discipline.

When this view is translated into politics, the government becomes the strict father whose job for the country is to support (maximize overall wealth) and protect (maximize military and political strength). The citizens are children of two kinds: the mature, disciplined, self-reliant ones who should not be meddled with and the whining, undisciplined, dependent ones who should never be coddled.


The Nurturant Parenat model is the very mushy liberalism that the screaming heads of the right have been deriding for years:

It is assumed that the world should be a nurturant place. The job of parents is to nurture their children and raise their children to be nurturers. To be a nurturer you have to be empathic and responsible (for yourself and others). Empathy and responsibility have many implications: Responsibility implies protection, competence, education, hard work and social connectedness; empathy requires freedom, fairness and honesty, two-way communication, a fulfilled life (unhappy, unfulfilled people are less likely to want others to be happy) and restitution rather than retribution to balance the moral books. Social responsibility requires cooperation and community building over competition. In the place of specific strict rules, there is a general "ethics of care" that says, "Help, don't harm." To be of good character is to be empathic and responsible, in all of the above ways. Empathy and responsibility are the central values, implying other values: freedom, protection, fairness, cooperation, open communication, competence, happiness, mutual respect and restitution as opposed to retribution.

In this view, the job of government is to care for, serve and protect the population (especially those who are helpless), to guarantee democracy (the equal sharing of political power), to promote the well-being of all and to ensure fairness for all.


The reality is that a successful society has elements of both. The left tends to minimize the responsiblities that go along with the rights of living as an adult in a nurturant society, while the right doesn't believe in rights at all, it only believes in not simply responsibilities, but obligations. It's not "You should...", but "You will..."

The right has derided the 60's for its near-total capitulation to the Mommy Model, in which obligation, responsibility, and discipline fell by the wayside, despite the fact that even then, people paid their mortgages, fed their children, and went to work every day at the same time that they fought for civil rights and an end to an unjust war. In their fixation on the 60's as a nonstop sex and drugs orgy in which they were not invited to, or chose not to, particpate, the right has forgotten that while hippies may have gotten all the press, American life in the 60's was not that much different from life before or after. Perhaps it's because the right, seeing through its Daddy glasses, lacks the multitasking ability of which some studies show women have more. This also would explain the right's inability to understand that dread concept of "nuance" -- and it's resulting ridicule of what it doesn't understand.

IIn demanding that the nurturants -- the Democratic "Mommy Party" in the case of the American Republican agenda, and women and gays in the case of the Catholic Church -- be not just cowed, but browbeaten into nonexistence so that the "soft" part of our nature is not permitted to flower, the Bush/Ratzinger axis is advocating nothing less than a single-parent family model, headed by an authoritarian Dad.
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