Daddy's Back

Well, not all of us. Just those benighted souls among us unwilling to toe the line of what our antediluvian, white authority figures demand.

This is not an isolated sentiment. A month ago, surveying the aftermath of the fires in California, Mel Gibson, the apotheosis of the white male mind and purveyor of socially acceptable antisemitism, opined that, “Daddy’s home, and he’s taking off his belt.”

It’s hard to know which is more alarming: the explicit assumption that the collective father figure is always going to be pale, male, and stale, or the fixation on corporal abuse of children by the people who profess to be the defenders par excellence of children and childhood.

The fixation on discipline and the neurotic need to specify exactly who should be subject to these paternal restraints is an enduring feature of liberalism. Not the sort that gets promoted in the schools or soft-pedalled on Saturday morning television, but the hard-nosed liberalism that lies beneath their unthreatening façade.

There is a line often falsely attributed to J. P. Morgan in the depths of the Great Depression: “In bear markets, stocks return to their rightful owners.” Although apocryphal, this formulation persists because it seems to express a fundamental truth about crises. They can abolish illusion and show the underlying truth in the clear light of day.

The disciplinary fantasies of right-wing leaders can be seen in precisely these terms. Donald Trump—or whatever avatar of the populist extreme right is currently in the spotlight—has arrived in the midst of a crisis. He (or very occasionally she) will use the resources of the carceral state to restore the standards of decency and probity that, at least in their collective imaginary, defined the world of their youth.

The current policies of the Trump Administration tend to be characterised as the grimmest outgrowth and intensification of the policy of destruction that the right has been visiting upon so-called mainstream liberalism for a decade.

Looked at another way, however, this onslaught is less an assault from outside and more a case of liberalism returning to an earlier and possibly more authentic version of itself.

As Domenico Losurdo argued in his Liberalism: A Counter-History, liberalism was never really about freedom. To the extent that liberal writers engaged in talk of freedom, this generally implied their goal of attaining freedom from existing hierarchies, which more often than not meant the freedom to expropriate others.

Over the past few centuries, liberals have been more than happy to countenance slavery, the subjugation of women, the expropriation of the property of the poor and colonised people, and all manner of other depredations. The most notable moments in the intellectual history of liberalism were those like Mary Wollstonecraft’s publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, when members of groups outside the charmed circle of the actually free pointed out the contradiction between liberalism’s emancipatory rhetoric and its less savoury reality.

Much of what the Trump administration has undertaken recently jibes with the long history of liberal ideas and ideals while simultaneously shredding the more velvet-gloved form of liberalism that has been more or less the norm since the end of the Second World War.

To take only one example, the manic fascination of Mr. Trump, his acolytes, and his European fans with eliminating DEI is really only a juiced-up version of the right’s long-running hatred of affirmative action and all it stood for, leavened with a full measure of anti-trans hysteria. The rejection of affirmative action is itself a toxic mix of pure racism, historical revisionism, and a patriarchal imaginary that sees white male dominance as a practical consequence of a culture of rugged individualism.

This, in turn, casts an interesting light on why the populist right has a pronounced dislike for historians. Not all historians, of course. There are the domesticated variety who turn up on the History Channel or at Heritage Society events to offer soothing reassurance that what the great and the good of the North Atlantic world believe about themselves and their history is actually true.

Any historian who has the temerity to deviate from this narrative hodgepodge must, from the august perspective of the paternalist right, have something wrong with them. One of the most distasteful spectacles of the present conjuncture is the way scurrilous assertions are spewed at anyone – historians, climate scientists, medical researchers, etc. – whose expertise leads them to deviate from what the mavens of the right wish to be the case.

Voltaire’s comment that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” has been repurposed by the populist right, with communism as the prime mover. Communism is dead, but its ghost lives on, haunting the halls of academic and scientific institutions. It is this occult presence that prompts the educated to add malign zealotry to the already depressing lot of most scholars: piddling wages and soul-crushing bureaucratic drudgery.

This mix of arcana and ressentiment is the true basis of the residual opposition to the salubrious work of the collective fathers to bring back a society in which right thinking and right acting, especially where wealth is concerned, are the coin of the realm (so to speak).

At the root, the problem is one of institutions. In the decades since the end of World War II, the world—particularly Europe and North America—has been subject to moral and institutional hypertrophy. The untrammelled growth of institutions has effectively reduced the scope of action for the traditional elites.

There was a time when the paterfamilias had a sort of baseline authority. Combined together, and without the static of other, lesser voices—women, minorities, and the like—the fathers who ran society could organise matters on the basis of sic volo, sic jubeo, writ extremely large.

The social movements of the twentieth century made it a lot harder for these patriarchs to turn their wish into their command. The existence of actual communism, as opposed to the phantasmagoric traces of it still around today, meant that the people running the system needed to give at least the appearance of caring about possible alternatives. Soon, all kinds of people were bleating about their rights, and the men of the Western world were left to rue the fact that they had lost the patrimony that God had bequeathed to Adam.

The first returns from the drama Return of the Fathers have not been great. It turns around that they are no better at operating technology than they ever were. The inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, on a supposedly secret Signal group chat summons memories of those technologically less favoured senior members of a department accidentally replying to every subscriber to its listserv with, let us say, excessive candour.

Clearly, the topic for this Signal chat, the expansion of direct US intervention in Yemen, is a serious matter. But it is not what one would call surprising. This is the sort of thing American leaders have long been inclined to do, irrespective of who is running the show. But the flip tone of the exchanges, coupled with the grotesque deficiencies in terms of operational security, bespeak a lack of seriousness. It’s not surprising that this is the thing that seems to have drawn eyes from both sides of the aisle in American public life.

What we are witnessing is liberalism reverting to its true form. In place of the soft and sentimental stereotype that conservatives have mocked for decades, a muscular masculinity is making its return.

This is liberalism without “liberals,” turning the sentiment of Robert Bly’s 1990 book Iron John into action. It slashes away at overgrown bureaucratic institutions the way Ronald Reagan used to attack the chaparral on his Santa Barbara ranch, smiling for the cameras.

Finally, the avatars of right-thinking manhood can once again subject the world to their will. If this involves nuking hurricanes, or washing our innards out with bleach, or imprisoning foreigners in secret camps, we can all rest easy that it is being done in the service of truth, justice, and the American way.