Jeffrey R Dudas

Raised Right

Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. März 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 458g
• ISBN-13: 9781503600188
• ISBN-10: 1503600181
• Artikelnr.: 45605426

Autorenporträt

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).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Raised Right
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 is the book's substantive and methodological introduction. It
first, identifies the paternal rights discourse that suffuses modern
American conservatism and introduces the book's argument that this
discourse exerts multiple and paradoxical effects on the trajectory of both
American conservatism and American politics writ large. Second, it situates
the book's analysis of the paternal rights discourse in the scholarly
traditions of interpretivism, on one hand, and critical social theory
(including elements of critical legal, feminist, race, and psychoanalytic
approaches), on the other hand. Chapter 1 thus develops the conceptual
scaffolding on which the book rests.
2Something to Believe In: Modern American Conservatism and the Paternal
Rights Discourse
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 first investigates the large body of scholarship that details the
rise of the conservative movement in modern America. While it establishes
that the success of American conservatism depends on prominent movement
figures who at once appeal to a mass public and gild the fractious
tendencies of conservatism's member populations, the accumulated
scholarship offers little in the way of understanding of how the figures
accomplish this feat. The second half of the chapter corrects this
scholarly omission by documenting the obsession of modern American
conservative intellectuals with the intertwined discourses of paternal
authority and individual rights. It was an obsession that received full
articulation in the personal and political narratives of the influential
conservative figures who are the subjects of Chapters 3-6. Accordingly, in
addition to its contribution to the existing scholarship on modern American
conservatism, Chapter 2 prepares readers for the analyses of movement icons
that follow.
3Penetrating the Inner Sanctum: William F. Buckley Jr., Paternal Desire,
and the Rights of Man
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 investigates the legacy of William F. Buckley Jr., focusing on a
neglected aspect of his career: the best-selling Blackford Oakes spy
novels. The Oakes novels, produced between 1976 and 2005, are distinguished
within Buckley's oeuvre because their fictional form allowed him to present
his vision of virtuous American citizenship in crystalline terms,
unencumbered by the contemporary, parochial concerns that dominated his
political writing. Filtered through the hypermasculine and sexually
voracious Cold War-era adventures of a protagonist with whom Buckley shared
particular biographical elements, these novels contain stark ruminations on
the character of the American nation and are his clearest articulation of
the familial, gendered, and rights-based desires and fears that are central
to American conservatism. This chapter shows how the Oakes novels prepared
the way in fiction for the Reagan Revolution of the 1980's that elevated
American conservatism to new heights of prominence.
4"The Greatest Nation on Earth": Ronald Reagan, Fathers, and the Rights of
Americans
chapter abstract
This chapter explores Ronald Reagan's use of the paternal rights discourse.
Reagan's handwritten speeches, letters, and radio broadcasts make clear
that this discourse was the unifying thread of his nearly thirty-year
political career. Conjoining childhood submission to paternal authority
with the mature, responsible practice of rights later in life, Reagan's
normative vision of American citizenship led him to at once champion the
rights of America's "average" citizens and attack the rights of the
nation's subversives - its "welfare queens," "wild animals," and "little
criminals." As Reagan's attacks on student protesters when governor of
California and his conduct of the Contra war when president of the United
States make clear, the paternal rights discourse encouraged Reagan to
pursue harshly punitive, frequently troubling, and ultimately ineffective
measures in the name of fathers and rights. Reagan's paternal rights
discourse nevertheless worked as a potent intellectual template for
contemporaneous and future conservative politics.
5All the Rage: Clarence Thomas, Daddy, and the Tragedy of Rights
chapter abstract
This chapter turns to current United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas, revered by conservatives as "the leading conservative in America
today." Although Thomas is widely seen as the "silent justice," he has
offered many speeches, interviews, and memoirs that are highly revealing.
Using this primary source material, this chapter finds that Thomas's
paternal rights discourse unites him with the fathers of modern American
conservatism (e.g., Buckley and Reagan), but has ambivalent consequences
for Thomas himself. These consequences manifest in Thomas's personal life
and in his jurisprudential philosophy of "originalism," which demands
fidelity to the constitutional desires of the founding fathers. Thomas's
jurisprudence thus evokes the abiding paradox inherent in American
conservatism's paternal rights discourse. Unable to successfully navigate
this paradoxical tension, Thomas embodies the tragedy of American
conservatism: his devotion to paternal authority prevents him from emerging
as the autonomous, self-governing citizen of his, and conservatism's,
dreams.
6A Nightmare Walking: The Haunting of Modern American Conservatism
chapter abstract
The tension between paternal domination and self-governance that courses
through American conservatism's paternal rights discourse raises a final
question that is the subject of Chapter 6, the concluding chapter. Indeed,
considering the paradoxical, troubling consequences that the paternal
rights discourse exerts on modern American conservatism, why is it the
movement's defining creed? To which deeply seated fears and desires does
the movement's devotion to paternal authority point? How, finally, are we
to account for the paternal rights discourse that haunts modern American
conservatism? This chapter employs a unique mélange of critical theory
sources and popular culture texts, including Julia Kristeva's concept of
"melancholia" and Jack Sholder's A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, in order to
assess the enduring appeal of American conservatism's paradoxical
celebration of both fathers and rights.