At a Wednesday rally for Donald Trump in Duluth, Georgia, disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson showed up in the guise of an emcee from a psychosexual nightmare realm.
After describing the American public as “a 2-year-old smearing the contents of his diapers on the wall” and “a hormone-addled 15-year-old girl slamming the door and giving you the finger,” a red-faced Carlson proposed a solution. “There has to be a point at which Dad comes home,” he said, to full-throated cheers from the crowd. “Dad comes home and he’s pissed. He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. … And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.”
The crowd went wild. And when Donald Trump came to the stage, it greeted him with rapturous cries of “Daddy’s home.” This segment of the nation, it seems, is eager for a spanking. Or at least titillated at the prospect of pain inflicted on others. This is not a new phenomenon within the MAGA movement, which has always been keen on the pain of those it deems wayward — but it is a florid illustration of the way patriarchal family dynamics and punishment stand at the center of contemporary right-wing morality.
Carlson, of course, is hardly the first person to conceptualize the nation as a family, although he may be the first to engage in a blissed-out ode to spanking on C-SPAN. George Lakoff, linguist and philosopher, posited that conservative ideologies rely on a “strict father” metaphor to conceptualize the nation and how it should be ruled. In his 2006 book “Thinking Points,” Lakoff explained that in this model, “The strict father is the moral authority in the family; he knows right from wrong, is inherently moral, and heads the household. … Obedience to the father is moral; disobedience is immoral. … When children disobey, the father is obligated to punish, providing an incentive to avoid punishment.”
Authoritarian conservatives, Lakoff argues, apply the strict-father model “not just to all issues but to governing itself.” In this vision, the state and its leader adopts both absolute control and the moral necessity to punish.
But Carlson’s words might have had a special resonance for a particular breed of authoritarian conservative: members of the evangelical right, who have been Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers; 77% of white evangelical protestants voted for Trump in 2016, and 85% did in 2020. Carlson — a maestro at knowingly appealing to the far-right masses — utilized a skin-crawling, sexualized misogyny in the culmination of his metaphor. But his central appeal to an angry father was consonant with a 50-year movement on the Christian right, one in which tens of millions of Americans have experienced, firsthand, the consequences of disobeying Daddy.
In the 1970s, in response to the student-led social revolutions of the 1960s — civil rights, feminism and gay rights — a newly awakened religious right created a movement designed to quash the impulses of rebellious youth. It was called “biblical parenting.” Its first megahit was James Dobson’s incredibly cruel book “Dare to Discipline,” which instructed parents, in great detail, to take a “rod of correction”-centric approach to child rearing. Dobson, founder of the evangelical institution Focus on the Family, recommends regularly spanking children from the ages of 18 months to 10 years old, with a spanking “of sufficient magnitude to cause tears.” This will efficiently quash “willful, haughty disobedience.”
Published in 1970, the book quickly sold millions of copies and launched a movement that centered God, and the rod, in child rearing. It’s a movement that has endured in millions of households across America, and across generations — leading to a new cadre of people, like the baying crowd in Duluth, for whom authoritarian principles were first nurtured in the home.
For my recently released book, “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America,” I reviewed 50 years’ worth of evangelical parenting manuals, from 1970 to 2017, and conducted interviews with nearly 150 former evangelicals who were raised according to “biblical parenting” principles. Evangelicals also evince a consistently higher approval toward corporal punishment in polling than other groups, a case of successful propaganda enforced with paddles, switches, sticks and hands. The through line throughout decades of these parenting manuals, and in testimonies, was an emphasis on corporal punishment, sometimes brutal, in order to enforce, in the words of youth-centered ministry Youth With a Mission, “instant, joyful obedience.” In this family model, the strict father isn’t just the moral core of the household; he is also its spiritual head, with the mother as a submissive co-enforcer. Obedience to parents, according to these texts, is both a necessary prelude for and expression of obedience to God. The stakes are existentially high: One frequently cited verse is Proverbs 23:13 — “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.” This system coerces parents into using physical violence on their children in order to save their souls. And in an extension of Lakoff’s “strict father” model of the nation, this model of the family, predicated on obedience enforced with physical violence, creates an authoritarian politics in its practitioners. The best way to rebuke authoritarianism is to not just rebuke it, but to defeat it and make it look ridiculous and weak. Consider that a child who has been systemically beaten in the name of God since toddlerhood grows up to be accustomed to brutality and to exhibiting instant and joyful obedience to authority no matter how capricious or unjust. Someone who empathizes with the aggressor to survive, and is inured to brutality by repeatedly being subjected to it. When you ask what might motivate a crowd of people to cheer on the idea of a national spanking — to picture, with approval, a nation submitting to punishment by an abusive father as just and righteous, a necessary corrective to disobedience — you might not have to look any further than the kitchen tables they were raised around as kids, where wooden spoons were broken on their backs. The best way to rebuke authoritarianism, to break the tyranny of the strict father, is to not just rebuke it, but to defeat it and make it look ridiculous and weak. Mockery and defeat undoes the authoritarian more effectively than violence. When a system is predicated on a cartoonish hypermasculinity, the solution is to treat its leaders as deserving of ridicule, not fear. And until voting ends next month, we have the chance to do just that. To disobey, with glee and en masse, the edict of this punitive would-be father. He’s not our dad. He’s just a man on a mission of punishment, and we can — and must — deny him that chance.
Talia Lavin
Talia Lavin is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, GQ, The Village Voice, The New Republic and many more publications. She is the author of the books "Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy" (Hachette Books, 2020) and "Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America" (October 2024). Her newsletter, The Sword and the Sandwich, is featured in Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024. 
