This is what happens when you don't say "no" to your kids
Or maybe when you say "no" to them too much.
Warning: this is going to be one of those “old guy ranting about these kids today” posts.
New parent Jeff Maurer argues that extreme-right and extreme-left politics at least partly have their roots in way its true believers were brought up by their parents:
What’s the worst kind of parent?
Maybe it’s the kind I’ll call “ticking time-bomb pee wee football coach”. You know this guy: He makes his kids call him “sir”. He thinks children have gotten soft since they stopped fighting wars of colonial conquest. When his son gets hurt, he douses him with iodine and yells at him like James Corden at a bistro. His kids’ chore list would overburden a Russian serf, but he feels it’s important for his kids to learn valuable skills like how to remove a mountaintop with dynamite and how to apply a tourniquet to a blast wound.
On the other hand, maybe the worst parent is the kind I’ll call “manic pixie nightmare Montessori mom”. Her children — Candy Cane and Dinosaur — were allowed to name themselves. She coos every time her kids do something adorable, like farting on an airplane or playing with matches at a gas station. She has a lenient attitude towards substance abuse, figuring that, look: Kids simply will soak a tampon in ketamine and put it in their rectum, so it’s better that they do it at home.
I’ve been thinking about parenting a lot because I’ve been a dad for two whole weeks. I’m wondering what kind of shitty parent I’ll be. Will I be too much like Football Dad, or skew more towards Montessori Mom? These archetypes — which, yes, I gendered, because they tend to correlate with gender — seem to represent opposite extremes of bad parenting. I think we can learn something from them. I think that digging into what, exactly, is going on with these cartoonishly-awful parents sheds some light on where certain bad political attitudes come from.
Consider Football Dad. He fetishizes strength and has no empathy. He either can’t remember what it was like to be a kid, or he does remember and is subjecting his kids to some weird reverse-generational cosmic payback. The result is a parenting style that’s somewhere between Navy Seal training and pledge week at a soon-to-be-banned frat house.
The extreme form of this mindset has a name: authoritarianism. In the ‘50s, when the world was looking back at World War II and wondering “what the fuck was that about?”, a book called The Authoritarian Personality was all the rage. It created a list of authoritarian traits, which you can read here, though it’s worth noting: These days, the book is seen less as hard science and more as an interesting meditation on authoritarianism. My takeaway from the book is this: Authoritarians really, really like strength. I mean REALLY. They like strength the way Elon Musk likes attention. Every fiber of their being is devoted to promoting, projecting, and otherwise worshipping strength.
[…]
Some issues have become the Empathy Olympics, in which people compete for the title of Most Compassionate Person in the Universe. The progressive dialogue around homelessness largely elides the possibility that any homeless person might bear some responsibility for their situation. It’s the mirror image of hard-right conservatism: Responsibility always lies with society, never with the individual. Besides being infantilizing, this displaces honest discussion that might lead to solutions.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Montessori Mom’s approach to parenting and politics is ultimately all about her. It’s about how other people see her — she always wants to be good, never wants to be the bad guy. That remains true even when a broader worldview might bring the issue of what’s “good” and “bad” into question. Her flaw as both a parent and a political actor is the failure to realize that simply doing whatever constitutes “being nice” might not always be the right thing to do.
I am intrigued, and wish to subscribe to his newsletter. (Oh, wait: I already do, and you should, too.) But I also think the Venn Diagram between these personality types actually has a lot of overlap.
Certainly, the MAGA right is all about worshipping strength, or at least brain-dead bluster masquerading as such. Trump himself is legendary for changing his mind based on what he was told by the most recent person to whom he spoke, but he talks a good game about being strong and resolute and pushing the weaklings around.
And yet, he does not strike me as someone who was told “no” very often as a child, even if he was sent to military school. For all the good it did.
On the other end of the spectrum, Ken “Popehat” White surveys the last Mohammed-related controversy at Minnesota’s Hamline University, a nominally Methodist school which apparently became a madrassa while no one was looking:
What’s most disturbing about this case is that it’s not so much about university bureaucrats punishing a lecturer for a classroom discussion, but that the administration appears to have sheepishly folded when confronted by angry students demanding that their feelings trump “academic freedom” and other such [everything]-ist ideas:
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