They're Not With Us
The right wants to cast itself as the "party of parents." Its vision of parenthood is objectively unpopular.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore
A speaker at the 2023 Moms for Liberty summit described his audience as part of a movement of reluctantly aggrieved normal people.
They were the “pissed off moms and dads,” the speaker said; the angry “mama bears” who were spurred into conservative activism by the repeated injuries and usurpations of public schools. He recommended the audience learn more about their plight in the book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy.
The book’s author, Kurt Schlichter, is a right-wing columnist and the author of multiple wildly ill-composed novels salivating over a protagonist who “lay[s] waste to leftists” in a balkanized America that has split into feuding liberal and conservative nations, so he might not be the best arbiter of “normalcy.”
But Militant Normals’ central argument—that a core population of True Americans with “family” values is rising to “reclaim” the country from the left—is an enduring conservative coping mechanism. It frames a right-wing program as natural and apolitical, and its adherents as salt-of-the-earth citizens who disdain politics but will step to action to thwart an insurgent liberal agenda (implicitly unnatural, deviant). It’s Donald Trump’s invocation of a “silent majority” of suburbanites who supported his policies, a vision of a minivan herrenvolk, an invisible but omnipresent army supposedly girding extreme-right groups like Moms for Liberty which, despite their impressive funding and political connections, have murky membership numbers.
So how normal is the conservative American conception of parenthood?
Not normal at all. It’s quantifiably weird as shit.
Parents support a program that is not merely liberal, but frequently falls to the left of national Democratic policy, repeated recent polling shows.
Take the results of the 2021 General Social Survey, compiled here by the Washington Post, which identified a clear liberal leaning among the parents of minor children. “Among those with children who are all under the age of 18, just under half identify as Democrats, nearly double the percentage that identifies as Republicans,” the Post found.
Only a quarter of parents with minor children identified as Republicans.
Parents of adult offspring trended more conservative than those with kids under 18, but this newsletter is about the work and politics of raising children and I’m going to center the people still actively in the game.
Parents’ preference for Democrats prevailed when polled on education-specific issues. A January poll of parents with school-age children, conducted by the National Parents Union, found that 46 percent trusted Democrats to do a better job handling K-12 education. 38 percent of respondents favored Republicans, and 16 percent said they were unsure.
But more revealing than party allegiances were the respondents’ answers on specific parenting policies, where they overwhelmingly supported free school lunches (84 percent), a year of free college (78 percent), and direct payments to families for mental health support (79 percent).
74 percent of respondents supported reinstating an expanded child tax credit, which was credited with lifting more than 3 million children from poverty in 2021, the only year it was in effect. Congress failed to renew the credit at the end of 2021, due to opposition from Republicans and conservative Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin.
This broad support for left-leaning parenting policies cuts against a narrative of a conservative uprising as depicted in high-vis footage of right-wing furor at school board meetings.
Instead, polling shows, most parents are happy with their children’s schools. A recent analysis by Chalkbeat found the trend consistent across multiple new surveys. A 2022 Gallup poll, for instance, found that 80 percent of parents with school-age children were “completely or somewhat satisfied” with their oldest child’s education (higher than the average satisfaction since Gallup began recording in 2001).
Similar polling from Pew, the New York Times, Education Next, and EdChoice all reported high levels of parental satisfaction in schools (ranging from 77 percent to 90 percent).
That’s not to say that complaints about the American educational system—many of them mired in right-wing grievances about LGBTQ+ rights and “critical race theory”—haven’t inundated the airwaves. But those complaints aren’t coming from parents writ-large; they’re coming from Republican ideologues without school-aged children.
While parental satisfaction with schools increased to 80 percent in 2022, per Gallup, overall U.S. satisfaction with schools dropped to 42 percent.
“There is no ambiguity about the source of the recent decline in public satisfaction with education, nationally,” Gallup found. “It entirely reflects reduced satisfaction among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents since President Donald Trump left office, while Democrats' satisfaction has remained fairly stable.”
Even among Republicans, the griping is mostly confined to non-parents. Republicans with school-aged children generally rated schools positively, at 74 percent satisfaction.
And what of the decision to become a parent in the first place? What about women’s ability to decide how many children (if any) we’ll have? To terminate a medically threatening pregnancy? To opt out of pregnancy and its crushingly expensive array of body horrors?
In overturning Roe v. Wade, Republicans triumphantly advanced one of the most electorally toxic positions in U.S. politics—especially among people who can become pregnant.
Most people who seek abortions are already parents. 61 percent of abortion patients in 2020 had previously given birth, according to a KFF study of CDC data. (That figure has remained virtually unchanged since 2008, according to analysis by the Guttmacher Institute.) 63 percent of women support legal abortion, according to a 2022 Pew poll, and that figure is weighted down by slightly lower (although still a majority) support from the over-50 set, which typically does not become pregnant.
American mothers—those who’ve already navigated an uncompromising medical system, a hostile work culture, a last-in-the-world paid maternity leave program, a childcare crisis, the breathtaking unaffordability of raising children in the U.S.—know the costs of forced birth. Those costs are borne by mothers and their existing children: in quality of care, in mental health, in aspirations, and in financial immiseration. Women who are denied abortions are four times likelier to live in poverty, according to the 2018 Turnaway Study.
And “the children women already have at the time they seek abortions show worse child development when their mother is denied an abortion compared to the children of women who receive one,” the study found.
Left policies have broad support among parents, outstripping parental identification with the Democratic party, which does not uniformly support some of those measures like free college, healthcare, food. If there exists a “silent majority,” an aggrieved but politically sidelined bloc of American “normal,” it’s the overworked and under-resourced parent.
The GOP wants to present itself as the “party of parents.” It doesn’t have the numbers.
What, then, do Moms for Liberty types mean by their allusions to “normal” Americans? Schlichter is helpfully transparent.
He opens Militant Normals by asserting a binary in American political life between “Normals” and the “Elite.”
“Normals is not a synonym for conservative,” he writes. “The Normals tend to be center right, if you have to place them on the political spectrum, but that’s most because traditional American values like faith, family, and patriotism have become identified with center-right politics as liberals either stopped defending them or abandoned them altogether.”
This argument rocks, if only for its window into conservative intellectual rigor re: parenthood. Schlichter gestures at the existence of an ur-American “normal” which he insists is not necessarily conservative, before conceding in the following sentence that his imagined archetype leans right due to its support for families (which he couches in vague language about “values,” rather than in parents’ actual politics).
Existing opposite of “normals” in Schlichter’s political matrix are “the Elite,” which he characterizes as “those people, the experts, who run the day-to-day operations of society’s institutions—like the government, the media, academia, and Hollywood.”
With the broad popularity of left-leaning policies among parents, it’s statistically unlikely that all of those caregivers belong to a selective echelon of intelligentsia. Instead, Schlicter supplements the elites’ ranks by adding to their numbers anyone who disagrees with the right.
“Today, America’s Elites also includes those who merely identify with the values and ideology of the Elite,” he asserts, giving as an example a 23-year-old beanie-wearing Starbucks patron who doesn’t like Donald Trump.
If, like most parents, you diverge from the right-wing vision of family—if you want abortion rights, queer liberation, a downward redistribution of wealth to benefit children—you’re an elite in this Moms for Liberty-recommended book.
All of this serves to obscure or invert any class awareness, leaving someone like Schlicter (a California attorney and media personality) to cast himself as something like an honest prole while sneering at a fictional twenty-something in Starbucks, whom he casts as elite. Effete baristas, the logic goes, represent a moral assault on the management class of patriotic Honda dealership owners. (It is, as Jamelle Bouie put it this week, “what no materialism does to a mfer.”)
Put into practice in right-wing mothers’ movements, this argument seeks to conceal the GOP’s parental unpopularity. It seeks to align parents with a conservative aesthetic while divorcing them from the material needs that unite them. It’s an effort to use parents as a wedge against solidarity, against public schools, against the widely held desire for more.
The speaker at the Moms for Liberty conference was correct, in a way, to diagnose parents as “pissed off.” We want better. But we don’t want what they’re having.
Hey! Cool to have you here. A few more things:
-This is the first regular installment of MomLeft and we already have more than 100 subscribers from last week’s introduction post! If you’re one of them, I’m so glad!
-If you’re not a subscriber yet … maybe yes????
-I wrote this newsletter before watching the Republican primary debate on Wednesday. I regret it—both watching the debate and working proactively on the newsletter—because any competitive showcase of Republican politicians is guaranteed to be a rich text re: women’s rights. I was struck by points of Republican retreat on gender-related issues, where their recent militancy led the GOP to get murked in the 2022 midterm elections. LGBTQ+ rights, where right-wing vitriol skeeves out the average American voter, were seldom mentioned, and candidates like Nikki Haley were skittish about calling for federal abortion bans. Of course, candidates onstage wanted those bans and more—they've just seen the polling and know abortion bans are electoral poison. “Can’t we agree that contraception should be available?” Haley asked at one point. No one answered, which is a shame because I would, actually, like to hear Mike Pence’s reply.
I also had the misfortune of hearing Vivek Ramaswamy proclaim (twice!) that “the nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.” It’s the kind of creepy pronunciation that gets cooked up in a basement lab full of Peter Thiel types—fodder for young men using Roman statue avatars to post about “retvrning” to pre-modern civilization where, presumably, a doting housewife will be provided to them upon arrival. It’s so weird!
I think there’s a little utility in pointing out the hypocrisy of Ramaswamy’s argument. He and fellow candidates have called for gutting the government (including, Ramaswamy suggested during the debate, slashing the social safety net where it supports single mothers). But the party of “I want the government out of our lives” is neurotically invested in structures of governance within the household. Their objection isn’t to structures of hierarchy and control (many conservatives will endorse male familial headship outright). They love hierarchies! Instead, theirs is a narrow objection to the one specific form of hierarchy that also wants them to pay taxes. (All of this is to say little of the state’s historical role in forcibly creating the two-parent “nuclear family” as it currently exists!)
To that end, the hypocrisy is part of the appeal for don’t-tread-on-me patriarch types. They’re suggesting an inherently unequal deal for men and women in the family—some governing and some governed. They just expect to play the role of the state.
Moira Donegan unpacks the Ramaswamy line more succinctly in the Guardian: “It’s the kind of line that would not be out of place in a radical feminist tract, exposing the ways that law and custom transform women into property, extract their labor, and subject them to sexual and reproductive servitude,” she writes. “But when Ramaswamy said it, he meant it as a good thing.”
Back next Sunday!