When you look at what the right’s rising leaders are saying, it’s clear that conservatives have become increasingly obsessed with the fate of the American family. From Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance assailing “childless cat ladies” to Elon Musk fretting about a birth rate apocalypse, there is a deep and abiding sense that the family is in dire need of defense.
The right’s plan to fix America: Patriarchy 2.0
JD Vance and like-minded conservatives are theorizing a kind of “neopatriarchy.”
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
Recently, a loose group of conservatives has emerged with a solution: that the family can be defended by boldly reasserting the importance of old-school gender roles. The movement tells men to be strong and women to have babies without overtly insisting that women must submit to their husbands or stay at home. It’s an effort to revive an older model of gender relations without the explicitly sexist baggage (though it often resurfaces in a more subtle form).
I call this loose movement “neopatriarchy,” and have come to believe that it is at the root of both some of the modern right’s biggest ideas and its most interesting internal conflicts.
Concerns about the family’s health are hardly new on the right. Speaking in 1977, influential conservative writer Russell Kirk claimed that a nearly enacted universal daycare bill threatened to disintegrate the family and substitute the state.
“We would be foolish to ignore a drift in what we call ‘the West’ toward the supplanting of the family by the Universal Orphanage,” Kirk said, warning that the daycare bill specifically “would have encouraged even affluent mothers to consign their little children to the baby-bin and spend their days at bridge-clubs.”
Kirk’s fears reflected the central conservative preoccupation of the time: the threat from communism and the ever-growing powers of the modern state. It was “compulsory collectivism,” for Kirk, that threatened to tear familial bonds apart.
Modern neopatriarchy begins from the opposite fear; the concern is not communist collectivism, but liberal individualism.
The neopatriarchs believe we live in an age where people prioritize self-actualization and fulfillment above all else. Young adults, they argue, live in extended adolescence, lost in some combination of video games, drugs, and casual sex; as they age, raw hedonism is replaced by single-minded foci on money and career. According to neopatriarchs, this liberal social model fails men and women alike, funneling them toward a spiritually empty existence that all but guarantees disappointment and depression, and it fails society by discouraging the production of children who are quite literally required if the country is to have a future. (Immigration, needless to say, is not seen as an acceptable solution.)
The solution, for neopatriarchs, is to return to the past. Men need to rediscover the old John Wayne vision of masculinity, making traditional male gender markers (including acting as fatherly provider) into defining aspects of their identity. The state should play a role in encouraging this reversion, primarily by changing policy to cultivate “masculine” virtues and incentivizing marriage and child-rearing.
In his recent book Manhood, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley urges men to embrace strength and stoicism as routes for self-improvement, calling on them to take on the roles of “warrior” and “builder” in their everyday lives. The psychologist Jordan Peterson has long dispensed similar advice, helping turn him into a conservative guru. In his forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts argues that contraceptive technologies “break the most basic functioning elements of civilization” by liberating individuals to have consequence-free sex out of wedlock. Vance, who wrote the forward to Roberts’s book, has mused about eliminating no-fault divorce for similar neopatriarchal reasons.
Neopatriarchy can be distinguished from straight-up patriarchy primarily through its treatment of women. Unlike some Christian fundamentalists or alt-right scribblers, neopatriarchs do not assert that women are obligated to be homemakers as a result of divine commandment or natural law. All they insist on explicitly is that women have lots of children, and that choosing to focus primarily on raising said children is no worse than having a career.
It’s obvious why liberals and leftists would have problems taking this seriously. If Americans are supposed to be having more kids, and American men are supposed to be more traditionally masculine, then who’s supposed to be doing the work of raising all of these kids? The answer, of course, is wives (as it’s certainly not immigrants). Neopatrarichy may not explicitly call for a reversal of the feminist revolution, but that’s basically what it’s going for.
Indeed, neopatriarchal writing rarely floats the idea that more men should be homemakers — and often suggests that women are happier at home. The choice to work is theoretically left up to women, but the traditional option is at the very least suggested. The neopatriarchal vision for women is thus most clearly expressed through popular “tradwife” and big-family TikTok influencers: women who became social media evangelists for a family-first lifestyle, occasionally giving up formal careers in order to do so.
But it’s not just feminists who have problems with neopatriarchy.
There’s a class of conservatives, mostly men, who despise the left primarily because it tells them what to do: that it’s offensive to ogle women or use male pronouns for a transgender woman. This group, famously termed “Barstool conservatives” after the bro-y Barstool Sports website, enjoys partying and casual sex — and resents people telling them to knock it off.
This has led to some real skepticism about neopatriarchal ideas. When Vance’s comments calling for non-parents to pay a higher tax rate came to light, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy called Vance a “moron” in a post on Twitter/X.
“You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids? We sure this dude is a Republican?” Portnoy asked. “If you can’t afford a big family don’t have a ton of kids.”
With Republicans out of the White House, these divisions have largely been confined to posting wars. But should Trump retake the presidency, his administration would likely include prominent neopatriarchical voices — including Vance himself. That would launch a high-stakes national debate over an issue some may have thought settled: whether the state should favor families with traditional gender roles.
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