Chapter 11: Focus on the Fascist Family
On the connection between authoritarian parenting methods and authoritarian movements in Germany and beyond
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TW: corporal punishment, anti-LGBTQIA+ politics
Chapter 11: Focus on the Fascist Family
“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home. And he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior and he’s going to have to let them know. ‘Get to your room right now and think about what you did!’ 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. This is 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.’”
—Tucker Carlson opening for Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Georgia on October 23rd1
I, like many other people, watched a clip of Tucker Carlson comparing Donald Trump to an abusive father figure this week and was horrified. Not only by the weirdly sexual undertones and veiled threats of god-ordained violence, but also by the loud cheering of the crowd of supporters. As Donald Trump is on the ballot for the third time in eight years in the United States, I couldn’t help but feel grief and anger at how white evangelicals in particular remain his fervent and enthusiastic base. The community I was born into are now ecstatic authoritarian followers who chant “Daddy Don” when Trump appears, who are hungry for a father who will punish those deemed disobedient, and who fervently believe they will be rewarded for their loyalty and obedience and get the love and safety they so desperately crave.
Carlson’s diatribe reminded me of another country, in the not too distant past. One where another leader called himself the ultimate authority and whose followers gleefully followed him as he punished those he deemed deserving of it. A nation where authoritarian parenting had become the norm for centuries, and where children were conditioned to obey authority without question and to equate parental violence with love.
But most of all it reminded me that historically, democracy does not die in darkness. Instead, it is often ushered in by cheering crowds who are desperate for a society that feels comfortingly similar to the family dynamics that they grew up in, no matter how abusive they might be.
To many in the outside world, Hitler seemed like a caricature of a human, with his angrily shouted speeches, his tiny mustache, and his obvious dictator persona. But for a wide swath of Germans, he was the person they had been primed to obey their entire lives. Hitler projected an image of an angry patriarch who demanded complete obedience and a submission of their wills, just like their actual fathers did when they were children. He promised to punish the bad people and to protect the good. And all he asked for in return was obedience, devotion, and the suppression of individual will.2
Why were millions of people so eager to follow their patriarchal, punishing leader? Perhaps it has something to do with how people were trained to relate to authority in childhood. Alice Miller, a Polish-Swiss psychologist famous for her works like The Drama of the Gifted Child, was obsessed with the problem of cruelty towards children and how it shapes people and societies.3 In the 1970s and ‘80s, she wrote often about Germany, and Hitler, and other prominent members of the Third Reich who enacted horrible violence on the orders of their leaders. Miller focused on the violence and corporal punishment these men experienced in their lives — from their fathers and school masters — and how these “poisonous pedagogies” shaped their psyches. She delved deep into the parenting philosophies that saturated Germany at the turn of the century, and found that both Christianity and authoritarianism created children who were primed to be manipulated by a totalitarian regime. Who were primed, in fact, to usher it in with gladness.
In her 1980 book, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childhood and the Roots of Violence, Miller looked at several prominent German educators in the centuries leading up to the Third Reich and discovered that they were all obsessed with rooting out “willfulness” in children at a young age. J. Sulzer in 1748 in Germany encouraged teachers and parents to “make it their main occupation to drive out willfulness and wickedness and to persist until they have reached their goal . . . . . . if parents are fortunate enough to drive out willfulness from the very beginning by the means of scolding and the rod, they will have obedient, docile and good children whom they can later provide with a good education.”4
He goes on to say that when a child is two to three years old the parents must demand strict obedience to themselves and all other superiors and to always trust authority. This is because “a child who is used to obeying his parents will also willingly submit to the laws and rules of reason. . . obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning to obey.”5 (italics mine)
Sulzer, who was a renowned philosopher in Germany, also wrote about how convenient it was that young children could be coerced into compulsory obedience without them ever becoming aware that this was happening to them: “It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.”6
Using physical force, psychological compulsion, and focusing in on the years before long-term memory has developed is a hallmark of these parenting methods that were designed to break the child’s will without them even knowing it happened. In 1752 J.G. Kruger, another German intellectual, describes why it is so important to target willfulness in children: “Disobedience amounts to a declaration of war against you.7 Your son is trying to usurp your authority, and you are justified in answering force with force in order to insure his respect . . . the blows you administer should not merely be playful ones but should convince him that you are his master.”8
By the 19th century, a man named Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber devised his own system of child-rearing and discipline that aimed to help make German children less “soft” and “weak.” His methods permeated German culture and remained popular long after his death, and the playgrounds (called gymnasiums) he recommended for physical fitness remain sprinkled throughout German towns even to this day.9
Dr. Schreber built off the advice from the previous century, advising that parents pay careful attention to the “willful” outbursts of their children and punish them in a systematic manner.10 “If parents are consistent in this, they will be soon rewarded by the emergence of the desirable situation in which the child will be controlled by a parental glance alone.”11 Morton Schatzman, who wrote a book about Dr. Schreber’s sons and their lives marked by mental illness and suicide called Soul Murder, points out how the doctor was adamament that if Germany followed his abusive parenting methods, it would lead to better society and a better “race.”12
If generations of people have had their wills crushed in childhood (either knowingly or unknowingly) it is easy to see how these impulses and patterns can be exploited by authoritarians who are eager to play the role of the punishing father. As Miller wrote, “If a child learns to view corporal punishment as a ‘necessary measure’ against ‘wrongdoers’ then as an adult he will attempt to protect himself from punishment and will not hesitate to cooperate with the penal system. In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any kind of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His ‘will’ is completely identical with that of the government.”13 It would come to no surprise to students of history like Alice Miller to hear the crowd cheering wildly as Tucker Carlson ranted about the punishment of an allegedly delinquent society. She would see it as the most likely outcome of a society predicated on the abuse of children in order to get them to comply in patriarchal and hierarchical families. Because a society that prioritizes breaking the wills of children instead of nurturing safety, is a society that is creating citizens who are easy to control.
Miller was not the only person noticing how the control of children was a core component of German fascism. Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychologist (and contemporary of Freud) who was horrified by observing Hitler’s rise to power in Germany culminating in his democratic election into power. Reich published his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism in the year 1933, before he nor anyone else in the world could know the full extent of the horror to be perpetrated against Jewish people and many more marginalized groups by the German government. Reich pinpointed that fascism was at its core a middle-class movement that was rooted in authoritarian homes that protected the patriarchal power structure.14 Reich also noted that every fascist movement was founded on the repression of sexuality and instilling shame in children about sex and gender expression that was upheld by Christianity in the wider culture. “The psychoanalysis of men and women of all ages, all countries, and every social class show that: the interlacing of the socio-economic structure with the sexual structure of society and the structural reproduction of society take place within the first four or five years in the authoritarian family. The church only continues this function later. Thus, the authoritarian state gains an enormous interest in the authoritarian family: it becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology are molded.”15
Policing gender and sexuality was one more form of control, which is why it is almost always a component of fascist movements. It also helped with the “positive eugenics” aims of white supremacy. In a pamphlet expressing his political program in 1932, Hitler wrote about the importance of men and women and their separate roles and how their most important job was to reproduce and train up future members of society. “Thus, the highest task is to make the founding of a family possible . . . Its final destruction would mean the end of every form of higher humanity.” (Italics are from Reich, while the words are from Hitler’s Mein Programm.)16 Despite never getting married or having children of his own, Hitler knew that the formation of authoritarian families was paramount to his political success. In Mein Kampf he wrote that “The authoritarian position of the father reflects his political role and discloses the relation of the family to the authoritarian state.”17
Riech wrote: “From the standpoint of social development, the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it…the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation.” He goes on to show that for the Nazis, as well as other fascist movements, sexual repression is deeply connected to the reproduction of the authoritarian family. Women are not to be seen as sexual beings, but solely as child-bearers. “Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of authoritarian ideology.”18 (italics are Reichs).
This is also true of queer people, who were the targets of the Third Reich along with Jewish people, disabled people, and anyone who resisted Hitler’s authoritarian regime. In Nazi Germany, women were outlawed from working outside the home and homosexuality was not only a death sentence, but places where the wide spectrum of human sexuality was being studied and researched were demolished early on in the Nazi regime. Men and women were forced into narrow gender roles in childhood and were pushed into heteronormative relationships designed to bear the most number of “superior” Aryan children. Fears of the decline of the white German family were stoked by political and religious leaders, and the solutions to this problem were obvious: focus on creating families that mirror the practices of fascism, and with enough time you will have a constituency that has learned to equate abusive control with parental love.
Thanks in part to centuries of authoritarian parenting and educational practices in Germany, Hitler was able to exploit the impulses instilled in early childhood to immediately obey authority by putting himself into the role of the punishing patriarch. This is why he referred to himself as the Führer, the leader, the ultimate head of the authoritarian nation, and he encouraged men to view themselves as the Führerss of their own kingdoms within their homes. Thus, what happens in the home becomes a reflection of what the men want to see reflected in politics — a strong, godly leader who will be in control and who will punish the “bad.” The fascist becomes identified with the Führer, and feels that he is the defender of the “national heritage” and the nation itself, sworn to punishing the enemies who threaten his security.
Although fascist movements claim that family is the most important part of their ideology (e.g. “family values”), in reality, these movements’ focus on the family are ultimately designed to ensure that family life upholds the authoritarian political structure, not for the flourishing of the children or parents themselves. Understanding this framework gives insight into the obsession fascist movements throughout history have had with eradicating people that had no interest in upholding a nuclear family model. It helps us understand why in the United States people like Tucker Carlson are appealing to the punishing patriarch archetype. And it is why the STRONGWILLED project is focusing on religious authoritarian parenting experts in the United States from the 1970s on: We believe there is a direct link between the current authoritarian movement in the US and the decades of parenting methods that led to it.
For instance, Dr. James Dobson, his organization Focus on the Family, and the dozens and dozens of political lobbying groups he helped form (including multiple groups on the board of Project 2025) have been working tirelessly in the United States to limit the rights of LGBTQIA+ people, women, people of color, and more. But perhaps his most potent political work was writing bestselling books like Dare to Discipline (1970) and The Strong-Willed Child (1977) that taught parents to employ religious authoritarian parenting methods, partly because of the way such experiences could be exploited by political and religious leaders decades later19.
Almost 40 years after Hitler was elected to power, Dobson utilized many of his same arguments to appeal to aggrieved white middle class Christian families of the United States. He, under the tutelage of the eugenicist Paul Popenoe, saw it as his primary goal in life to help white women live up to their ultimate aim as mothers in a patriarchal household — and to discipline and raise their children in such a way that they would accept their role in a patriarchal authoritarian system. And in the United States, Dobson used evangelical Christianity as the framework under which to baptize his political aims. He, and many other RAP experts, constantly appealed to God as the ultimate loving authoritarian, the Führer who would protect the family from all of those who sought to tear it down, if only the children would obey.
Fifty years ago Dobson promoted a way to discipline children that he knew would help him accomplish his long-term political goals of taking America back from the progressives. His books sold millions of copies, his radio programs were listened to by countless people, and his tips on how to control children permeated the American culture in ways that are hard to quantify. Dobson, and the hundreds of copycats he inspired in Christian publishing and beyond, had a vision of an America that would be great again for white male patriarchs, and the Christian framework was his lottery ticket. As both a child psychologist and a political strategist, he combined his skills and knew that if he was given enough time, he could teach people to train up the citizens he would need to implement his political plans.
He focused on the family, since the (white), middle-class family has always been the backbone of authoritarian movements.
Here at STRONWILLED we rely on the witness and research of people like Alice Miller, Wilhelm Reich, Donald Capps, Philip Greven, Morton Shatzman, bell hooks, and more who have attempted to point out the long-term impacts of repressing childhood emotions in the face of violence from your caregivers on both individuals and on society as a whole. And yet using corporal punishment, coercive control, and religiously motivated shame continues to remain the child-rearing method of choice for millions of people in the United States — most of whom profess at least some kind of connection to a Christianity which baptizes these methods. To be raised in a Dr. Dobson home — or any home that utilized patriarchal authoritarian methods with a religious undertone — is to be heavily indoctrinated into this worldview. It is sobering to recognize this is a tactic that has been used throughout history to control populations by appeals to “focus on the family.”
In later chapters we will be looking specifically at the American context, and how breaking the will of the child has been essential to patriarchal Protestant authoritarians for centuries. For today, we hope that with our STRONGWILLED project people will be able to gain the context of understanding religious authoritarian parenting methods and how they shape both individuals and societies towards authoritarian impulses.
As America finds itself faced with our own blatant authoritarian vying for power -- and with millions and millions full-throatedly supporting him -- it’s time to start to process the pain and cruelty of the ways generations of Americans have been parented. And it’s time to take the punishing patriarchs at their word -- that when they get into power, it will hurt us a hell of a lot more than it hurts them.
STRONGWILLED is a reader-supported publication. Thank you to everyone who has supported this publication and enabled it to exist. If you appreciate our work, please consider subscribing, sharing, or financially supporting this survivor-centric project.
You can read more about / watch the clip of Carlson here: https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/tucker-carlson-trump-daddy-spanking-speech-rcna177078
It will not be a surprise to anyone to discover that Adolf Hitler was brutally beaten by his father, and by teachers at his school throughout his education.
Alice Miller has a complicated history and never publicly spoke or wrote about her own connections to Jewish identity due to trauma she experienced and the ways she had to suppress her identity to survive in Poland in the early 1930s. And yet she poured her energies into trying to solve the “puzzle” of Hitler’s followers, desperately trying to get the world to end the systemic violence against children that is continually played out on the world stage. For more information on Miller’s backstory (as well as the abuses she herself perpetuated against her child) you can read this summary here.
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence (Third Edition, 1990) 11.
For Your Own Good, 12.
For Your Own Good, 13.
If you’ve been reading along in our previous chapters, you’ll recognize how nearly-identical these words sound to current religious authoritarian parenting experts in the United States like Dr. James Dobson, Ted Tripp, Michael and Debi Pearl, Bill Gothard and more.
For Your Own Good, 15.
One of the reasons Schreber was so in favor of public places to exercise for children and adults is because he believed there needed to be places for people to get their energy out, since he adamantly opposed masturbation.
Schreber came under examination (in the book, Soul Murder, by Morgan Schatzman) because while he positioned himself as a child-rearing expert, his sons both showed significant signs of maltreatment: one was institutionalized (and became the basis for Freud’s diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia), and the other died by suicide.
For Your Own Good, 6.
Morton Schatzman, Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family, (1973) Ix. Schatzman also noted that in 1973, much of the “liberal” West mirrored the same ideologies as the German educator, including the belief in male dominance, the repression of sexual and gender identities in adolescence and — most importantly — how children must learn early to submit, often uncritically, to their parents’ wills.
For Your Own Good, 42.
Wilhelm Riech, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, (1970), 41. First published in 1933 in German. All quotes taken from the 1970 edition.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 30.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 61
Mein Kampf, 53.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 104. Full access to the book can be found online here.
This isn’t just speculation: research has shown that authoritarian parenting is associated with political support of authoritarian leaders. Check out Do authoritarians vote for authoritarians? Evidence from Latin America, Authoritarian Parenting and Polarization in Politics and this article about authoritarian parenting and Trump support.
I hate it. I got bad chills the whole time. You're doing great work.
because of your work, I've already been making these connections, and it's really helped clarify a lot of things for me as well about dynamics on the political left and the ways in which we still employ methods of punishment (which makes me concerned and wary and also wanting more for our movements forward).