This “apt model for today’s political household,” as Matthews called it in 1991 amid the Persian Gulf War, became an enduring paradigm in political science and commentary—a convenient rhetorical shorthand, at least, if not necessarily a foolproof framework for understanding the Democratic and Republican parties. But at the dawn of the second Trump administration, as with so much other conventional wisdom, the parenthood analogy is in desperate need of revision. Daddy, specifically, has become less a protector of the home than a fearful menace to his family—including Mommy.
And Matthews’s characterization of Republicans has held up to a degree, too: The Daddy party practices tough love, promising to protect Americans from outside threats while also expecting people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. “In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant,” linguist and philosopher George Lakoff, who explored the mommy-daddy paradigm in his 1996 book Moral Politics, described the GOP perspective in a 2003 interview. “Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.”
None of this fully accounts for the abject cruelty underpinning President Donald Trump’s first month back in office. He immediately froze foreign aid and moved to eviscerate the U.S. Agency for International Development, which helps alleviate hunger, improve health care, and provides disaster relief in the poorest parts of the world; food was left to rot in ports and warehouses around the globe. He slashed grants for medical research (a federal court has put a stop to it for now), imperiling work on cancer and infectious diseases. He engineered a mass firing of as many as 220,000 federal employees that is ongoing as you read this, with tens of thousands having received impersonal termination notices.
Trump acolyte Tucker Carlson gave an accurate (if creepy) preview of this abusive, menacing Daddy at a Georgia rally weeks before the election. “Dad comes home, and he’s pissed!” Carlson said to a cheering crowd. “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 GOP itself really seems to be lining up behind their leader with a similar constellation of aggressive attitudes and behaviors,” said Nicholas Rule, a University of Toronto psychology professor. “If the 2016 campaign liberated Americans to say [things that] we teach children is impolite, the 2024 campaign may have liberated them to do [things that] we teach children is wrong: acting out their worst impulses.”
“It’s not even that they are opposed to social services. They are, but I really do think it goes beyond that, in the sense that government in general emasculates people, meaning men,” said author John Feffer, project director and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “Because it interferes with a man’s prerogative to control his wife, the education of his children, his ability to provide a kind of full-spectrum services of his own to his family. It’s not just that government provides these services. It’s the very notion of any interference into the male sphere.”
Here, again, Matthews’s 1991 essay is instructive. “Don’t underestimate the appeal of this new two-parent arrangement in American politics,” he wrote. “By focusing on ‘mommy’ matters, today’s Democrats avoid the brutal, intraparty debate that tore at the party’s soul during Vietnam. By playing down their Persian Gulf votes in the 1992 election, Democratic lawmakers hope to protect themselves from a second Bush landslide.”
Though Matthews was writing about foreign policy, the Democratic tendencies on display are depressingly familiar. The party’s failure to fight Trump early in his second administration appears to be driven in part by an assumption that they lost the election because they focused too much on the threat Trump faced to American democracy—and that voters eventually will reward them for not attacking Trump as aggressively as before. Ironically, it’s this very timidity and overcaution, especially among Democratic leaders on the Hill, that’s starting to fuel a debate that could indeed tear at the party’s soul, imperiling its chances of clawing back power in future elections.
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