Robert O. Self

In All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, Robert O. Self argues, “If ‘equal rights’ had been the driving force of American politics in one era, three decades on, ‘family values’ had usurped that position” (pg. 3). The developed from the creation of what Self defines as breadwinner conservatism, in which conservatives portrayed the ideal family and society as a patriarchal one in which men worked and women raised children. Self writes of his monograph, “The history recounted here shows that Americans rarely fought about equality, power, and money without invoking one idealized version of family or another” (pg. 6). To this end, Self argues, “The question is not whether gender, sex, and family are structured and regulated by the state; the question is what kinds of regulations exist and to what end” (pg. 12). Self organizes his book into four sections, tracing postwar masculinity, women’s responses through the mid 1970s, the place of sex in society in the late sixties through 1980, and the conservative pushback from the early 1970s through 2011.
Self argues that ideas of breadwinning and independence defined middleclass identity from the nineteenth century and that, “if men failed to become breadwinners and support families…it was a personal failure, not a social one” (pg. 19). While African Americans attempted to use masculinity to validate the black power movement, whites found black masculinity threatening. Echoing K.A. Curodileone’s discussion of Cold War masculinity, Self writes, “The Cold War draft was fraught with anxiety for many American men, not least because it entailed an encounter with the military’s sexual regime” (pg. 75). The military represented a force for heteronormative masculinity. Worse, the troubles in Vietnam threatened the masculinity of the military. Later, women responded to this archaic masculinity by casting “the female body as the site of political struggle, the place where the intimate and personal became the legal and public, where the personal became the political” (pg. 134). Feminists placed birth control and control of one’s body at the forefront of the political battle in order to claim their power in the public sphere. Alongside all of this, questions arose over “what role should the government play in the regulation of sexual knowledge and who ought to set the terms of sex itself – men or women” (pg. 190). New publications disseminated information about sex and the body. In response, “the anti-sex-education activists viewed the family, not the government, as the natural site of morality, ethics, and responsibility” (pg. 200). Self approaches the neoconservative revolution, arguing, “Only by considering the politics of gender, sex, and sexuality in tandem with – and just embedded in – the politics of race can we understand how breadwinner conservatism. For some whites, racial animosity fueled their breadwinner politics…For others, struggles over gender, sex, and family were enough to propel them rightward” (pg. 275). In the 1976 campaign, “‘Family’ had quite suddenly and powerfully joined communism and civil rights as the battlegrounds on which conservatives would wage war against liberalism” (pg. 309-310). Conservative evangelicalism helped to bind these traditionally conservative, yet disparate thoughts together. When Self writes of Reagan, he argues, “The gushy nostalgia among conservatives for Reagan in the twenty-first century has obscured the reality of that era’s conservatism, which met success and failure in equal measure” (pg. 367). Self argues that the greatest success of Reagan was to shift “the political debate about American citizenship away from rights toward government provision – what government ought to provide” (pg. 398). Further, “it recast liberalism for large numbers of Americans as a moral threat rather than as a lift up” (pg. 398). While there were other victories for the left into the early 2000s, the conservatives successfully changed the terms of the debate.… (mais)