Why is the Republican Party so obsessed with children?

Tucker Carlson and his GOP friends can’t realistically paint Joe Biden as a Stalinist puppet — so they’ve turned to the oldest trick in the book

The Trumpist right’s first line of attack on Joe Biden was all too predictable, and perhaps that’s why it didn’t work. Having spent months trying to frame him as an out-of-control radical authoritarian – confusingly, nefarious and ineffectual at the same time – all the reliable indicators now show that Americans just don’t see him that way.

True, many of them don’t love him — but they don’t see him as a doddering Stalinist puppet either. And the relief checks they’re about to get from his administration won’t hurt.

And so instead, there’s a pivot underway into a retro style of opposition politics: the full-on, reality-defying old-school culture war. And this no-limits rearguard action, like many before it, is being fought on one of the right’s traditional battlegrounds of choice: the mind, body and soul of the American child.

Whenever the argument can’t quite be won on economics or security or the resolution of a catastrophic pandemic, the furious defence of child minds is a safe battle to pick – because someone is always offended enough to care, someone can always be blamed, and no-one can ever definitively say the threat has gone away.

There’s ample fodder these days, of course. For outrage at what children are exposed to, there’s the hectoring, pneumatic-drill-like female genital paean “WAP”; Netflix’s questionable-in-taste but undeniably satirical Cuties; a curriculum that puts slavery at the center of the American national narrative. And if you’re worried about what children are being deprived of, the complete uncensored works of Dr Seuss should be top of your list.

Of course, Democrats have gone here themselves many times. Tipper Gore was fretting over obscene song lyrics in front of Congress 40 years ago, up in arms about Sheena Easton’s relatively oblique “Sugar Walls”.

But these days, The Simpsons’ panicked Helen Lovejoy screaming “Won’t somebody please think of the children!” is being channeled nightly by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, the permanently frowning referee of cultural grievance forever on high alert for anything that might pollute the American hatchery. Thus his extended monologues laying into “WAP”, raging at its obscenity while also directing his viewers to look up the lyrics.

What gives a nonsensical twist to all this is an undertow of rage at the people who carry and bear the children in the first place – not least the ones who dare get pregnant in the wrong time and place.

“So we’ve got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits,” Carlson fumed at the news that expectant servicemembers might now be given clothing they can wear comfortably while doing their jobs. “Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the US military.” This has landed him in a war of words with the Pentagon (the Pentagon!) over his lack of respect for Americans in uniform – a group whom Republicans often use as a cudgel against the Democrats, not a target of their own.

What, besides political expediency, is all this in service of? Yes, plenty of it is just a cynical repackaging of personal irritation and distaste as objective moral standards, as has been the case for decades. But there’s something more at work: a genuine, deeply held fear that the precious next generation in the US’s collective womb could at any moment be wrecked beyond repair – and the nation with it.

For a spell during the benighted tail-end of the George W Bush administration, I worked as an intern in a liberal congressman’s office. At one point, a doomed immigration reform package was inching its way through the Congress, and the predictable wave of vile messages was starting to hit.

One of them has stuck with me to this day: a calm, mid-morning call from a concerned father worried what would happen to his kids if any old Mexican could just stroll on into his family’s country. “I want my kids to grow up in a land of baseball and hot dogs,” he said, “not a land of tacos and Cinco de Mayo celebrations.”

Rather than enraged, the man sounded mournful – his racism seemed genuinely, confusingly sorrowful, rather than aggressive or murderous. But racism it very much was. Only a racist deeply believes that two questionably healthy street foods cannot sustainably co-exist within the same nation. Like a merciless sunbeam burning Dracula into dust, the logic goes, a mere splash of adobo sauce will irrevocably transform white America into Guadalajara.

The culture warriors raging against the sexually and intellectually open-minded forces of whatever-it-is are premising their war on this same idea of extreme vulnerability. The American child, they say, is liable to be irrevocably ruined at any time, as helpless in the face of a vaginal self-lubrication anthem as a spiderlings dangling from their gossamer threads.

That millions of American children live every day with poverty, food insecurity and educational neglect thanks to structural conditions the modern right has in part created and declined to repair is simply not the point.

The vulnerability that matters is the child’s vulnerability to vulgarity, irreverence, libertine tendencies to do things the right would rather people didn’t do (especially not in public) – and most of all, of course, to change. As is so often true when the Democrats take the helm, what progressives call progress, the Carlsons of this world call decay.