All the Rage: Clarence Thomas,Paternal Authority,and Conservative Desire

Abstract

Clarence Thomas is, according to The Weekly Standard, the “leading conservative in America today.” More than just an iconic conservative, The National Review esteems Thomas as “an extraordinary man.” How are we to understand the ascent of a sitting United States Supreme Court Justice to the status of national hero in the American conservative imagination? And what does Clarence Thomas’s hero-status reveal about that conservative imagination?

I argue, first, that the canonization of Clarence Thomas by American conservative intellectuals speaks to, and revives, long-standing motifs in the American political tradition: rage at, and rejection of, maternal, feminine influence; an associated longing for stable, paternal authority and the self-disciplined, autonomous citizenship that it is believed to produce; and the promotion of law as the primary means by which to achieve social order and to repress the chaos conventionally associated with the maternal realm. Second, I argue that Thomas’s political vision and, especially, his jurisprudential philosophy – which emphasizes a Judge’s responsibility to abdicate individual judgment in the name of fidelity to the desires of the Founding Fathers – reveals an ironic ambiguity at the heart of the conservative political imagination. Indeed, fixation with the paternal authority of law leads modern conservatives, as it does Clarence Thomas, to impose a series of limitations on the individual autonomy that they claim is the fruit of overcoming feminine, maternal influence. The manifold obsessions voiced by Clarence Thomas and his conservative intellectual champions – obsessions with fathers, with mothers, and with law – thus point to a limited citizenship that is at odds with conservatism’s own dreams of mature autonomy.