Happy families are all different, but nationalists want them all to be alike. A coercive vision of the family as the bedrock of the nation—and of the nation as a family ruled by a single, benevolent but all-powerful patriarch—is being pushed everywhere from Tennessee to Budapest to Moscow. As such, the family has always been a key site of both policymaking and meaning-making for right-wing nationalists seeking to press their vision of the good national community.
In August 2024, during the dog days of the U.S. election season, then-vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance came under scrutiny for the foreword that he wrote to a 2017 Heritage Foundation report that included an essay attacking the spreading use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. In that essay, author Jennifer Lahl opines that “more women have been pursuing higher education and graduate degrees and spending a large portion of their most fertile years building their careers.” For Lahl, IVF is a mirage through which “women are lured into the belief that they can have children whenever they are finally ready.”
Earlier in 2024, the Southern Baptist Convention—the second-largest Christian denomination in the United States, comprising nearly 47,000 churches—passed a resolution opposing IVF treatment. The resolution declares that “[c]ouples who experience the searing pain of infertility can turn to God, look to Scripture for numerous examples of infertility, and know that their lament is heard by the Lord, who offers compassion and grace to those deeply afflicted by such realities (Genesis 16:1-16, 25:21; Judges 13:2; 1 Samuel 1:11; Luke 1:5-13).”
These kinds of normative arguments against the benefits of IVF are important to scrutinize at a moment when global right is fighting for its own narrow definition of what a family is.
Despite repeated insistence from national Republican Party figures that such views remain fringe, Republicans in the U.S. Senate have danced a two-step on the issue. Leading Republicans, such as Sen. Rick Scott and others, have offered paeans to the blessings of IVF. However, only two Republicans ultimately voted in June to support Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s bill to codify the protection of the practice.
Of course, much of the coverage has focused on the central, controversial assertion that embryos are human beings. But there are also wider politics of the family at play—a movement that ties to other right-wing fears about population decline, immigration, and LGBTQ rights. Questions about what families are have become key to the vision of the nation itself.
Today, the very definition of family—as well as the policies that directly affect the legal integrity, personal privacy, and social viability of the family in its many forms—are at the center of hard-right politics in the United States and
The family, in its structural and normative dimensions, is often used as an avatar for larger social units. When the far right talks about husbands and wives and the distribution of labor and authority in a household, or when it evokes sepia-tinged nostalgia about when families were strong and the world was supposedly as it should be, the message is clear enough: This is how the community and the nation should be ordered.
For Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, it goes even further. In Orban’s view, the family is at the center of Western civilization and all the things that make that civilization worthwhile. As he said in a 2021 interview with the American magazine Chronicles:
“Christianity, first of all, created the free man. Therefore, we must — first and foremost — protect human dignity. Then, Christianity created the Christian family. We must protect the concept of the Christian family. Next, Christianity has created nations in this part of the world. If we Hungarians had not followed Christianity for a thousand years, we would have disappeared; so we must also protect the nation. But we also have to protect religious communities and the Church. To summarize, our task is not to protect theological principles, that is the mission of the Church; but our mission is to protect the great Christian achievements of our civilization…”
Orban’s family politics are about building a bulwark. And that sense of the family as part of a defensive politics is manifest in many far-right circles. Historian Isabel Heinemann describes parties such as Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany as “placing the ‘white healthy family’ at the centre of its political programmatic and campaign iconography.” This is a reaction against the multicultural Germany that has emerged since reunification and especially since the refugee crisis of the mid-2010s.
Similarly, the ideas being offered from the hard-liners of the U.S. right are part of an interlocking vision of both the family and the nation that is predominantly white, Christian, reproductively healthy, and morally chaste.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership—the conservative think tank’s 900-page plan to reshape the government—declares:
“…the next conservative President must understand that using government alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue America’s kids from familial breakdown. … It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.”
There’s nothing inherently reactionary about trying to make it easier for Americans who want to get married and have kids to do so. Falling birthrates and the challenges of population decline aren’t manufactured concerns, but the Trumpian GOP has frequently replaced reasonable concerns about productivity and tax bases with lurid fears of political and racial displacement.
Take, for example, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik’s embrace of the so-called great replacement theory, which postulates that elites are conspiring to replace the West’s white population with nonwhite immigrants. One of her ads declared that Democrats have designs on “a permanent election insurrection” through foreign immigration. Stefanik could soon be representing U.S. interests to the world as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to become the next ambassador to the United Nations.
Or consider Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is a Fox News host and avowed “culture warrior” with a chip on his shoulder about everything from women serving in combat to the existence of trans people.
He’s also an outspoken advocate for his particular brand of Christian family values. Hegseth sees himself as standing athwart history, yelling “stop” at the apparent secular, leftist threats to the family and the nation.
As he has put it, “Our individual family stories are the stories of our nation. If in three generations we can go from faithful Christian households to anti-American households, we are toast.” And the image of Hegseth, his blonde wife, and their many children (some from previous marriages) has elicited shouts of glee from the very online right, who view him as an ideal “family man.”
Of course, all of this means that family is a contested concept. And it’s one that can bend to suit the ambitions of a new set of aggressive far-right activists.
But the need to protect the integrity of the family does not appear to extend to all families. This sentiment was on clear display in Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s speech at Madison Square Garden just days before the November 2024 election: “Who’s going to stand up for our daughters? Who’s going to stand up for the girls of America, the women of America, the families of America? Who’s going to stand up and say … America is for Americans and Americans only?”
As commentators such as Hegseth make clear, the degradation of the family unit is a stand-in for the degradation of the nation. So when the traditional family is threatened—either directly, through the rise of divorce rates or more abstractly through growing acceptance for LGBTQ relationships and what conservatives see as “woke” cultural norms—it is a civilizational dilemma.
This is why Russian President Vladimir Putin frames his authoritarian crackdowns on LGBTQ rights and bellicose posturing toward NATO as an exercise in benevolent patriarchy. In Putin’s words, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was part of an effort made for the “protection of children.” Putin has also asserted that Russia is fighting “sexual deviation.”
Ahead of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed that Ukrainians “sought to destroy our [Russian] traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.”
Consider the implications of Putin now finding an appeaser in the White House and a similarly retrograde culture warrior running the United States’ Defense Department.
In September 2024, the Russian parliament approved the first reading of a bill that would prevent Russian children from being adopted by parents in countries where gender-affirming health care is legal. It’s a move that shows the globalized nature of the fight around families, social norms, and political freedoms.
In the United States, that kind of cross-border fight has found a different target: birthright citizenship. American immigration hard-liners have long hated the principle of granting citizenship to anyone born within the boundaries of the United States. But the principle is not just legally enshrined. It is also fundamentally intertwined with the post-Civil War refounding of the country, which set the United States on the path toward true multiracial, multicultural democracy.
The attack on birthright citizenship is framed as a means to reduce illegal immigration, but it is also about precluding certain types of people from belonging. It can’t be taken otherwise. As my own representative, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, recently argued after introducing a bill to amend birthright citizenship, “There is no constitutional right for illegal aliens to cross the border to gain citizenship for their children.”
And birth more generally has become a battleground—and not only because of the repeal of Roe v. Wade and subsequent fights over abortion rights and access. This brings us back to IVF.
When it comes to childbirth and LGBTQ Americans, same-sex couples largely rely on IVF treatment to create biological offspring. And while adoption is an alternative route, many of these couples want to be able to experience the joys and intimacies of pregnancy and childbirth, either themselves or via surrogacy. Moreover, same-sex couples in many states are already excluded from coverage for fertility treatments.
And same-sex couples aren’t the only ones who use the process: Roughly 12.5 percent of heterosexual couples experience infertility. IVF accounts for 2 percent of babies born in the United States. Statements such as the one from the Southern Baptist Convention make clear that these cultural institutions view it as simply acceptable that any fertility challenges, whatever their source, are the burden of the family concerned to bear—and that they must do so without access to fertility treatments.
In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump declared his support for government-funded IVF treatment and bizarrely titled himself as “the father of IVF” during a Fox News town hall. But the legislative reality is that Republicans have shown little more than lip service to protecting IVF access for all Americans. And the potential for future rollbacks on reproductive rights in a post-Dobbs v. Jackson United States remains serious.
Beyond the question of who gets to become a parent, there is also the question of how to parent and where the state should and should not intervene. Right-wing policies billed as supporting parental rights circumscribe their protections for heterosexual and gender-conforming parents and children.
Deep-red states have made it easier for anti-LGBTQ parents to control their children’s sexual and gender expression while removing privacy protections for all youth, resulting in policies that could out young people before they are ready. Such policies help erect systems of coercion and distrust between parent and child, and they sometimes leave affirming families outside of the community altogether.
I was adopted as an infant into an evangelical family. I have personally experienced the power of family-building methods beyond the narrow parameters of heterosexual, biological procreation to create a loving home. What all these things have in common is that they rest on the desire of people to take control over the world around them, to make new homes and configurations of family, and to participate fully in the same institutions of community that have always been available to white, American-born, procreative, and heterosexual couples.
These right-wing policies, above all, result in the exclusion of people from such opportunities—and, by extension, the closing off of what it means to be fully American. With Trump set to return to the White House, his early staffing choices suggest an administration that will be deeply hostile toward immigrants and cozy with culture warriors. We’re likely to see four years marked by policies that seek to exclude whole swaths of people from the American experience.
The post The Global Right Is Fighting Against Real Families appeared first on Foreign Policy.
