Marriage, Misogyny, and the Pursuit of Happiness: The Right Is Offering a Morally Barren Vision of the Family

On Sunday, right-wing media figure Benny Johnson posted a photo of himself with his wife and their four young children, captioned:

I know this is going to trigger some people, but here is my family.

We’re happy. 

They’re miserable. 

That’s why we win.

Johnson’s X post was in response to rumors ignited by gay right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos that Johnson is himself closeted and has engaged in multiple sexual encounters with young men during his career. I have absolutely no interest in litigating Johnson’s sexuality or weighing his credibility against that of Yiannopoulos. 

But his choice to contrast his happiness with his opponents’ supposed misery by highlighting his wife and children felt striking because it is a common refrain on the right today. We hear regularly from right-wing podcasters all the way up to Vice President JD Vance that they are married, God-fearing, and rooted in traditional values—thus, happy. And they tell us reliably how their enemies are sexual delinquents and social outcasts, spewing their own discontentment back at the world. 

To quote one of Johnson’s favorite refrains:

Fall in love

Get married

Have a million kids

Then watch God’s wonders in your life

This will unlock your full potential. I’ve lived it firsthand. It is the greatest motivation. It is the only motivation that matters. Leave a legacy for the Kingdom.

All of this operates on a specific kind of family politics that now dominates the American right. It’s one that hinges on a highly exclusionary definition of marriage and that insists that a patriarchal structure, strict heterosexuality, and right-wing Christian principles are inalienable parts of that institution. Anyone who cannot conform to this sort of marriage is unworthy of marriage in the first place and cannot access the many blessings it bestows. 

On the one hand, this is the way that right-wing thinkers have viewed marriage for centuries, and it’s one that has plenty of resonance with recent decades of American conservatism. However, the right today has proven willing to publicly espouse a much more muscular and misogynistic program for marriage than in the past, with more extreme ideas making their way from the fringes into the mainstream. This is doubly pernicious when we consider how this family politics simultaneously promises to subdue heterosexual women inside oppressive marriages and to exclude other groups from the family project altogether. 

After all, Benny Johnson and many others among the MAGA and America First right don’t believe in the marriage or parental rights of LGBTQ people. Moreover, the right frequently excoriates single women as tragic examples of loneliness, inadequacy, and the dangerous excesses of feminism. They are “childless cat ladies” or some other sort of maladaptive thing. 

Yet what the right does offer women in relationships is a hierarchical, straightforwardly patriarchal version of the home. It’s presented as mutually beneficial, but it’s a sleight of hand in which men’s lives are enhanced by their leadership and vision and women’s lives are improved by submission and sacrifice. The actual satisfaction of women is taken for granted. They will be satisfied because they are married. If not, the defect is with the wife and not the marriage. 

All of this matters greatly if married life—more specifically, family life—is meant to be the primary if not only path to true happiness. Because, if we take that proposition at face value, whole chunks of society cannot and even should not be permitted access to that happiness by virtue of some moral or social defect. And others, namely women, will need to give up a great deal of their own dreams and independence in order to experience it. 

I want to lay this out in more detail below and to explore how this fusion of a reactionary, deeply illiberal idea of the family with the fundamental pursuit of happiness is a moral crisis for American life. And I want to show how dangerous it is to allow those on the right to claim to be the only ones offering disillusioned Americans a theory of the case on what the good life is and ought to be, on how they can achieve personal and moral satisfaction. It’s a challenge to which liberals must respond. 

A well-respected man about town

It’s crucial to understand the mechanisms by which family life unlocks personal happiness and fulfillment, because the right does not view all familial arrangements as necessarily granting these benefits. No, the true bounties of such a life can only be found if the family unit is properly ordered. 

During his interview with Incel and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson put his chauvinism in stark terms:

If you believe in the patriarchy, as I fervently do ‘cause it’s just reality, you know. We didn’t choose the system. We were born into a system that is part of nature. Can’t get out of it. So if you believe that’s true, which it is, then you think men should lead.

For men, this means leadership, control, and, ultimately, a passport from boyhood to manhood that rests on his capacity to bend his own little corner of the world to his will. Men gain a sense of themselves and their place in the world by taking their rightful place as head of their family—breadwinner at the office and rulemaker at home. 

Earlier this year, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh took to X to excoriate men celebrating the fact that their well-educated wives earn more than they do: 

Oh yeah, it rocks so much that your marriage is 50 percent more likely to end in divorce if your wife earns more than you. It rocks so much that both wives and husbands consistently report being less satisfied in their marriage when the wife earns more. Yeah it absolutely rocks for a man to be in a situation where his wife is a better provider than he is. Totally inverting a system that has worked across all of human civilization since the dawn of humanity is great. Sending the message to your wife that you don’t bring anything to the family that she doesn’t already bring in greater supply is amazing. Good advice. Thanks for the feedback.

Despite the sweeping, ahistorical nature of Walsh’s claims, it’s crucial to understand that the right-wing view is that a firm hierarchy with the husband at the top is actually beneficial to all parties. It is what everyone needs to be truly happy.

But if this traditionalist configuration of marriage promises men empowerment and confidence through leading their household, its offer for women is more paradoxical. For women, the operative word is submission. This is framed as a kind of giving in to their natural purpose to love and nurture. In this sense, women’s acceptance of their own subordination is presented as a form of liberation through sacrifice and humility. 

They can obtain security, love, and the actualization of their feminine virtues, but only if they are willing to take a subordinate position in and out of the house. 

Let’s turn once again to Matt Walsh: 

There’s a lot of work that needs to be done, constantly all the time, to keep a household running and a family alive, cared for, and happy. And, for all of our talk about being a society that has moved beyond gender roles, the fact is that the man is still the primary breadwinner in a majority of American households. And the woman is the primary breadwinner in a small minority—15 or 16% last I checked. So all the feminist complaints about men not contributing enough to childcare and to household chores just simply ignore this point entirely. They treat the man’s role of working every day and carrying the burden of supporting the family as if it’s nothing, as if it doesn’t matter at all. A man can carry the financial needs of a family on his shoulders alone, but if he changes fewer than 50% of the diapers then he’s still effectively a deadbeat. This is the attitude they have, and it’s why almost all of them are single, or divorced, or married yet soon to be divorced. 

Women who refuse to accept their place in this patriarchal institution are simply denying themselves the true benefits of marriage. By not accepting male headship, by going out and earning more than their partners at work and refusing to submit to their husbands at home, they’re doing themselves and their family a disservice. Or, as Tucker Carlson has asserted: “I don’t know a single happily married woman who’s liberal. Not one.”

During the 2024 campaign, The Guardian’s Moira Donegan laid out the disturbing evolution of family politics on display from the GOP, a trend highlighted by the selection of JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate:

If you’re a woman in America, Republicans want you to be a mother whether you care to or not. They want you to risk your health to give them more babies. Then, when those babies get bigger, they want to make sure that those children’s fathers – or, excuse me,“parents” – have a near-total control over both them and you.

They don’t want you to be able to get a divorce if your marriage turns unhappy or even abusive. They don’t want your daughter to be able to get birth control if her father doesn’t approve of it; they don’t want your other daughter to be able to get the hormone treatment she needs to thrive as her truest self. They want to inspect your kids’ genitals before they let them play on the high school softball team. They want to ban books, and decide what your kids can and can’t read.

They want to bar the medical treatments that allow you to plan your family and have children on your own terms – things like egg freezing and IVF. They want to make you have your children young, and they want to stigmatize those of us women who pursue our own careers, interests and ambitions instead of popping out as many children as they deem appropriate.

Donegan’s assessment has proved accurate. What’s more, the Republican Party is now beset by internal fights over whether self-proclaimed misogynists like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes should be considered members in good standing in right-wing politics. 

Despite all the talk on the right about happy wives and the gentleness of women, the barely concealed threat of rage and violence that Donegan emphasizes is key. Often, especially on the far right, only a thin veil separates a woman from the position of a beloved housewife and that of a reviled whore. As Cynthia Miller-Idriss writes in her new book Man Up: The New Misogyny & the Rise of Violent Extremism,

It is only housewives—women positioned in subordinate roles—who are put on a pedestal, however, and only under specific conditions. Within white supremacist and other far-right movements, women are held to strict standards about sexual purity and chastised for behavior that violates those standards.

The male valorization of feminine virtue quickly sours into vindictive rage at women who do not conform to this deeply coercive pretense of love. 

The ugliness that lurks beneath much of the right’s pro-marriage, pro-family rhetoric may be more subtly hidden for heterosexual, eligible white women. But for other groups, the veneer disappears entirely to reveal a snarling face of misogyny and anti-LGBTQ hatred. For such individuals, the right wants to take marriage and the happiness of family life off the table entirely. 

All the lonely people 

Even if we take the right’s proposition about what constitutes the good life at face value, what of all those people who, for reasons ranging from personal preferences to their inherent gender and sexual identities, fall outside the definition of family that’s on offer? 

The right routinely pathologizes LGBTQ people, placing them outside the boundaries of social life and obligations and characterizing their existence as fundamentally disordered. Michael Knowles, another of The Daily Wire’s chauvinist provocateurs, has called for the “eradication” of “transgenderism” and claimed that families led by same-sex parents are essentially a fiction violating basic laws of nature:

Two men and two women can’t produce children. It’s not possible, just not how it works. So they are literally not fit to beget and therefore to raise children. But, broadly, even if they adopt a child or even if they go to the baby store and purchase the eggs from one woman and rent the womb of another woman and create a child, as though the child were a handbag to be purchased at Ferragamo or something, they’re not fit to raise a child…The people who support homosexuals purchasing children and raising them by pretending that they’re a married couple or something, they necessarily are holding that women or men contribute nothing to the raising of children. 

And the right has not really surrendered in the fight against same-sex marriage. Matt Walsh argued just this year that conservatives need to seize on recent dips in support for LGBTQ rights to turn back the clock on gay marriage:

You know, people on our side—conservatives for years thought that the marriage debate was over, that we lost, there's nothing we can do about it. But that's not really true. It's never over. After all, the quote, unquote traditional definition of marriage, which is to say the actual definition of marriage, was settled for thousands of years until it wasn't. The reality is that just as quickly as America was overtaken by the moral panic of BLM and the emotional blackmail of trans activists, we can return to some semblance of sanity. You know, it doesn't take much.

What’s clear here is that the right regards LGBTQ people as outside the social compact, unnatural interlopers for whom progressives want to remake and redefine public life in unacceptable ways. Marriage cannot be for these people because it was never made for them. The integration of LGBTQ individuals into society as persons with full dignity and the right to pursue the lives they want and the love and respect we all crave is impossible because doing so is to turn ourselves over to what Rod Dreher has called “moral insanity.”

The treatment of single women—particularly single, liberal women—is similarly pathologizing. These women are presented as denying a fundamental yearning within them to be loving, submissive wives and mothers in traditional marriages. Their loneliness thus stems from their own dysfunctional thinking and behavior. Of course, they are unhappy with what feminism, liberalism, and the vanity of “independence” have to offer. 

Matt Walsh has insisted that this is the meager harvest of women’s liberation. In response to a viral TikTok by a woman describing her loneliness as a single person and desire for companionship, Walsh offered the following commentary on his show: 

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve always so aggressively opposed the lie that life is easier and happier if you forgo marriage and children. The culture’s been pushing this falsehood for generations now, as we know. Millions of people have listened to it and found themselves desperately lonely…They’re free, but they don’t have love…

The rub here is that Walsh and other right-wing commentators like him are not interested in any woman’s happiness if that happiness comes from their own self-empowerment or self-actualization. And marriage can offer them many things, but it can’t offer these—at least, not for the wife. This is the sinister underpinning of Walsh’s dichotomy between freedom and love. Marital duty demands submission of women, leaving lonely singles who want to retain their sense of self with a losing hand. 

Others on the right take this logic to even greater extremes. Christian nationalist pastor and commentator Joel Webbon insists submission is the natural state of all women, and that the real battle is whether they submit to the current secular culture or to heroic Christian men who are willing to take them as a prize:

And so young women, they’re sticking it to the man, they’re raging against the machine. No, they’re doing what young women have always done: submitting to authority. And so the men, what do we need to do? We need to win. Women are NPCs, non-player character. Meaning what? Meaning that all men have to do is win. You beat the zeitgeist, you have to beat the final boss, right? The gay, race communism final boss. You got to go in there, you got to beat him, and then you replace him as a righteous, God-fearing Christian man. And then you say, these are virtues, and these other things are vices…There actually is a damsel in distress, and she needs to be saved. She’s been cast under a wicked spell, and she is locked up in a tower by a fire-breathing dragon. And she needs you to rescue her. 

This is an obscenely misogynistic rant. But it also makes plain a logic of women’s salvation through subjugation and domination. Love and marriage aren’t so much made for women as women are made for them, and only the households where the man takes the helm and the woman readily submits are the ones where true marital bliss can be found. 

A great cruelty throughout all of this is that the right consistently offers up marriage and the family as the best and truest expression of love at the same time as it cordons off and denies real participation to anyone outside a limited community of heterosexual, typically Christian, avowedly patriarchal, and mostly white individuals. But this is a preposterous conceptualization of anything meant to have human dignity and mutual affection at its core. It’s an ahistorical and philosophically barren understanding of what makes human relationships so rewarding to begin with. 

Yet what the right apprehends and successfully preys upon is that yearning for human connection inside of us. Family is surely a more open-ended concept than the image of the 1950s nuclear household, but it is still something we all crave in some form. That is to say, we need the security of close connections, the community provided by living intimately and intentionally with other people, and the edifying effects of shared love.  

The good life 

Marriage and family, and the underlying desire for happiness and love, ultimately concern our beliefs about the good and what it means to live a good life. This is the sort of topic that I think too many from the center to the progressive left try to avoid or reduce to debates about legal rights. 

Yes, the legal questions matter, but liberals cannot afford to dismiss the desire to pursue some idea of the good as a fusty, reactionary thing. Yes, a liberal ideal of happiness and the good must maintain a healthy pluralism, but it is flatly irresponsible to cede vital ground on an institution as central to human life as the family. 

In a 2023 essay detailing ongoing far-right assaults on same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, and family assistance, Anne Lutz Fernandez captured the hypocrisy of venerating marriage while working to turn it into an oppressive, highly exclusionary institution that few people can access and even fewer can escape:

The desire for love and companionship is why Americans get married. We marry for happiness, plain and simple. But when people stay in unhappy marriages, it is mostly for other reasons, including money, fear, children, shame, and hope. Worthy policy steps would work these levers to increase marital happiness. Forces on the right are moving instead to make both marriage and divorce harder.

She is right. Happiness—and I would argue the very idea of the good life—is at the center of such policy fights. This, in a sense, is what the “Love is Love” and other pro-gay marriage campaigns were about. 

But to go even further, we liberals must be willing to have moral and not merely policy fights about the inherent right of everyone to strive for something more than just sustenance. The whole project of politics from the beginnings of the modern era shows us this. 

As Ritchie Robertson writes in his expansive history, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790

To [Enlightenment thinkers], happiness was not, as it often is in present-day discussions, simply a subjective state, such as might be induced by chemicals; it meant attaining the preconditions for personal happiness, including domestic affection, material sufficiency and a suitable degree of freedom…

Isn’t that the real promise of our republican experiment? That liberty precedes, is necessary but not sufficient for, but also demands the pursuit of happiness? What I mean is that liberal democracy itself is a starting point for our ability to ask what is good—what will make us happy, edified, and even enlightened? Isn’t that what makes freedom so precious?

This is the kind of conversation I have been having with people I admire like Holly Berkley Fletcher and Bradley Onishi, and which thinkers like Laura Field have done the work of raising in our public consciousness. 

Our present age is beset by crises of anomie and ennui. I genuinely believe that the liberal democratic society—the open, pluralistic, and free society—is the best environment for human flourishing. But for liberalism to offer a persuasive alternative to the hateful and authoritarian snake oil coming from the right, it will have to be willing to have big conversations about virtue, meaning, and the good life. 

Featured image is The Unequal Marriage, by Vasily Pukirev