Good Riddance to James Dobson, A Big Reason We All Live in Hell

And if there is a hell, and it does apply the same pluralistic principles most of non-Republican evangelical society prioritizes, James Dobson is surely writhing in pain below our feet right now. If you have never heard his name, it is partially by design, as he preferred to flex his power in more subtle ways beyond the reach of American media’s superficial form of sensationalist coverage. Dobson used his evangelical network to electorally bend the GOP to his will in the 1980s, and after helping the Reagan Revolution poison the evangelical well with his rancid form of partisanship, he became a GOP kingmaker. A major, major moment in 2016 came when Dobson said that Trump had “accept[ed] a relationship with Christ” and was a “baby Christian,” crowning him as the evangelical candidate. Trump’s move in the polls was up only from there.

This Republican evangelical voter bloc is the most consistent group of voters in the GOP–nay, America–as they proved in elections across the country throughout the 1980s and onward, striking fear into a generation of Democrats that still animates them today. Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Paul Weyrich were kingmakers who purged moderates from the Southern Baptist Convention and established the Moral Majority, and as much as we bicker over politicians and billionaires, motivated and unhinged ideologues like Dobson and Stephen Miller in influential positions do more to shape our political world than anyone. Look at guns; it’s an 80-20 issue that America can’t address because Dobson helped establish a base of 20 percent fanatics who strike more fear into politicians than the 80 percent who support common sense gun laws. He helped give them a bullshit narrative backed by bullshit psychology about the supposed breakdown of the family being at the root of mass shootings and not guns.

He also helped force debunked conversion therapy on the United States, torturing countless gay, trans and non-binary children across the country. A psychologist by education, Dobson’s true passion was imposing his barbarous pseudoscience on a country supposedly founded on the separation of church and state. He combined a PhD from the University of Southern California with revanchist views on Christianity and a fixation on disciplining children in myriad disturbing ways, creating an electorally acceptable moral universe for Republican politicians to stake out increasingly extreme positions in. If you want to know more about how Dobson’s resentment at not being accepted as a serious thinker by his peers animated his revanchist politics, check out this episode of Seeking a Fen at the End of the World led by Chapo’s Felix Biederman, one of this era’s most prominent studiers of right-wing brain rot. You cannot understand Joe Rogan and his more advanced manosphere iterations without first understanding the reactionary soil that Dobson cultivated for them.

It’s impossible to tell the story of America’s journey over the last century without including Dobson as a prominent player in it. Our modern political and economic system grew out of the depths of the Great Depression, as institutions like Social Security and Medicare were established by Democrats from the 1930s to the 1960s in the greatest victory for true American values since Reconstruction. Capital’s backlash to the reforms of the New Deal they have spent a century unshackling themselves from are well-documented, but architects of the cultural backlash to the advances of the 1960s like Dobson are less prominent in the national conversation. Like so much of our media coverage treats them, the GOP just is allowed to be the way it is, without any real justification for its positions and beliefs that often align itself against most of America, especially on social issues.

And Dobson is to thank for this tyranny. Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992 was a psychic shock that sadly convinced a lot of Democrats that 43 percent of the popular vote is a success, as it allegedly stopped what was characterized as an inevitable Republican march to supermajorities across America on the back of the Moral Majority. The problem with this story that Democrats tell themselves is they still retained their New Deal and Great Society-era congressional majorities through the Reagan era, and per usual, look in the mirror and see a weaker version of themselves than what exists in reality. Democrats’ perpetual stance in the fetal position that endures to this day is due in large part to the fear of James Dobson’s god that he put into them.

Dobson spent his entire life trying to upend the progress of the 20th century. He helped found purity culture, which has led Gavin Newsom to think that attacking trans people is the key to electoral success in 2028. Dobson encouraged “daddy-daughter dating” as a rebuke to America’s growing pluralistic sensibilities, as his Wikipedia entry writes that “he believed heterosexuality must be cultivated, Dobson intended these romanticized attachments to model proper heterosexual partnership to girls age six or younger.” Pedocon theory has its roots in Dobson’s creepy predatory network, and he embodied everything that is wrong with the modern Republican Party. The world became a slightly better place today, all because one person left it. That is Dobson’s ultimate legacy, that his most generous act in a lifetime of tyranny is finally freeing this world from his personal form of evil.