Great post. The only thing I'd add is that I don't think this is held over from older versions of childrearing; not just in right-wing families but in all families (to varying extents, with varying degrees of awareness), children are instruments to be used for a purpose. Nowadays that purpose is more likely to be symbolic and emotional than "I need children to work on the farm." But being a tool is the same subjective experience, whether you're being used for your physical labor or your emotional labor.
The authoritarian family (and all families are authoritarian, even the most liberal and loving ones, since the threat of "if you leave, I'll call the cops to bring you back" is never absent) carries out some of the functions of the authoritarian state, by producing workers to be fed into the capitalist economy, and that's where the "I need children to work on the farm" thing comes back: you probably don't own your own farm, but the economy does need your children in order to sustain itself, and if you believe (for example) that wage work confers dignity and you need to teach your child the value of hard work, that serves both your own emotional/moral goals and the state's economic goals.
Likewise, the state reinforces the family in some obvious ways: public education (it's not a coincidence that that's being continually privatized and pared down to the bare minimum for sustaining the reproduction of labor), welfare (which has been cut back even more aggressively), the administrative recognition of marriage, and most clearly, the "child welfare" system -- which is really a system for protecting parental property rights unless you're a minoritized and poor person whose children must be harvested from you because you're seen as incapable of turning the raw material of your child into a productive worker -- and police power that insures children can't leave their families (unless, same.)
So I don't think the family works this way because it's an old habit that people have forgotten to break. Authoritarianism renews and reshapes itself all the time.
This is also why queer and trans people are a threat to institutions, which conservatives openly acknowledge and liberals acknowledge through rhetoric that forcibly assimilates queer and trans people into institutions ("love is love", "born this way", etc.) It's perceived that queer and trans people don't produce children (inaccurate) and that queer and trans people are more likely to produce children who won't enter gladly into the patriarchal-parent-to-patriarchal-boss pipeline (probably accurate).
I owe much of what I'm able to say here to the writing and teaching of Sophie Lewis, without whom I wouldn't be able to say, without qualification: abolish the family.
because in their minds, we cause their queer and trans children to defect from their perfectly controlled family and community (instead of un-accepting parents being the cause of the defection). Because if you don't know what being gay, being trans is? It's much easier for social repression to just keep you rationalizing it in other ways while still being miserable.
Also true! It's simultaneously true that:
- Queer and trans people are a threat to social reproduction.
- Individual working people don't have much reason to care about social reproduction, as such.
- To get individuals to care, state and economic actors (in a "purpose of the system is what it does" way) pull from and remix existing stories to generate negative sentiment about queer and trans people. Often those stories are religious, since Christianity already did a lot of PR work and it's cheaper to ride its coattails, but not always.
- This coexists with an ongoing process of generating/fostering positive sentiment about "the family", which is its own reward for individuals since they get to feel good about their families of origin and/or the families they've created, at least if those families are close enough to the heterosexual/patriarchal/monogamous ideal.
- This positive sentiment helps people feel better about and/or repress their propertarian feelings towards their kids. A lot of people wouldn't feel very good if they had to explicitly talk about how their kid and their car are both possessions that must be protected from theft with violence or the implied threat thereof. The negative sentiment helps them pass off those (at-least-mildly-)socially unacceptable feelings as more acceptable, protective feelings about keeping "gr**m*rs" away from their kids.
If your kids abandon you, then yes, it's likely because you're un-accepting. How much this bothers you, though, depends on who you are. People who are a little lower than average on authoritarian commitment might still reach for the "queer gr**m*rs" narrative to avoid examining their own parenting. But that only happens if the accusation of being an un-accepting parent would make you feel bad. I think if you're authoritarian enough, you're not even susceptible to that accusation. It wouldn't make sense to you -- your property rights aren't contingent on your acceptance of the property. The sentence "You need to be more accepting towards your child" wouldn't be any more meaningful than "You need to be more accepting towards your car." It's yours to do what you want with, including cutting pieces off and adding new ones on, whether that property is an enslaved person, a house, a car, or a child.
The point about producing more right-wing voters is also very true. It's kind of hard to say whether this is a primary goal (because long-lasting systems, by definition, sustain themselves) or a secondary one (because voting is a tool for accumulating and protecting assets). Maybe some of both.