Every Totalitarian Regime Went After the Family First, and Not by Accident

A dictator has a problem that no army can solve. He can take the printing presses, the courts, the radio and the schools. But at six in the evening, behind a closed door, a father and a mother are telling a child what they believe, and he cannot hear a word of it.

That is not a small leak in the system. To a government that wants total control, it is the whole flood. The family is the oldest institution on earth, it predates every state, and it asks for a loyalty that no state can order or abolish. So the pattern is as steady as a law of physics. Take any revolutionary regime of the last two centuries, and you will find that sooner or later, usually sooner, it turned on the family. Here is the story in order, and then what it tells us.

Why a state would fear a family

Define the claim carefully, because it is easy to overstate.

A totalitarian regime is one that seeks to control not just political behaviour but all of life: thought, education, belief, work, leisure and loyalty. Hannah Arendt, who studied such regimes, described them as aiming at the total domination of the individual. The family, in the sense used here, is the household built on marriage and parenthood, the first community a person belongs to and the first authority he obeys.

The argument is simple, and it can be put in four premises.

1. A totalitarian state wants every person's first loyalty.
2. The family claims that loyalty first: a child loves his parents before he has heard of a flag.
3. The family also transmits values, religion and memory independently of the state.
4. Therefore a totalitarian state must either capture the family or weaken it.

I am not claiming that every government that has ever regulated family life is totalitarian. Every state sets rules for marriage, inheritance and child protection, and some of those rules are necessary. The claim is about regimes that set out to remake society wholesale, and about the direction in which they pushed.

The ancient version

The idea is older than the revolutions. In Book V of Plato's Republic, Socrates proposes that the guardian class of the ideal city should hold wives and children in common, so that no guardian would know which child was his own and loyalty would run to the city alone. Aristotle, Plato's own student, answers in the Politics that this would not unite the city; it would thin the affection out until nobody cared for anyone. A thing owned by everybody, he says, receives the least care. The first great debate about the family and the state ended with the conservative position: the household is not an obstacle to the good society, it is its foundation. That argument has been running ever since.

The Jacobins, 1789 to 1794

The French Revolution began as a rebellion against a monarchy and quickly became an attempt to remake the person. The revolutionary government legalised divorce by mutual consent in September 1792, changed inheritance rules to break up the family estate, replaced Church marriage with civil registration and, in the radical phase, drew up plans for children to be educated by the republic. It also invited citizens to denounce enemies of the Revolution, and the Terror of 1793 and 1794 rewarded exactly that. A republic that asks neighbours, and sometimes relatives, to inform has put itself between husband and wife.

The Revolution then retreated. Napoleon's Civil Code of 1804 restored the authority of the father and tightened divorce, a quiet admission that a society could not run on the principle that the family was a relic. But the template was written: the revolutionary state, when it wanted to change everything, looked first at the household.

The Manifesto, 1848

In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. In its second section it takes up the objections to communism, and one of them it answers directly. Its words are: "Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists."

Read what follows with care. Marx and Engels argued that the bourgeois family rested on capital and private gain, and that it would vanish when its economic basis vanished. They also proposed to replace home education with social education, and to end what they called the exploitation of children by their parents. In their argument, the family is not a natural community but a product of the property system, and so what depends on property will fall with it. That claim, that the family is a social construct of economic arrangements, is the intellectual root of every later communist family policy. The reader who wants the economics behind it can find a measured account in The Value of a Thing Is Not the Labor in It, and Menger Answered Marx.

The Bolsheviks, 1917 to 1936

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first time a Marxist party held a state and could try the idea. The results came quickly.

In December 1917 the new government introduced civil marriage and easy divorce. In October 1918 it adopted a comprehensive Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship, which removed the legal power of the church over marriage, treated the couple as equal partners, and abolished the legal distinction between children born in and out of wedlock. Some of that was a real modernisation. Some of it was ideological: the theorists of the day, among them Alexandra Kollontai, spoke openly of the family's eventual "withering away", on the model of the state.

The outcome was a social disaster. After the civil war and the famine of the early 1920s, millions of children, by most estimates, were homeless, the besprizorniki, and the state could not care for them. Easy divorce left many women with children and no support. A regime that had decided the household was obsolete found it had nothing to replace it with.

In the 1930s Stalin reversed course. The decree of June 1936 prohibited abortion except for medical reasons, made divorce much more costly, and introduced payments and honours for mothers of large families. The party that had spoken of the family's withering suddenly spoke of its strength. Do not misread the reversal. It was not a conversion to the family's rights. The state wanted more births and a stable workforce, and it wanted the family as an instrument, a small cell of order under party supervision. The family was permitted, on the state's terms.

The same decade saw the elevation of Pavlik Morozov, a boy in a Urals village who, according to the Soviet account, denounced his own father to the authorities in 1932 and was killed for it. Soviet schools taught children to honour him. How much of the official story is accurate is disputed by historians, and I make no claim about the facts of the case. The claim I do make is about what the regime chose to celebrate: a child's duty to the state over his father.

National Socialism, 1933 to 1945

Hitler's regime was ideologically the opposite of Marx's, and its method was close. It exalted the family in speeches, with awards for large families and slogans about the "German mother," while taking control of the family's most important function, the formation of children.

The Hitler Youth had been one party organisation among many in the 1920s. After 1933 it was expanded and absorbed rival youth groups, including church ones. A law of December 1936 made it the state youth organisation, and in 1939 membership was made compulsory. Boys and girls spent weekly time in uniform, under party leaders, on programmes that competed with school, church and home. The point was stated plainly by the regime itself: the child belonged to the nation, and the parents were stewards. The Church was one of the few institutions with the standing to object, and the history of those who did so, like the Confessing Church pastors, is told in Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the church that would not bow to the Reich.

Mao's China, 1949 to 1976

China's Communist Party took power in 1949, and in 1950 passed a new Marriage Law that banned arranged marriage and concubinage and gave women the right to divorce. Much of that was welcome. The break came later.

In 1958, in the Great Leap Forward, the government merged agricultural cooperatives into giant "people's communes," often of several thousand households. In many communes, meals were taken in communal canteens, and in some places families' cooking pots were collected for steel production. Children were put in communal nurseries and boarding schools. The household as a unit of production and consumption was deliberately dissolved. The Great Leap ended in the worst famine in recorded history; estimates of the dead run from the tens of millions upward. When the state had taken over the kitchen, the granary and the field, nobody was left to say that the numbers were wrong.

During the Cultural Revolution of 1966 and after, children were encouraged to denounce parents and teachers as class enemies, and many did. The Red Guards were taught that loyalty to Chairman Mao outranked loyalty to a mother or father.

The pattern, and the other side's best answer

Line the cases up and the pattern is hard to miss. Different ideologies, centuries apart, on different continents, reached for the same lever: a rival loyalty to the family, a state-run education for children, a reward for informing on one's own relatives, and a promise that the household would be replaced by something better.

The fair objection comes in two parts. First, some of those states also did good things for women and children; the 1918 Soviet code and the 1950 Chinese marriage law ended real abuses. Second, the family has itself been the site of cruelty, and a state that never intervened would leave abused wives and children without remedy.

Both points are true, and the answer is the difference between protecting the family's members and replacing the family. A free state will punish a father who beats his child and will not take the child from a home of loving parents to raise him in a collective. The line between those two is the line between a law against abuse and a programme of abolition. Conservatives who care about the family defend the first and resist the second. The tests are plain: does the state treat parents as the presumptive guardians of their children? Does it make room for religion and for private schooling? Does it ask children to report on their families? Does it justify its reach by a promise that the old household will be unnecessary?

Why the family is a check on power

Here is the positive argument, and it is the heart of the matter.

The family is a natural limit on the state in four ways.

1. It forms the person before the state does. A child learns trust, honesty and right and wrong at home. A citizen who has those habits can see when the government is lying.
2. It provides for its own. A family that cares for its elderly, its sick and its children does not depend on the government to do so, and a person who does not depend on the government for his bread is harder to coerce.
3. It holds a loyalty the state cannot cancel. The test of a free society is whether a man can say, "I will not do that, because it is wrong," and know that someone at home will stand with him.
4. It passes down memory. Totalitarian states rewrite history. Grandparents remember the original.

The sociologist Robert Nisbet made the point in The Quest for Community (1953): when intermediate institutions like the family weaken, individuals are left alone before the state, and the state offers itself as the only community. Read more in Robert Nisbet Saw Lonely People Turn to the State for Belonging. Tocqueville saw the same danger in democracies, a gentle government that takes over more and more of life, described in Democracy in America, and ends by reducing a free people to a flock. See Tocqueville Saw Soft Despotism Coming, a Power That Never Says No. The case that the family comes first, in time and in right, is made in the family came before the state, so why does the state act like a parent?.

The Founding view

The American founders took it for granted that the household was prior to government. The Declaration of Independence grounds government in the consent of the governed and in rights that precede it. The Constitution gives the federal government no power over marriage or the upbringing of children; those matters were left to the people and the states under what became the Tenth Amendment. The Supreme Court later affirmed, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), that "the child is not the mere creature of the State," striking down an Oregon law that would have required all children to attend public schools. The reasoning was that parents hold the primary right to direct the upbringing of their children, a conclusion the totalitarian regimes above would have found intolerable.

The lesson for us is not that every government programme touching families is a step toward the Gulag. It is that the direction of travel matters, and that a government which begins to speak of children as belonging to the community, rather than to their parents, is speaking in a very old accent.

The case in brief

1. Totalitarian regimes seek the first loyalty of every person, and the family claims that loyalty before the state can.
2. The Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis and Mao's China each moved against the household: by law, by youth organisations, by communes and by rewarding denunciation of relatives.
3. Soviet policy reversed in 1936 not out of respect for the family but because the state found it needed one, which confirms that the family exists on the regime's terms or not at all.
4. A free state protects family members from abuse; a totalitarian one replaces the family, and the difference between the two is the difference between a law and a programme.
5. The family limits power by forming citizens, providing for its own, holding a loyalty the state cannot cancel and preserving memory.

What you can do: ask your school board and your state legislators, in writing, whether they recognise parents as the primary decision-makers in a child's education and upbringing, and keep their answers.