In her well-researched book A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance, Australian academic Alison Lewis observes that many of those who became informants for the East German Stasi had one thing in common: fatherlessness. The Stasi, the secret police under East German communism during the Cold War, were skilled at exploiting the vulnerability of people whose fathers had abandoned them. 

It’s a phenomenon that is also evident in the rage of the modern American Left. When scholar Mary Eberstadt witnessed antifa riots and discovered how many of those arrested were without fathers, she dubbed their rage “the fury of the fatherless.” 

By now the research is so abundant even most liberals accept it. Children with strong fathers in their lives are far less likely to wind up in prison, divorced, or with emotional problems. They are also less likely to join radical political organizations. In the late 1960s, the poet Robert Bly saw some radical students on TV rioting at a prestigious university. “They’re all out there looking for their fathers,” he said. It’s still true today.