Yep, the most likely answer to your original question (“what conclusions can we draw?”) is that socialists want to replicate the authority that parents have over their young children. Clean up your room or get punished! Instant verdicts, immediate penalties. No appeals.

To respond to the family metaphor point, I’d say (some of) the left is applauding the demise of the family, and the decrease in the U.S. birthrate, so that metaphor may roll off their tongues a bit awkwardly. Here’s one warning:

Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman’s 1947 classic Family And Civilization (available on Kindle for only $9.99) will knock you off your chair. In brief, Zimmerman examines the role family structure played in Greco-Roman civilization, as well as the medieval period, up until today.

He shows that in ancient Greece and Rome, a collapse of “familism” — a worldview that placed the family at the core of society’s self-understanding — preceded a more general civilizational collapse. Zimmerman explains how and why this works. Signs of the ongoing and future collapse include declining fertility rates, abandonment of marital norms, widespread divorce, and the normalization of aberrant forms of sexuality. For contemporary readers, one striking aspect of the book is that Zimmerman published it in 1947, and saw all these things rising in the West in his day — and indeed, had been rising for centuries. Any conservative today who thinks this all began in the 1960s should read Zimmerman.