I suspect that public policy is of secondary importance, with individual goals and attitudes being more important than any policy. But politics is downstream from culture, and there might be some places where the policies encourage outcomes at odds with those goals.
The masochistic right-wingers never seem to notice a massive contradiction in their core beliefs. On the one hand, they acknowledge a lot of bad policies have suppressed job creation and wages, increased the cost of living, and generally made life more grim, but at the same time, they want to pretend it’s 1962, the world is everyone’s oyster, and a healthy dose of social Darwinism is the best medicine to encourage young people to do their best. Ridiculous.It is ridiculous. Freedom, though, implies the freedom to make choices that sound good at the time, although they turn out not to be.
American conservatives have always been the witting and unwitting allies of feminists. In a battle between the rough-and-tumble market and the refined ideals of motherhood and matriarchy, they prefer to see the GDP grow rather than encourage more two-parent families.Up to a point. We are, all of us, underemployed compared with our great-grandparents, and yet, that "privileged place for motherhood" might have been acknowledgement of how much maternal and infant mortality there was in those days. Go, visit an older cemetery, whether on a genealogical excursion or not, and see for yourself.
It is noteworthy that the Generation Z representative in the video is a young lady. She’s been fed a relentless diet of propaganda since the age of five that her purpose in life is to pursue her future career, that this career would make her feel empowered, and that striving instead to be a good wife and mother would be an unworthy and unrealistic goal, the opposite of a “strong, independent woman.”
The mass introduction of women to the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s proved to be a pretty neat trick. Just as no-fault divorces were devastating childhoods across the country, finance capital convinced millions of women to enter the labor force en masse, suppressing male wages in the process and soon making it impossible for all but the very wealthy to raise a family on a single income. At the same time, these developments that helped corporate bottom lines were sold as the advance of progressive and liberating values!
The trendlines are clear. The system, broadly understood, delays marriage, increases debt, reduces the number of marriages and children, and generally operates to turn one into an economic commodity. This may have always been a bigger part of the American character than, say, continental Europe. As Calvin Coolidge—no feminist, he—opined, “The business of America is business.” But the old America also had a privileged place for motherhood, for community, and for Christianity, all of which combined to act as buffers against the rough edges of a free market system.
Even before the modern wage-earning economy, neither men nor women could afford to be idle. Women worked, whether in the much-more-demanding requirements of homemaking before modern appliances or on family farms. Of course, working in a home for one’s family has different, intangible benefits compared to preparing PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets.Yes, and yet, any adaptation to the machinery that rendered daily life a different sort of slog is going to take time.
This is another way that so-called conservatives aid and abet feminists. For the former, men and women are completely interchangeable, mere economic units easily switched with one another. For the feminists, these differences are mostly artificial social constructs designed to keep women down and easily discarded through an act of will.How do those commonplaces go? Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; and Income = Wages + Interest + Rent + Profit.
I’m sure it seemed this way to the early feminists, owing to their backgrounds. Feminism grew in an urban, academic milieu. Think Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. Blue-collar work, the factory or the battlefield, and tackle football were all anathema to people like them, and their perspective was skewed accordingly. They wanted a world where people like them would have more power and influence and be happier, and they succeeded.
This means that people’s choices do not take place in a vacuum. The patriarchal model has been rendered unavailable by market forces, as well as relentless propaganda and changes to the law. But the results are plain: a lot of people are miserable, and unmarried women in the workforce seem to be the most miserable of all.
Something is really broken, and at least part of what is broken is economic. Forces have converged—inflation, mass immigration, financialization, and outsourcing—to grind down the middle class by removing the ability of the average family to survive and thrive on a single income. This means the ranks of those who never marry and never will have children are significant and growing.That's a Complex Proposition, nicht wahr? I don't know that it follows that the increased labor force participation of women, their economic emancipation if you will, inevitably brings with it more miserable cat ladies or reduced rates of family formation. I'm quoting only snippets of the article, there is a lot I skip over that might be material for the aspiring pundit or social scientist in quest of another Minimal Publishable Unit, or at least a capstone paper. Toward the end, though, Mr Roach notes a complaint about Careerist Feminism that I have encountered before: now the high-powered woman has the same agency to neglect her children that the high-powered man ("When you comin' home Dad, I don't know when") enjoyed well before the American High.
Getting married, having kids, and supporting those kids on a husband’s single income was a completely ordinary middle-class attainment in the recent past. Now, educational requirements and the rising cost of healthcare, taxes, rent, food, and everything else mean that social outcomes tend to be concentrated at the extremes.
A system that guarantees the brightest and most productive women spend their best years in a cubicle, miserable and crying on TikTok, while couples that do marry only see each other fleetingly, coming and going from their stressful jobs or picking their children up from daycare, is not a society worth defending. And only the heartless or politically incompetent—in other words, average Republican operatives—respond to a cri de couer from one of the struggling little people with mockery and contempt.I wonder if that includes relying less on public policy. People have the option of rejecting the rat race. That they might vote for policies that reduce the consequences of their mistakes, though, transcends ideology, at least until their Political Masters run out of other peoples' money.
Obviously, in a free society, people should have choices, including the choice to live their lives in a way that suits their personal talents. Freedom means they even have the right to live in ways that turn out to be mistaken and risk failure. That said, not all choices are equally free. The devolution of the family is the outcome of decades of deliberate social engineering; it involves constraining certain choices even as it offers up those preferred by the system, and that social engineering is now undermining the happiness and freedom of men, women, and children.
Part of making America great again requires the restoration of the older patterns of family life. Those on the right should be thinking about how to use public policy to promote sustainable family life, encourage more children within marriage, and make it easier for young people to get established.
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