Family or leviathan state, take your pick

It was a timely occurrence for me to run across this Daniel Greenfield piece at Frontpage.com.  I'm in the middle of a heated Facebeook comment-thread exchange that is presently, after twists and turns covering a number of other matters, focused on what causes poverty.  I contended that there are two levels - a micro and a macro - involved in explaining it.  The micro level involves the absesnce of cultivation of certain traits in an individual: thrift, promptness, integrity, keeping one's pants zipped until marriage, cultivation of a keen mind.  The macro level involves the state choking off economic activity with excessive taxation and regulation.

What is needed in the way of an environment for an individual to be able to cultivate those prosperity-fostering traits?  The family, of course.

Greenfield points out that family is generally the deciding factor in voting patterns:

Married white voters lean toward a Republican candidate by 43% to 24%. Among single white voters, Democrats lead 34% to 26%.

There are other factors that affect these numbers such as age, race, sexual orientation and religious affiliation. Growing minority demographics have certainly helped make single Americans a statistical majority, but it’s dangerous to ignore the bigger picture of the post-family demographic trend.

If Republicans insist on running against the nanny state, they will have to replace it with something. That something was traditionally the family. Take away the family and something else has to fill its place.

In the West, government has become the new family. The state is father and occasionally mother. The nanny state is literally a nanny. It may be hated, but it is also needed.

That is why married whites oppose ObamaCare 65% to 34% while single whites also oppose it, but by a narrower margin of 53% to 47%.

I thought it was interesting that even single whites do oppose Freedom-Hater-care.

Anyway, what is to be done?

Three choices lie ahead.
The Republican Party can fight for the family. It can abandon fiscal conservatism and social conservatism in both word and deed to pursue its real program of trying to make big government work. Or it can look for alternative institutions that can replace both family and government.
Faith-based programs attempted to bypass the social disaster of the lost family without ceding the social territory to big government, but there is only so much that any entity outside the family can do. No amount of programs can fill the gap for a child or an adult. The family is an organic wraparound entity. Replacing it led to a Great Society in which a horde of social workers, teachers, psychologists, parole officers and sociologists struggled to fill the role of a mother and a father.
It doesn’t take a village to raise a child except in a failed state and no village can afford to hire an entire other village to raise its children. That, among other things, is what is bringing California to its knees.

Replacing the family, with or without government, is expensive and difficult. Republicans can and should champion private sector alternatives to government takeovers, faith-based or otherwise, but such an approach will only delay the inevitable. There really is no institutional replacement for the family. 

So it's back to the basic building block for a free and healthy society.  Or it's Julia Nation, and the money eventually runs out to sustain that.