The high cost of the diminishing of the family

Two opinion pieces observing changes in the role of the family in American society have come across my radar screen this morning, and they could not be more diametrically different.

I generally don't link to leftist opinion pieces even if I discuss them at some length, but let's look at this one by Stanley Greenberg at the UK Guardian. It's over-the-top snot-nosed, as befits someone who has made a career out of cackling over any evidence to be found in the minutiae of political data of an irreversible leftward shift in our society.

This is particularly true in a paragraph dealing with the declining role of Christianity and changes in American family structure:

Since 2011 a majority of Americans have been living in unmarried households, and a diversity of family types – from same-sex marriages and cohabitation to remarriage after divorce, delayed child-rearing, childlessness and those who never marry – is now accepted. Millennials are in fact marrying later and having few children, while working class women are avoiding marriage with working class men who are no longer assured of secure, decent-paying manufacturing jobs. With the traditional male breadwinner role nearly extinct, three-quarters of women are now in the labour force and two-thirds are the principal or joint breadwinner. The result: single women will form a quarter of the electorate in 2016. Religious observance meanwhile has plummeted across all religious denominations, with the exception of white evangelicals. People who define themselves as secular now outnumber mainline Protestants.

On its own, this paragraph strives for, and to some extent achieves, journalistic objectivity, a just-pointing-out-facts tone that does indeed point out some undeniable trends. But, coupled with what he has to say elsewhere in his piece about such matters as age groups, urban-versus-suburban population trends and changes in America's work life, he has what he needs to wrap it all up with an undisguised glee.

He is glad the American family structure has changed. He thought there was something wrong with the way it was until the last couple of decades or so.

Now, on to an essay by Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review Online. He covers some of the same factual ground:

Childbearing out of wedlock and divorce have risen; people marry later in life, and fewer people ever marry. Marriage has declined for many reasons: the economic emancipation of women, the longer schooling encouraged by modern economies, the invention of the birth-control pill, the spread of liberal individualism, and more besides. 

But he then looks at some results thereof that Greenberg chooses to ignore:

 . . . the weakening of marriage has come at a heavy cost. Children generally do better when they are raised by parents who are married to each other: better academically, economically, and behaviorally. They do worse in other environments. Even children in what we used to call “intact” families fare worse in communities where such families are rare. And we have some reason to think that the decline of marriage has decreased happiness for adults, too, and especially for women. Americans with relatively low incomes and levels of schooling, in particular, have experienced the downside of these trends. Among them the decline of marriage has been especially pronounced.

It is a far more challenging environment in which to make the case for conservatism than existed when  our modern movement emerged:

The America in which NR developed “fusionism” — the combination of libertarian economics and traditionalist morals that would characterize modern conservatism — had a level of marital stability that was unusual in our history and looks almost mythical now. The country had gone through a great deal of centralization and homogenization as a result of the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War. Big government, big business, big labor, and big media never loomed as large in American life as they did in the 1950s, and never would again. It was the magazine’s libertarianism that stood athwart the age.

 Then he wraps up his argument with the point I am increasingly inclined to emphasize, among all the points about various issues that do indeed deserve an airing: a spiritual revival that puts God's design for the human family front and center is indispensable to a rescue of our nation:

The government still needs reining in. It needs it more, since it is larger than it was 60 years ago: more meddlesome, unwieldy, and ineffective. But conformity in lifestyles is not our era’s problem, and the romance of collectivism is dead. The decline of the family is what most needs resisting in our time. There is no ready-made program, no five-point plan, for bringing about a cultural change that would lead more people to raise children within healthy marriages. But conservatives could stand to spend a little less time thinking about the conditions necessary for businesses to flourish, as important as that is, and a little more time about those for families. 

Precisely. Policy addressing taxation, immigration, education, even defense is secondary to getting family and faith right.

This is why the rise of one-note johnnies among the pundit class makes my teeth grind. (Need an outstandingly egregious example? Ann Coulter's statement that she wouldn't care if Donald Trump performed abortions in the White House if he deported all the illegal aliens.) It's why I'm also not real keen on canvassing the public with questionnaires yielding yes-or-no results.

Conservatism isn't the best ideological orientation because it puts Americans back to work, or gives the middle class some financial breathing room, or because it keeps jihad out of the nation's classrooms, or disproves climate alarmism.

It's the best because it is moral.

And Ponnuru is correct: there is no ready-made program for what ails us at the core.

But there is prayer for courage and wisdom.

That can be done without joining anything, participating in any rallies or phone banks, or even writing opinion essays.

It can be done as soon as I finish writing this and you finish reading it.