Not to disrupt your exclamation-point filled extravaganza Dilan, but the point the book makes vis-a-vis birth control is that it increased women's options by enabling more women to have sex without getting pregnant. This had many salutary effects, including the enormous strides made in the workplace, academia et..

However the increased availability of contraception did result in an increase in the number of people who never marry (23% 1960- 30% 1980). The disincentives for having sex outside of marriage were substantially reduced, if not entirely eliminated by contraception. Furthermore, those that were married were more likely to get divorced (divorce rate doubled from 1960-1980), because that was less difficult with less children (birth rate fell from 23.7 to 15.9 per thousand 1960-1980). Contraception is not 100% effective, and so the larger numbers of unmarried people having sex (incorrectly estimating the odds of contraceptive failure)resulted in an increase in illegitimacy rates. Certainly the statistics show a striking correlation between widespread availability of the pill and an increase in people who never marry, a dramatic increase in the divorce rate, and increased illegitimacy after the pill. Given that wages didn't stagnate until the early 70's, and these trends were well underway prior to that point, the correlations suggest the pill was a more significant causal factor than wages.

Didn't Caesar Augustus try this?

Mr. Douthat has yet to refute any of the criticisms of the commenters in his first post. Obviously, we the great unwashed are to be ignored as usual. That seems to be a common theme with Republicans.

I can see why someone might think that the "sexual revolution" wreaks havoc on what you're calling "working class" people, especially their kids--who are the last people who should be told that it's okay to screw around by would-be do-gooders (right, just use a condom), in state sponsored educational institutions, no less.

But, I don't know why someone would think that "working class" families are *necessarily* more retro in their sex role assumptions that they'd pick a government coerced paternalistic option over a better labor market that they would navigate on their own terms.

I'm also not sure why someone would think that *anyone* would really want the federal government intentionally making it even more difficult for single people to live on their own, given that most people want to maintain their personal integrity when it comes to sex and marriage, and not just shack up because it's the only economically viable option. Personally, I think I owe that to the other party as well as myself.

You need to be able to imagine that--that not-rich people have to shack up to pay the bills. That's dehumanizing. It's also contrary to a lot of people's religious/ quasi-religious beliefs about the role of sex and love.

It's bad enough that capitalism produces this no-win situation, we don't need the government drawing its knives, too. The federal government should do one thing with its social policies: help individuals of any description live their lives with integrity.

Sure, I do think there is a place for some "paternalism," but keeping your private parts to yourself isn't against the law.

I'm all for "family friendly" policies, whether Democrats or Republicans are supporting them. (I'd pass on the moralistic paternalism, of course. That never works.)
Ross and Reihan seems like smart, sincere people, who are no doubt arguing in good faith. But the the Republican power brokers, the Limbaughs, Delays, Cheneys, etc. are ever gonna go for this agenda. Republicanism exists to preserve white, male, pseudo-Christian, heterosexual privilege. Period. I wish good luck to those who seek to change that. But I won't hold my breath.
And I really don't understand this obsession with the pill, either. As noted above, lots of social changes occurred over that same period of time that the pill became widely used. That doesn't mean the pill caused those changes.

Re: Certainly the statistics show a striking correlation between widespread availability of the pill and an increase in people who never marry, a dramatic increase in the divorce rate

I cannot see any connection between people never marrying and the Pill or people getting divorced and the Pill. Surely the blame for the latter can be laid chiefly at the door of the institution of no-fault divorce. Also, let's remember that contraception did not begin with the Pill. Ever hear of condoms? Or for that matter, coitus interruptus?

Re: You need to be able to imagine that--that not-rich people have to shack up to pay the bills.

A lot of single people do "shack up" to pay the bills: it's called having roommates and it's very common.

A big - and therefore certainly debatable - part of our argument is that the American social model, with its emphasis on socioeconomic mobility and individual freedom, depends for its strength on the democratization of cultural capital, that the biggest source of cultural capital going happens to be the two-parent family, and that the long-term future of the American experiment thus depends the continued viability of the kind of family unit that's "most appealing to social conservatives," as Kerry would put it.

Well this is certainly an ingenious, though very strained, attempt to reconcile the inherent contractions in the modern "conservative" movement. But you can't escape the double-think of that mixed-up, self-deceived coalition of contemporary Republicanism. You, like your co-partisans, hanker after the values and forms of life associated with traditional families and small communities, and yet you embrace the runaway individualism of classical liberalism and capitalism - American-style - with their emphases on social mobility and rootless individual freedom. Like a lot of other Republicans, you have taught yourself to believe that the formerly secure and steady mooring rocks of human communities are actually the social foundation for the aimless tumble of rolling stones that makes up American life. That's really screwed up.

It is the "American social model" itself - or rather the social model that has become the dominant one in America during the past century - that is responsible for the breakdown of traditional communities, including the family. Where contraception is concerned, I suspect you have the causal order reversed: contraception is primarily just one effect of the capitalist disruption and dissolution of traditional family life, not its cause. As liberal capitalism promotes and drives the narcissistic frenzy for the pursuit of individual pleasures and attainments, people increasingly find enduring human relationships to be burdensome. These relationships are all little anchors that hold us down in the local harbor, and prevent us from setting forth on our socially mobile voyages of individual self-realization and achievement. So individuals in advanced liberal societies demand ever more comprehensive means of liberating themselves from ties to others, and the commercial and legal engines of capitalism oblige by delivering these means to the marketplace. Contraception is just one such means.

The classical liberal tradition is all about the individual's drive to escape from the demands placed on him by other people. The extreme individualism of American life, based on the values of individual liberty, individual achievement and the individual pursuit of happiness is a moral acid that over time destroys every vestige of genuine community, of lives lived in common, and replaces them with a commercial and financial leviathan into which each atomized individual can plug himself and get by.

Traditionally-minded Americans have been telling themselves for years that the family is actually the "backbone" or "foundation" of the hyper-individualistic society of advanced post-industrial capitalism. But that's delusional. It a notion that seems to be based on some pop-cultural fantasies associated with the period of transition from agrarian and industrial forms of life to our modern life. Father might have Known Best. But he was raised in a different era and carried his doomed traditional and atavistic family values into the go-go commercialism of postwar society and economy. He raised Buzz and Princess to be good little American self-seekers, and to value "socioeconomic mobility and individual freedom" above everything else. They likely both went to college and moved far away from home. At least one of them is likely divorced. Both of them no doubt discovered that the American love of change, mobility, novelty, intermittent career-change, personal adventure and individual achievement doesn't sit well with the desire to maintain durable and happy families and communities.

By the way, families are not merely "cultural capital". If you treat them as such you are perpetuating a fraud on the genuine traditionalists in your party, and selling them a mere simulacrum of traditional values, in the service of commerce.

I wonder if Mr. Douthat could handle life as a single woman. Or life as a single woman who couldn't have access to contraceptives and therefore became a single woman with a child he couldn't afford. My guess is no, not even remotely. Lucky for him and the rest of the privileged-who-pretend-they're-working-for-everyone, he gets to be the pater figure in the paternalism. Much easier to stomach that way.

Blech.

And for the record, I prefer individual, tax-payer, human being, or citizen to "singleton," not only because all of those words sound less like "simpleton," but also because I DO have a family (like everybody else!) Having babies shouldn't be the only way to understand that word. But this obviously isn't a vision that would be congenial to the brand of unintentional but nonetheless selfish assholism embodied by, say, him, but then I don't think much of his brand of assholism to begin with.

How come all these so-called externalities allegedly associated with the pill are not found in Europe?

Okay, snark aside, I don't have a big problem with family friendly social and tax policy PROVIDED THAT -- it is friendly to families headed by single parents; it is friendly to families that are responsible for dependents who are not necessarily children; and it balances income ranges so that well to do families are not favored at the expense of less well to do singles.

In other words, it shouldn't just be a reward for doing the daddy + mommy + baby = perfection dance.