A Child-Centric Politics
I want to return quickly to something Kerry wrote in her first post:
Children do better on average, along a variety of dimensions and across all income groups, when raised by both of their biological parents. Poor children are more likely to be born out of wedlock, and those that are born to married parents are more likely to see their parents divorce later. But as women have spent some time trying to establish, they are in fact distinct from children. The class of women is also conceptually distinct from the class of mothers; while most, but not all, women will become mothers within their lifetimes, the years spent actively caring for small children will comprise only a small percentage of her total lifespan. Even if it were possible to improve the lives of children by enforcing reactionary gender norms, it would be wrong.
Let's bracket the question of whether an expanded child tax credit and benefits for parents (of either sex) who provide child care in the home really amount to the "enforcement of reactionary gender norms," as opposed to, say, "incentivizing family structures that most parents aspire to but many can't achieve." I want to address Kerry's point about mothers who are actively engaged in mothering being a relatively small part of the female population, since it dovetails with a frequent criticism of the book - namely, that we're proposing to bribe a narrow slice of the American population, working parents, to vote more consistently for the GOP.
On the one hand, I think this is a rather overheated view of a pretty normal approach to majority-building; as Reihan notes, responding to the same argument, "the idea of expanding a political coalition through the embrace of substantive and not merely rhetorical policy shifts has a pretty long and storied history." But I also think it's a criticism that elides the extent to which pro-family policies, while somewhat narrowly targeted in electoral terms - to working parents (and aspiring working parents), the voters most likely to be swayed by pro-family appeals - are extremely broadly targeted in execution. No matter how you end up living your adult life - whether in obedience to "reactionary gender norms" or as a childless lesbian polygamist - you stand to benefit from policies that make it easier for parents to rear children, so long as you're born after the policies go into effect, because everyone starts life as a child. True, not everyone will actually benefit, because not every parent will put the money or benefits to good use. But not every child benefits from, say, the public school system either, and yet it would be absurd to describe public education as a narrowly-targeted program pitched to the minority of the American population who have school-aged children, or to claim that by taking responsibility for the education of American children, the government is discriminating against taxpayers who don't have children. All of those taxpayers were themselves children once, and the childless Americans who would endure (slightly) higher taxes under our proposals will likewise have been children too, and thus have stood to benefit from the system they end up helping to pay for as adults.
On a related subject, for a taste of Grand New Party-style politics across the pond, check out this speech by the Tory MP George Osborne - especially the final section on family breakdown.
Comments (15)
If you don't support the same tex breaks for same sex couples with kids, then you're supporting reactionary gender norms. Got an answer for that?
July 18, 2008 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're mischaracterizing the objection. The objection is not to expanded "childcare credits." The objection is tying expanded cild care credits to connubial bliss. This demonstrates an interest not in "the children" or "strong families," but
coercing a *particular* family form, even if it's f-ed up to all hell, internally.
We've already established that two incomes are better than one, so connubial bliss is economically superior if you can get it. If someone acts against their economic self interest, they must have a compelling reason.
Granted, there are people who object to paying for public schools and so forth because "we don't use them," etc, just like they object to public transportaion subsidies. They tend to be Republicans who can afford the pay-go rule, people who aspire to support the billionaire libertarian cranks.
If your "working class" does that, then that just means Thomas Frank has a point. Because, it seems to me that the Democratic Party is mostly responsible for things like the EITC. If you're going to tell me that your hypothesized "working class" doesn't support the EITC because it doesn't try to force women to put up with wife beaters, then I think your women should switch parties. Marriage should be as fully consensual as we can make it, and there's a reason for that.
July 18, 2008 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
It has always seemed that one of the least reliable groups in terms of party affiliation are "Soccer moms" who voted for Clinton and then became security moms and voted for Bush.
Personally I think this happens because as a group parents are going to be unhappy regardless of who is in power, children make life difficult for their parents. Many people have children either by accident or because of social pressure. No matter what policies are in place these people are going to be unhappy. Parents tend to follow the party that they think will improve their lot on life where in reality neither party can do much for these people.
July 18, 2008 11:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
What I resent most about this book is that it promotes and disseminates a false view of American life - that the nuclear family is and has been the backbone of our society and the breakup of that family is the cause of our ills in that society.
That is not true. In colonial times marriages lasted on average less than ten years because one or both partners died within that time frame, usually the woman from complications of childbirth. Children were separated early from the families because they were put out to work, left as orphans, or the families could not feed the child and the child was driven out to find a means of support. Both parents had to be income earners in order to survive, families needed more than one income stream to support that family and that generally included any and all family members who could work. (And looking at birth records from that period, almost one quarter of all children were conceived prior to the parents marrying, just to put morals into perspective here.)
The 19th C. proved to be little more improved - while some women did have more time to devote to prolonging the childhood of their children, it was done at the expense of other women and children who were employed by factories that took over the most onerous and time consuming task of women which was spinning and weaving, that also however, took away the most common income stream of women - producing cloth. So while a few families benefited, most families suffered by this loss of income. It forced more family breakup, not less. Women, whether they had the knowledge or not to control the size of their families had to have more children to maintain what was always a precarious labour pool inside the family.
Families who did prosper employed more household labour, but again, this was at the expense of other families who were forced to send their daughters and sons into domestic labour for others, breaking up families and removing one source of household labour for the family. Slave families seldom if ever stayed intact as families, they were sold as labour and were themselves a source of income for a minority of families.
In the cities of that period, the streets were teeming with orphans, opportunity labourers, (just as you see them standing outside of Home Depot today) prostitutes and female beggers. Where do you suppose those people came from? Broken nuclear families.
For a very short time in the history of this nation, during the 1950s, have we had the luxury of maintaining the nuclear family, and that was true of only a small segment of our society. So when conservatives claim that the women's movement, divorce and the pill have destroyed the nuclear family, the backbone of the nation, tell me when the time was that this was the case. Tell me which era was the golden era of the nuclear family, when the vast majority of families were intact as families, when women didn't have to work and families could survive on the income of one worker. It has seldom existed for the majority of white families and it has never existed for black families.
So maybe the problems we face as a society today are the same problems we have always faced as a society - our failure to regulate greed and the amassing of great fortunes by the few on the backs of the many. Perhaps the problem isn't divorce, or the pill, or illegitimacy, perhaps the problem is the same as it has always been - poverty, poverty, poverty.
The reason the inner city black kid can't get a job isn't because of the onerous tax burden on businesses, it's because those businesses don't pay their share of taxes. Industries are offered huge decade long tax abatements (usually property tax abatements) for locating in cities, the very monies needed to support the systems that they take advantage of - the roads, the safety services, the hospitals, the schools and then have the temerity to complain that the labour pool available is insufficiently prepared to work for them. These entities that depend on the military defenses of the nation are the very entities that mitigate their own tax burden so much that they pay far less than their workers do to maintain that defense. They want their workers healthy and educated but they don't want to contribute to that cost of health and education. They desparately want to believe that they have no role in this cycle of poverty, so they pretend that this is caused by the immorality and flawed character of the working class. It never occurs to them that in the poorest nations where marriage and legitimacy rates are higher than in this country the poverty stricken are still poverty stricken, the working class is still struggling and both are still one disaster personal or national away from utter starvation.
The new republican strategy to combat the "evils" of poverty is the same strategy used by China - coerce people by means of bribery or penalty to conform to the republican ideal of state, where the citizen serves the state and that class that most benefits from the state. It is as manipulative and immoral as it has been since Caesar Augustus bribed the upper classes to marry and have children so that they wouldn't be completely overwhelmed by the working class and the poor and probably just as effective. This isn't a "new strategy" this is the same philosophy of blaming the poor, protecting the rich and convincing the citizens by means of myth and meme that it is their own immorality that causes them to suffer poverty.
My own personal opinion of Douthat and Reihan still stands - they're two assholes who think they're morally superior to those dumb, morally challenged working class morons who as Reihan stated "rent hotel rooms in the Hamptons [instead] of putting down a deposit on an apartment" thus "maintaining the cycle of poverty." Can you imagine anyone with the chutzpah to even say that much less think that?
July 18, 2008 1:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your point that the nuclear family is a 1950's aberration cannot be made enough. It has always struck me as so ironic that conservative culture warriors have latched onto that (and other 1950's "values") because doing so is not truly "conservative" as in "conserve the old ways." The "old ways" are extended families and tribes, with the elders ruling the roost. As I see it, the reason mainly lies in adoration of the American frontier myths, where you did have some real examples of the libertarian lifestyle by some small nuclear families. Even there, though, reality intrudes: grandma, an uncle, the ranch hands at the dinner table for 20 years intrude on the pretty picture. And the love of land that inspired it meant getting a place to hand down to an extended family, to continue the extended family. giving it roots.
But I must mention that the other night I caught HBO's documentary on the child kidnap problem in China and that sure got me thinking out of the box on the nuclear family thing. They have a forced nuclear family situation there, counter to the ancient culture, and many problems looming with not enough females, but the government is still convinced it should go on for at least another decade. It's interesting to think of this all within that context and not rehashing old myths that get us nowhere. Heck, the suburban lifestyle that was built to support the U.S. 1950's nuclear family thing has got us in a real bad situation right now.
Not that I personally want to go back to a situation where grandpa ruled the roost. I myself admire the independence thing that was part of the baby boom--for the first time, a whole generation coming back from a war said no, we are not going to do things the same way, we are going to get our own job, our own house, and raise our family our own way. I cannot see how conservatives cannot see the implications of that, which way that was headed: choice; change; alternatives. It could not remain static; the children of such marriages were being raised to throw off old paradigms. Not to mention that Social Security kicking in at the same time enabled it all like nothing else could, as grandma and grandpa could live on their own.
July 18, 2008 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is a very nice link up, Art Appraiser. I too watched that documentary about China's children and the effects their policies of enforced reproductive rights is beginning to create huge class problems among others for the state. One major problem is that the care for the elderly is going to become overwhelmingly costly for the Chinese state, especially because of their tradition of paternalism - in China sons are a necessity because it is sons who care for the elderly, China is without the safety net that allows younger people to move and change with the market.
Conservatism is empty because it is based on myth and meme - it is "Being There" without Peter Sellers. It is the "Ozzie And Harriet" wishful society without the realization that "Harriet" was a working mother - she was an actress, for Christsakes...
July 18, 2008 9:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Now there you go, confusing us with historical facts and stuff. That's not what I learned at homeschooler high - America was a vast untouched wasteland until the Pilgrims landed and tamed it, Africans snuck on those cruise ships just for a taste of adventure and women voted for George Washington.
July 18, 2008 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
The sad thing is that these two have no idea of how life really is for the working class. None.
July 18, 2008 10:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nice post, Bev--much more cogent than Douthat's confused pablum.
A few tax credits here and there don't make up for generations of fighting for the 'right' to pollute the land, waters and skies, collaterally poisoning children via lead, PCBs, arsenic and whatever else industry wishes to do. Also, let's not forget how Reagan tried to 'help' children--by classifying ketchup as a vegetable serving in their school lunch!
This is quite the exercise in wishful thinking--if the next generation of Republicans starts helping US children, they will be the first, because, frankly, conservatism in general, and specifically today's R's, care for children as much as they care for Spotted Owls nesting on a building site.
Next, I look forward to hearing from Ross how the new Republicans can reach out to gays, atheists, Muslims, African-Americans and Hispanics...that ought to be even funnier.
July 18, 2008 3:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with yer post, but ketchup is nutritionally similar to a tomato.
July 18, 2008 4:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks. This "new" strategy is the same strategy the republicans have always spouted - it's just in a better tux.
July 18, 2008 10:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Tell me which era was the golden era of the nuclear family, when the vast majority of families were intact as families, when women didn't have to work and families could survive on the income of one worker."
Why, it could it possibly be that era produced by the socialist labor movement, prior to the billionaire libertarian crank takeover, as engineered by Saint Ronald Reagan?
July 18, 2008 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I haven't followed all the discussion so what do these sainted fellows think of SCHIP? I can't tell you how many women I know who work because they have a job that provides health benefits and they have a spouse trying to start or expand a small business.
The best thing you could do for the family and I mean all families, young and old, extended and nuclear would be to guarantee there is a safety net there for them so they don't lose the house or their job when they are caring for a loved one - child, spouse, sibling, parent, aunt, grand-parent or friend who is vulnerable and dependent.
July 18, 2008 7:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
you stand to benefit from policies that make it easier for parents to rear children, so long as you're born after the policies go into effect, because everyone starts life as a child.
Yeah, but children can't vote. Duh.
July 19, 2008 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Noble comment BevD, nice skewering of Doughhead (sorry I couldn't resist).
Republicans have always sought every opportunity to defeat or reduce healthcare for poor children and to vote down family medical leave.
I still recall when George H. W. was running in 1992 he told his New Jersey audience that a federal mandate forcing family medical leave onto NJ would ruin the NJ economy. It turned out that NJ already had a state law allowing family medical leave. Yet Republicans are now running McCain, after 8 years of George W.-where do Republicans find these unqualified clunkers and how brain dead must one be to think the likes of 'I never sent an e-mail but I married a rich blonde' John POW McCain will do didly squat for them or the country?
July 19, 2008 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink