Family Value$

by digby

We have heard a great deal over the past few decades about how the elites are ruining the country with their libertine ways. In fact, the social conservative movement is based almost exclusively upon the idea that our society is going to hell in handbasket because the liberals are promoting immorality. And one of the main pieces of evidence is the decline of traditional marriage.

But what if the decline of marriage has little to do with a lack of traditional family values at all? And what if the salt of the earth regular working Americans who social conservatives claim as the backbone of their movement are the ones who are rejecting marriage in the greatest numbers?

Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households — a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census.

As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock.

“The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an expert on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

So traditional family values are becoming the purview of the rich and large numbers of Americans are living in alternative arrangements. Who knew?

I suppose it might be at least partially a coincidence that this change coincides with the rise of the free market fundamentalism of the conservative movement, but whatever underlying economic conditions which were present were likely to have been at least accelerated and made worse by Republican economic policy.

“We seem to be reverting to a much older pattern, when elites marry and a great many others live together and have kids,” said Peter Francese, demographic trends analyst for Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising firm.

Much, much older. Feudal to be exact. When aristocracies form, marriage and children become important institutions for maintaining property and hence, power. Policies are enacted that favor those institutions and it becomes a somewhat superfluous institution for the rest of society. In fact, the additional economic stresses of these policies put enormous strain on marriages and they become an institution of unhappiness for many. That’s exactly what’s happening right now in this country.

As far as marriage with children is concerned, the post-World War II version of normal began to fall apart around 1970.

“Before then, if you looked at families across the income spectrum, they all looked the same: a mother, father, kids and a dog named Spot,” said Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution.

Around that time, rates of divorce and cohabitation were rising sharply — and widely publicized.

“What I don’t think the public knew then or knows now is that well-educated, upper-middle-class professionals did not engage in these activities nearly as much as less-advantaged families,” Sawhill said.

Despite what the right would have us believe about the 60’s, in those early years, the sexual revolution was not the primary reason for the change. My mother was a divorced woman with two young kids in the early 1950’s and her opportunities were almost nil. She was in her 30’s and had to live with her parents until she met a man who could support her and her children. Once the woman’s movement broke down some of those barriers in the next couple of decades, people like my mother had some adult choices in life. Of course that also changed marriage. Women like her who had been in terribly abusive or stifling marriages were finally able to live a decent middle class life on their own.

It was always mostly about economics and basic human freedom, not morals, even though in her day, my mother was considered something of a loose woman and certainly a failure by the society in which she lived — a deeply unfair characterization that the social conservatives are trying desperately to bring back with their hectoring about family values. They may say they don’t see traditional marriage as unfair to women, but in the hands of a bullying Promise Keeper, it most certainly can be.

Class, though, is a much better tool than race for predicting whether Americans will marry or cohabit, said Pamela Smock, co-author of the review and a University of Michigan sociology professor.

“The poor aren’t entering into marriage very much at all,” said Smock, who has interviewed more than 100 cohabitating couples. She said young people from these backgrounds often do not think they can afford marriage.

Arguments that marriage can mean stability do not seem to change their attitudes, Smock said, noting that many of them have parents with troubled marriages.

Victoria Miller and Cameron Roach, who have been living together for 18 months, are two such people, and they say they cannot imagine getting married.

She is 22 and manages a Burger King in Seattle. He is 24 and works part time testing software in the Seattle suburb of Redmond. Together, they earn less than $20,000 a year and are living with Roach’s father. They cannot afford to live anywhere else.

“Marriage ruins life,” Roach said. “I saw how much my parents fought. I saw how miserable they made each other.”

Miller, who was pressured by her Mormon parents to marry when she was 17 and pregnant, said her short, failed marriage and her parents’ long, failed marriage have convinced her that the institution is often bad for children. Shuttled between her mom and dad, she moved eight times before she was 16.

“With my parents, when their marriage started breaking down, my dad started to have trouble at work and we spent years on government assistance,” Miller said.

Her two young sons live with their father.

“For most Americans, cohabitation will continue to increase over the coming decades, and the percentage of children born outside of marriage is also going to increase,” Smock said.

If the Republicans want to turn this country into a feudal aristocracy they are going to have to accept what comes with that. — an unsettled and unhappy populace many of whom are mired in downward mobility, stressed out, unhappy and open to all kinds of political and social unpleasantness. It’s not their morals, it’s their dead-end futures.

(And by the way, there are no more licentious people anywhere than in the Aristocracies — including, as we know, their priests.)

I find it very interesting that nothing in our politics reflects these facts and instead we are dealing with a phony, idealized construct of middle and working class America that bears no relationship to people’s real lives. No wonder so many are apathetic. And no wonder that many of those who are interested, see politics as a sporting event — it’s just another reality show with rival tribes battling for a big prize. Like jousts, perhaps. Or Roman circuses.

Update: If you want to see something that will add stress to a marriage, try this:

For more years now advocates have been denouncing sub-prime loans and “exotic” mortgages – adjustable rate loans, “no doc” loans, interest only loans, etc. – as often abusive and predatory, and a leading contributor to mortgage defaults and financial instability among working and middle class people. Meanwhile sub-prime lenders have been losing profits, downsizing and going out of business because their loan porfolios are crumbling under the poor or non existent underwriting criteria. And an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported how while prime borrowers seem to be paying back their loans, those who fall somewhere between “prime” and “sub-prime” are also defaulting at higher rates on their mortgages. Almost as troubling and predictable as the rapid collapse of Bush’s “Ownership Society” culture, which pushed homeownership at any price, literally (See my Op-Ed making this argument here), is the extent to which the press conflates sub-prime loans with bad credit risk borrowers. Research has already shown that people of color are receiving higher priced loans, period, even after credit scores are taken into account.After a while it becomes absurdist, yet convenient, self-fulfilling prophecy. Make double-digit, interest only, loans to the people who can least afford them – or loans in which the rate suddenly shoots up, or loans in which the borrowers’ income is not verified – and then sit back and marvel at how these borrowers are falling behind on their payments. It’s like selling cars with faulty brakes to housewives and then announcing that women are bad drivers when they get into accidents.

That’s the same logic driving this campaign to make the marriage failure rate a matter of “bad values.” Create a greed based economy so filled with stress and insecurity that all social institutions are straining at the seams and then blame the people for being immoral when they reject those same institutions.

H/T to reader MK
.