Paging Corey Robin
by digby
One of my favorite insights of Corey Robin’s book The Reactionary Mind is this one:
Every great political blast—the storming of the Bastille, the taking of the Winter Palace, the March on Washington—is set off by a very private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power.
And here’s this week’s Weekly Standard (h/t David Atkins)
[A] case can be made that the welfare state has competed with the family for primacy from the beginning. It’s a point exquisitely if unintentionally illustrated by the Obama reelection campaign’s infamous “Julia” website, which showed the beneficent state stepping in to do at every stage of life what used to be done by competent families: babysitting, educating, influencing romantic decisions, caring for someone in old age.
Raw propaganda aside, some serious thinkers have also remarked over the years on the zero-sum game that is the power struggle between family and state. Plato, for one, understood that the only sure way to make children reliable instruments of his Republic was to separate them from their families at an early age. British author Ferdinand Mount argued in a 1992 book that the family “is a subversive organization. . . . Only the family has continued throughout history and still continues to undermine the ‘State.’ ” Tocqueville, Mount pointed out, also grasped this fundamental antagonism between family and state; witness the great Frenchman’s observation that “as long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.”
Looking away from theory and toward the public square, it’s also plainly true that the welfare state has interrupted the organic bonds of family in ways too numerous to count. As Milton Friedman once observed of Social Security, “The voluntary transfers [from young to old] strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.” And certainly it’s the welfare state that has effectively bankrolled via many programs the expensive pan-Western fallout of the sexual revolution: the unprecedented levels of divorce, family breakup, out-of-wedlock births, and other trends that have turned the modern state into an inefficient but all-encompassing substitute for a man of the house.
In sum, statism has been an engine of family destruction—and vice versa. All of which leads to a contrarian thought: Might the dark ages of the welfare state end in a family renaissance?
If the welfare states of the West finally do implode, it’s hard to think of any institution but the family that could step into that vacuum. When politics forces the truth that taking care of one’s own is less ruinous than having the state do it, it’s just possible that personal choices could come to reflect that fact.
Can it be any plainer?
And this is also why conservatives have been a bit more, shall-we-say, flexible with marriage equality lately than one might have expected. The institution of marriage is the bedrock of their patriarchal belief system. Sure, they may wish it stayed more “traditional” but as long as the nuclear family remains sacrosanct, the workplace stays outside the purview of society at large (aka government) and the individual is not empowered beyond these institutions, they are winning.
All the pain and insecurity of these past few years of austerity are necessary. This experience will force us to submit to power in private relationships based upon our material needs — in the family, the factory and the field. Survival, in other words will depend upon the good will of our family and our bosses. And as long as we obey their rules we should be ok. Just as God intended.
It’s ironic that these are the same people who extol the founders and proclaim their great love of freedom and liberty, but then the founders were a bunch of rich white guys who loved those things universally in the abstract but kept the privilege only for themselves in reality, so I guess it makes a sort of sense. The good news is that our modern freedom-lovers will allow obedient people of color to claim a small share of the patriarchy and some are even willing to support gay folk who agree to live by their prescribed bourgeois values. So, it’s not as if they don’t ever evolve at all. Progress!
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