New wine in old wineskins
This is very familiar. I’ll get to why.
Lawmakers, it seems, haven’t yet fully inhabited the 21st century, explains The New Republic. Fifty years ago, the country was “88 percent white and 90 percent Christian, and less than 5 percent of the population was foreign-born.” Most pols and businesses have figured out that those days are gone. They’ve had to:
And yet, when it comes to the family structure itself, the system (public and private) is stuck in an earlier era, one which assumes a “traditional” household made up of a married couple and their offspring. Lawmakers proudly brand themselves “pro-family,” and vow to fight for “working families.” There’s Family Day at attractions and entertainment venues, and family discounts on everything from phone service to cars, retail and college tuition. The best value for consumables is the “family-sized” version that will rot before a single person can finish it. Solo diners are shooed to the bar at restaurants, with tables reserved for couples or families. Single people subsidize family health insurance plans, pay higher tax rates for the same joint income of a married couple, and can’t get Social Security death benefits awarded to a widowed spouse. Companies that brag about being “family-friendly?” Ask a single person: That means they work nights and weekends.
Policy makers are in denial that that family model is no longer dominant.
“It’s not that [leaders] don’t understand that families have changed very much from what they used to be. It’s that they don’t want to confront the reasons why families have changed,” said Stephanie Coontz, author of five books on gender and marriage. It’s not that people don’t want to couple—most do, she added—but marriage is not necessary anymore, especially for women who no longer need a man for financial support and don’t need to stay in an unhappy or abusive relationship. They want intimacy, but with equality, and “women have the ability to say, if I don’t get that, I’ll hold out,” said Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and emeritus faculty of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
There’s a misguided longing, especially among conservatives, to return to a storied American family that never really existed, Coontz argues in her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. In reality, drug abuse, alcohol consumption, and sexually transmitted diseases were more prevalent in the 1950s, but economic conditions (in part because of government support for families) make the mid-20th century family look idyllic in retrospect, Coontz argues in the book.
Democrats want an American economy that works for you. Republicans want an America where you work for the economy. Since Reagan, that’s what we’ve built, and it’s taken a toll on those old, familiar families. But they’ll neither admit it nor adapt.
BTW, family values conservatives, your avatar in the Oval Office has been married three times and has five kids by them. Etc., etc. Their panic over the supposed breakdown of the American family hasn’t changed how they choose leaders. Their fretting over the decline in fertility and in birth rates continues, but it hasn’t forced them to reevaluate public policy that’s stuck in the 20th century. They might reconfigure, but it’s easier to quadruple down on forcing “Americans back to an earlier, mythic demographic era.”
I’m having a similar problem bringing Democrats’ campaign strategy into the 21st century. Their principle voter targeting and turnout tool was designed over two decades ago for a time when, here in North Carolina, Democrats were 48% of registered voters and independents were 18%. Now independents are 38% and Democrats are 31%. But the basic approach to voter targeting and turnout has not changed. We update our software and implement new software tools, but all it means is we’re campaigning the same ways, just tracking our progress digitally.
New wine in old wineskins.
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