ConservativeHome's The Republican

DOMA isn't where the fight is

Ryan Streeter

The Pew survey numbers yesterday on generational views of marriage haven’t gotten as much attention as they should, given their confirmation of a trend we all know is real: we are growing more and more into a society that doesn’t believe in marriage.

We could win the DOMA fight and lose the issue. The Pew figures show just how downstream from culture politics are when it comes to views of marriage and family.

Millennials care more about parenting than their GenX forebears, but less about marriage. The percentage of Millennials saying marriage is one of the important things in life dropped to 30 percent from 35 percent among GenXers. Perhaps not surprisingly, the marriage rate has dropped from 29 to 22 percent for those under 29 years old compared to those in the previous generation.

This is where the shifting views of marriage hit the hardest: the belief that marriage isn’t vital to raising children.The report authors write:

Millennials are less likely than older generations to link marriage with parenthood. About a third of Millennials (34%) think that more unmarried couples raising children is a bad thing for society, compared with 45% of those ages 30 and older. Likewise, about six-in-ten (63%) Millennials think that single motherhood is bad for society, compared with seven-in-ten (71%) adults ages 30 and older.

Those over 65 believe 3 to 1 that a child needs a father and mother to grow up happily. Even the boomers, children of the 60s as they are, believe 61 to 34 percent that children need both parents. Among millennials today, the margin is down to 53 to 44 percent.

Middle class marriage in crisis: wrapping up today's coverage of the issue

Ryan Streeter

Someone must have foreordained today as "Brad Wilcox's Wake-Up Call about Middle America's Crisis" Day.

Not only did Brad write on Platform today about his new study on marriage breakdown in the middle class, he was interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO and his study on middle class marriage breakdown was the subject of Rich Lowry's column. In addition John McCormack featured Lowry's take on the study at Today's Standard. I covered the issue here. We all have Ross Douthat to thank for drawing attention to this early in the week.

Here's a recap of some of the more salient clips from today:

• Wilcox on Platform: "Up until the 1970s, marriage had a strong hold over both Middle and upscale America. But over the last four decades, dramatic changes in the economic, cultural, and civic fabric of the United States have eroded the strength of Middle American ties to marriage; by contrast, the ties that upscale Americans enjoy to marriage have remained resilient in the face of these changes."
• Wilcox in Lopez's NRO interview: "[W]e are witnessing a striking reversal in American life where highly educated Americans are more likely to be connected to the religious and moral sources of a strong marriage culture than their fellow citizens from middle America...Indeed, the biggest marriage story among ordinary Americans is that cohabitation is mounting a major challenge to marriage as the preferred site for childbearing and co-residence in Middle America...This is disturbing because children and cohabitation do not mix. Children born to cohabiting parents are at least twice as likely to see their parents break up before they turn five, and they are much more likely to suffer educational and emotional problems, compared to children born into married homes."
• Lowry: "All of this points to a slow-motion social and economic evisceration of a swath of Middle America...At the moment, American politics offers two separate, distinct ways not to address these issues: Either the brain-dead populism of the Left that blames it all on trade and the decline of unions, or the brain-dead populism of the Right that extols the working class without taking serious note of its agony. We’ll have to do better: There’s a crisis in the middle."
• McCormack sums up the issue by quoting Indiana congressman Mike Pence: "'You would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family continues to collapse.' This new study seems to prove Pence's point: Where the family fails, the state grows."

The left is philosophically incapable of addressing this issue. The options available to conservatives aren't great, but they should be thinking hard about how we confront this problem. It's real, it's severe, and nothing will have a greater effect on inequality between the rich and everyone else a generation from now.

The uncomfortable conversation we need to have about marriage breakdown in the middle class

Ryan Streeter

Murphy Brown has come a long way. Dan Quayle's infamous remarks once ignited a firestorm, mainly among liberal elites whose "how dare he!" bromides reflected their default "defend-the-1960s-at-all-costs" worldview. Related, but less caustic, remarks by Indiana governor and potential 2012 contender Mitch Daniels will be less likely to create such a stir. But they point us to a real problem we probably don't want to talk about as a nation, however much we need to.

As reported this morning by Mona Charen at NRO and featured in ConservativeHome's morning update, Daniels said, "If I could wave a magic wand and change just one thing, it would be to guarantee that every American child could grow up in a two-parent home until the age of 18. That would solve maybe three-quarters of our problems."

Daniels won't likely be attacked as Quayle was for the simple reason that we have a lot more data and understanding about the issues now.  It's hard to argue with his claim (unless one wants to try to get scientific about the "three-quarters" point). The more out-of-wedlock births we have, the more social and economic dysfunction we have. Whether you're Isabel Sawhill on the left or Ron Haskins on the right, you follow what they data says on this point.

But just as the evidence has grown more complete and persuasive, the problem has gotten a lot thornier. Why? 

Because, as Brad Wilcox points out today on Platform, our marriage crisis in America has become a middle class crisis. We usually associate "out of wedlock births" with poverty. Confronting single parenthood was actually a big part of welfare reform, and we actually created a federal program to address it. But no more. Unmarried households have exploded within the 58 percent of the U.S. population that Wilcox calls "moderately educated" - those with a high school degree who went to college but didn't graduate. 

Between 1982 and 2008, unmarried childbearing rose from 5% to an eye-popping 34% among this group, while it has stayed at a low 2% during that time for wealthy women. 

This is truly a troubling development during a time when the Obama administration has made it a goal of its healthcare bill to extend social welfare far into the middle class. Like frogs in the proverbial kettle, we are witnessing a "welfare-izing" of the middle class. Middle income homes are now starting to exhibit traits that we used to reserve for low-income families.  And while their relative affluence compared to very poor families would help somewhat, all the evidence shows that - as Mitch Daniels has indicated - children in single parent homes fare worse on just about every indicator, leading to a host of problems that cost a lot to redress.

We can't throw federal dollars at this as we did in welfare reform. If we did that, we would simply be encouraging the "welfare-izing" trend. Plus, as Ron Haskins has argued in National Affairs, we don't really know of successful programs that help reverse single-parenting trends once people are in their 20s, which is what such programming would likely try to do. We would be shooting in the dark against the odds, probably creating more problems to fix later.

So what to do?

It is unlikely that trying to encourage behavior through the tax code would do much good. Our problem is cultural and fundamentally driven at the level of opinion and behaviors that lie outside good policy options. Politicians and policy wonks don't like this, but I'm afraid that's where we are.  So there are probably two things we can consider:

1. Increase public awareness of the facts. Probably the only thing policymakers could do at a national level is to partner with private sector communications firms, offer some funding for a competitive public affairs campaign, with a selection committee of private sector professionals, and set the private sector embarking on a multi-year public communications effort. Admittedly, these types of initiatives have mixed results. But the first step is talking about the facts. This is one way to do it. 
2. Double down on public health education and make childbearing and marriage required components. If schools are going to offer sex ed, they should be required to present the facts on marriage, cohabitation, and childbearing. It's insane to talk about sex without addressing these topics. Teenagers can probably tell you more about STD infection rates by contraceptive device than any data point on unwed childbearing. Efforts are already underway on this front, and this is the best we can do for the future. I'm afraid reversing the trend among 20- and 30-somethings through a public policy intervention is a lost cause.

These two ideas feel limited. And they are. What would help even more would be for a public official - or even more, a less-annoying Lou Dobbs type of television advocate - harping on this issue over and again. Short of that, we will be largely adrift on this issue, trying to make adjustments as we can through some version of the two options I suggest. 

 

Who is this middle class we've been hearing so much about? Not who you think

Ryan Streeter

What do Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox, and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have in common? 

In the past 24 hours, right in the middle of the heated debate about "middle class tax cuts," they have injected a disquieting idea into our heads about what the middle class is.

Yesterday, commenting on the recent unemployment numbers, Bernanke said: "The unemployment rate we’ve been talking about. If you’re a college graduate, unemployment is 5 percent. If you’re a high school graduate, it’s 10 percent or more. It’s a very big difference.”

Wilcox, commenting on a new study his National Marriage Project has released, says: "From the 1970s to the 1990s, divorce or separation within the first 10 years of marriage became less likely for the highly educated (15 percent down to 11 percent), somewhat more likely for the moderately educated (36 up to 37 percent), and less likely for the least educated (46 down to 36 percent)." The "moderately educated" for Wilcox is the 58 percent of the population that has a high school degree and went to college without attaining a degree.

Douthat, commenting on Wilcox's study, points out that the more highly educated class in America has actually grown more socially conservative, less likely to divorce, and more religious, while the "moderately educated" and the less-educated are more likely to divorce and less likely to value the positive contribution of faith. He says that this "means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club."

Somewhere between the 5 and 10 percent unemployment range that Bernanke cites is an increasingly perplexing divide in America. It is NOT an economic divide. It's cultural and social. No one completely understands what's going on, but somehow higher education - one of the most secular and socially liberal set of institutions in America - is conspiring with the people it educates to produce more intact families committed to the values of family and faith. 

The middle class, meanwhile, is exhibiting traits that not long ago were commonly ascribed to the "welfare class." 

The lesson for policymakers is that access to higher education, regardless of the debate about how much smarter it actually makes us, is a key driver of social stability these days. And the lesson for everyone else, as Douthat so aptly puts it, is that "no religious body seems equipped to play the kind of stabilizing role in the lives of the 'moderately educated middle' (let alone among high school dropouts) that the early-20th-century Catholic Church played among the ethnic working class." 

Forget tax cuts for a minute. The situation of the middle class is much worse than any of us probably realizes.