Fatherless America (David Blankenhorn)
Tucker, William
Though like White a true-believing veteran of the 1964 campaign, Edwards covers Goldwater's career not in iconic but human terms, from the clay feet up. Goldwater, he writes, "led a generation of...
...Never heard of Pauken...
...Vainglorious men make their contributions...
...Being himself...
...The New Father...
...Yet, as Blankenhorn shows, nearly all child molesting, and much companion-beating, is done by stepfathers and boyfriends...
...01 n the spring issue of Forbes MediaCritic, editor Terry Eastland made the striking point that Washington's well-educated and intellectually curious journalists simply don't know much about Congress's new Republicans...
...As one commentator remembers him: "[He] worked 10, 12, 14 hours, came home, sat down, read the paper, ate dinner, took out the rubbish, shoveled snow in the winter, cut grass in the summer, and gave the final word in all important decisions...
...In another era, this might be described as "self-centeredness," "immaturity," or "narcissism...
...Give me a call as soon as you're free...
...With 75 percent of divorces initiated by women, many men feel they are being fleeced by these proceedings...
...He was ever a man who, in the words of a friend, "shot from the heart, not the hip," and as a presidential candidate "always said what he wanted, and . . . did not intend to let anything, not even a national campaign, change him...
...Tocqueville described him intimately, and Margaret Mead wrote, surveying the postwar generation in 1959, "The GI's came home to be the best fathers—from the standpoint of their young children—that any civilized society has ever known...
...At best he engages in "parallel parenting," establishing some sort of relationship with the children while ignoring his ex-wife...
...Hoisted up by government programs, women really can support themselves and their children...
...Are there two Barry Goldwaters—the traditional conservative of 1964 and the radical libertarian of 1994...
...All we need is his paycheck" is the way the experts put it...
...An all-powerful, all-nurturing government is charged with the task of making everyone happy...
...The Sperm Father," says Blankenhorn, "is the stateof-nature father"—a biological regression to primitive mammalian culture...
...1 ndeed, as Edwards's book shows, Goldwater was an unconventional political leader who seemed to enjoy nothing more than discombobulating his staff and disconcerting his supporters...
...If Pauken were a liberal he would be known as a "community activist...
...As Robert Novak writes in the introduction: Considering the fact that he has been on the political scene for the 30 years of this book's title, he should be a major American political figure by now...
...When it inevitably fails in this task, then everyone feels justified to adopt a posture of permanent adolescent rebellion...
...Yet this postwar father is the same 1950s brute now remembered for shoveling snow and fondling his children's genitals...
...Although this halfway world offers no real fatherhood at all, it is once again supported by a heavenly chorus of pop psychologists and marital therapists who sing the praises of "better divorce" and co-parenting...
...Fathers, on the other hand, love their children conditionally...
...The mother-andchild family is better off without him...
...Most journalists haven't read conservative magazines or think tank reports, either...
...All that has changed is that the economy has improved and the task has gotten a little easier...
...As David Blankenhorn notes, it isn't just that nearly half the children of this generation will spend some time separated from their fathers...
...This one is a sexless creature who accepts his irrelevance and is willing to play any genderless role that feminists and academics cook up for him...
...As Blankenhorn points out, he is "the last traditional breadwinner in the experts' story of fatherhood...
...that the Goldwater we know today is pretty much the Goldwater we've always known...
...In a series of interviews conducted in four major cities, Blankenhorn and his colleagues questioned real fathers leading real lives with their wives and children...
...They were once essential as breadwinners, but according to waves of contemporary literature, fathers are not that important in raising healthy children...
...But he has been unable to play the devious game that took his acquaintance at Georgetown, Bill Clinton, into the Oval Office, and indeed is the accepted way of doing business in both parties...
...Or hadn't you noticed...
...It was Pauken's belief that the furor over nuclear energy had less to do with the issues than with the desire to consolidate a powerful political bloc...
...Even as single motherhood is being touted as a viable economic option, the "deadbeat dad" is simultaneously portrayed as the source of her almost inevitable poverty...
...The Visitation-Rights Father...
...There are now more of these characters in the population than welfare mothers...
...Two anecdotes from the last decades will illustrate perfectly his political style, a style we will see more of as the 104th Congress (which shares it) finds its footing: In 1978, after the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident led to media coverage and widespread public concern over the safety of nuclear power, Tom Hayden, a founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society, decided that the construction of nuclear power plants might be an issue around which to launch a national grassroots political movement...
...Concerned about policy drift—the imposition of wage and price controls and the preservation of Great Society programs—he got out before Watergate and returned to law school in his native Texas...
...But where Blankenhorn's originality is most appar70 The American Spectator August 1995 ent is in his research on what fatherhood actually is...
...T his resume is filled out in great (and interesting) detail in The Thirty Years War...
...In the spring of 1994, he urged Republicans to "get off [Clinton's] back and let him be president...
...The whole concept of fatherhood is under cultural attack...
...What emerges is a remarkably uniform culture that flies beneath the radar of popular analysis...
...Their wives may work, they may provide less than half the income, yet they still see supporting their children as their one and only purpose in life...
...Remarriage may offer adults a second chance for happiness," he concludes...
...In fact, Blankenhorn notes, support from divorced fathers has varied little over the decades, even as more and more non-supporting fathers are now being sent to jail...
...Today, Goldwater backs gays in the military and warns the Republican party not to take an adamant anti-abortion stand...
...Goldwater, he writes, "led a generation of conservatives to understand that theirs was a winning as well as a just cause," his presidential candidacy marking "the true beginning of a fundamental shift in American politics from liberalism to conservatism that continues to this day...
...While European countries have limited artificial insemination to married couples, America has cheerfully opened the doors to this biological anarchy...
...The primitive brute of the current literature resembles the Freudian imaginings of people who never had a real father...
...The Sperm Father...
...This commentator defines such a regime as a "monarchy"—and that's the benign side...
...William Tucker, TAS's New York correspondent, writes frequently about marriage and the family...
...A neighbor, a distant relative, a baseball coach, the television repairman—anyone can try his hand at playing this "male role model...
...While learning to pronounce the names, Washington journalists should spend some time learning about the ideas that motivate the new Congress, and about the conservative movement that developed it...
...His self-assigned task is to wade into the cultural swamp of feminist dogma and academic psychology and explore just how our elites have convinced themselves over the past three decades that paternity isn't important...
...It was to answer these questions that Edwards undertook this book, reminding us that even in his "traditional conservative" mode, Goldwater could wade through a crowd of shaggy anti-war protesters to greet his former speechwriter Karl Hess—by then a self-described "anarcho-syndicalist"—and tell him, "You're my friend...
...Distraught conservatives ask, "What's happened to Barry...
...Delving deeper, we find an evil-tempered, wife-beating, child-molesting barbarian...
...As chairman of the College Republicans in the mid-sixties he debated the major John Von Kannon is vice president and treasurer of the Heritage Foundation...
...He worked in several positions in the Nixon White House...
...Well, don't feel bad...
...Single mothers are heroes—even though there has obviously been a large element of female narcissism in the phenomenon...
...They may provide income and a sense of security, but the tension between non-related people in the household eventually wears on everyone...
...Hayden enlisted the help of his wife, Jane Fonda...
...He returned again to Texas, where he is now chairman of the Texas Republican party...
...Not content merely to debate, he joined the army and served as an intelligence officer in Vietnam...
...But remarriage does not offer children a second chance for fatherhood...
...We now live in a culture where almost everyone expects to be loved unconditionally...
...Thus Blankenhorn arrives at his most important distinction: Mothers love their children unconditionally...
...First, they still see themselves first and foremost as "providers and protectors," fending between their families and the world...
...They haven't talked with many of the idea-filled Republican politicians who now make up the leadership of the 104th Congress...
...A good place to start is with Tom Pauken's fine book...
...This is the father who has already been chased out of the house—usually by a wife who has initiated the divorce—and is now being asked to support his ex-wife and children...
...A merica is rapidly becoming a land without fathers...
...T his taxonomy offers a brilliant tour of popular culture's platitudes and delusions...
...Eastland was right: It is only in the past few weeks, for example, that TV commentators have begun to pronounce correctly the name of House Budget committee chairman John Kasich of Ohio, despite his repeated pleas that it rhymes with "basic...
...The Deadbeat Dad...
...0 Murray has detected a rise of white illegitimacy that seems to be mimicking the catastrophic disintegration of the black family since the 1960s...
...Instead, all see themselves as servants, "My wife and kids come first," is the common explanation...
...What characterizes these men...
...The Stepfather and the Nearby Guy...
...This is what their- fathers did before them (and these men do not fault their fathers, no matter how hard-pressed they were or how little time they spent with them...
...Writes Blankenhorn: "The axiom that fathers are essentially superfluous has constituted a major belief among social scientists for at least two decades...
...If all this means leaving the home when his equally genderless spouse asks him—well, he's a tolerant and agreeable fellow...
...If Americans seem to be growing less mature and less independent all the time, it may be because there are too few fathers around...
...Not even a national campaign...
...As the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski put it, the mother may provide nurturing, but the father serves as an indispensable link between the child and the outside world...
...Revealing words there, given the quandary his longtime supporters now seem to be in, searching for the real Barry Goldwater—as if there were a difference between the Goldwater whom Edwards calls "the traditional conservative of 1964" and "the radical libertarian" of today...
...Here is the roster: • The Unnecessary Father...
...Lesbians in search of some kind of Amazon society run the most active sperm banks...
...His most withering sarcasm, however, is reserved for the "nearby guy," the all-purpose, unattached male who wanders in and out of the lives of almost every single mother...
...Like Charles Murray, Blankenhornfounder and president of a small New York think-tank, the American Institute for Values—believes that fatherlessness and illegitimacy not only are problems in themselves but also drive many of the other major problems of our society...
...The view from here, reinforced by this superb biography, is that there isn'tany difference...
...Questions of sexual role-playing and "gender power" are basically irrelevant...
...This is the 1950sand-before father, the Ozzie Nelson stock character now held in universal contempt by educated elites...
...The most common examples are underclass young men who cede all responsibility for supporting their children to the welfare system...
...issues of the day, perhaps most importantly the wisdom of the war in Vietnam...
...Where visitation rights are allowed, men generally contribute...
...Many of the strongest advocates of the New Father model," says Blankenhorn, "are also the strongest advocates of the viability of single-parent homes...
...High crime, chronic poverty, miseducation, a degenerate culture—all are fueled by the breakdown of the family and the declining role of mature men...
...In an article on male nannies, the New York Times reported that men are more frequently hired as nannies by single mothers who are looking for a male presence in their children's lives...
...Fathers are viewed as unnecessary, burdensome, even downright evil and dangerous...
...That is, now that the war in Vietnam was over, the former anti-war activists were scavenging for another issue with which THE THIRTY YEARS WAR: THE POLITICS OF THE SIXTIES GENERATION Thomas W. Pauken Jameson Books /220 pages / $22.50 reviewed by JOHN VON KANNON The American Spectator August 1995 71...
...The Old Father...
...They provide the warm, nourishing environment that gives children the confidence to grow...
...Stepfathers, Blankenhorn argues, are hardly better than no father at all...
...In a culture of fatherlessness," concludes Blankenhom, "anybody can be a father...
...He ran for office four times, each time losing narrowly, and during the first Reagan term came to Washington and headed up the ACTION agency, which runs federal volunteer programs...
...No, Goldwater hasn't changed...
...The ideal [of fatherhood] does not vary much from place to place, or between blue-collar and white-collar, or across racial, ethnic, or religious lines," says Blankenhom...
...That's activism...
...that the icon whose "candidacy for president marked the true beginning of a tectonic shift in American politics" is merely doing in the conservative nineties what he did in the liberal fifties and sixties...
...An American original, "shooting from the heart," giving the Establishment fits...
...Despite a massive federal effort, average contributions remain at about $3,000 a year...
...I'm trying to set the example of the type of person [my three daughters] would want to marry," explains one...
...As Mario Cuomo once put it, "If you take a 15-year-old with a baby, get her an income, supply her with day care, put her back in school or in a job program—what's the problem...
...Blankenhom accepts this as a given...
...Where they are not, contributions dry up...
...Most important, he is willing "to prepare children for flexible adult roles that are not predetermined according to gender...
...With this has come a culture of fatherlessness...
...As Blankenhorn documents, the truly caring father has been a part of American culture for longer than most people can possibly remember...
...This fellow, says Blankenhorn, is a "sort-of father [who] exercises certain limited rights, but no longer wields authority...
...At worst, he remarries and drifts apart...
...Unconventional, contrarian, anti-Establishment, not so much an icon—he never asked to be—as an iconoclast...
...But in the contemporary FATHERLESS AMERICA: CONFRONTING OUR MOST URGENT SOCIAL PROBLEM David Blankenhorn BasicBooks / 328 pages / $23 reviewed by WILLIAM TUCKER The American Spectator August 1995 69 climate, it is a sign of go-it-alone independence or a willingness to "explore new family structures and lifestyles...
...Divorce, illegitimacy, and general cultural breakdown are all taking their toll...
...Surveying the current literature, Blankenhorn extracts several contemporary versions of what fatherhood means...
...Only the Establishment has...
...For the first time in the history of any culture, a large portion of children—over 30 percent by some estimates—are being raised apart from their natural fathers...
...That being true, how to explain the Goldwater of recent years, who "seems to change and even contradict what he once stood for...
...Many single mothers say they prefer having complete control of their children, and enjoy making decisions without having to deal with another adult...
...They expect some kind of performance and cultivate character traits they believe will help children survive in adulthood...
...But a surprising impetus comes from women who prefer single parenthood via anonymous sperm donors...
Vol. 28 • August 1995 • No. 8
