CAPITOL IDEAS: Our Permanent Revolution
Bethell, Tom
HE PHRASE PERMANENT REVOLUTION wasfirstusedby Marx and later by Trotsky. Revolutionaries at the time believed that economics explained everything. If only they could knock over the...
...The point is well made by David Blankenhorn, the president of the Institute for American Values andtheauthorofanewbook,TheFutureofMarriage (Encounter Books...
...When the welfare program Aid to Families with Dependent Children was ended in 1996, there was speculationthatillegitimacyrateswoulddecline.The program encouraged unwed mothers to have more children...
...Normally the problem of the underclass is misconstrued in terms of an economy that is losing T O MB E T H E L L M A R C H 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 5 5 Shelteredbytheirwealth,therichhave alwaysbeenfreetofloutconvention...
...Only a rich country can afford means-tested transferpaymentssohighthattheydetermarriage.A young couple with an out-of-wedlock child may consider marriage but decide against it once they realize that their combined incomes will disqualify them from Medicaid...
...He was promptly accused of racism...
...Gallagher, Blankenhorn, and others suspect that the potential loss of such benefits discourages marriage at the margin...
...Now, the middle class is beginning to enjoy a comparable liberation...
...The sexual revolution was not an equal-opportunity affair, in other words...
...The women who are forgoing husbands are "precisely the ones who can least afford to do so...
...It never did work out, although not for want of trying...
...Tom Bethellisasenioreditorof TheAmericanSpectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery Publishing...
...Blair must have calculated that defying them all carried less political risk than resisting the homosexual lobby...
...But it focuses on quite different issues--ones that would have surprised and (because they are so radical) pleased Karl Marx: the universal right to abortion, for example, even unto the time of birth...
...or at least men in the higher income brackets...
...How long before the illegitimacy fiasco undermines the economy...
...Since gay couples were all along free to approach non-religious adoption agencies, it is clear that their agenda was not just to gain access to children but to impose their views on the whole of society...
...Gallagher attributes the rise in illegitimacy to various factors, including the breakdownofformerlystrongtaboosagainstit:tothesexualrevolution,broadlyconstrued.Good intentions, as they often do, have gone awry...
...So they cohabit instead, and may never marry...
...Consider a young woman three months pregnant who wants to marry her boyfriend, Gallagher says...
...In liberated London, aslate as 1968, the Lord Chamberlain's office censored plays before granting a license...
...Post-Katrina, the great problem in that city is a shortage of labor...
...Thatcher's economic reformsintact(moreorless...
...The sexual revolution has worked far more to the advantage of men than women...
...Teenpregnancy"inexplicably gets all the attention but is not really the problem...
...Having sex and therefore children before marriage comes all too naturally and that is the problem...
...Some moms do getmarriedbeforetheirsecondchild,inotherwords...
...With a handful of exceptions, feminists have reinforced the sexual revolution rather than countered it...
...In 1994 Bill Clinton enjoyed "free love" in the Oval Office...
...In the inner-city ghetto, boys who grow up withoutfathersinturnbecomefatherswhowalkaway fromtheirownchildren.Classsolidifiesintocaste...
...Abolish private property, centralize the means of production, and a New Man would emerge...
...But it tells you that cultural revolution, not amelioration, was their true goal...
...Virtuallyall"childrenwhosefamiliesmakeover $75,000 a year "are living with both parents," says Hymowitz, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute...
...Educatedwomen,ontheotherhand,"knowthat they'dbettermarryiftheywanttheirchildrentosucceed academically...
...When they do, they set a bad example, but they probably harm themselves more than society as a whole...
...We are just so affluent now that we can affordtobuyourfreedomfromallourcommitments, such as marriage," he told me...
...The underlying philosophy of the Culture War could be put this way: We arenotmadeinGod'simagebutcanremakeourselves inourown.Somethinglikethiswasexpressedbythat unsatisfactory Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life...
...In fact, there was a pause in the rise of illegitimacyinthelate1990s,buttheearlierrisehasnow resumed...
...GALLAGHER'S CASE FOR MARRIAGE is subtitled: "Why married people are happier, healthier and better-off financially...
...Wages have soared, there's lots of work to be done but few people to do it...
...It is diminishing...
...The conservative opposition...
...Whentheydo,theysetabadexample, buttheyprobablyharmthemselves morethansocietyasawhole...
...Above all, Blankenhorn emphasizes a change in the nation's cultural values...
...Among lower-income groups it is not...
...The old-fashioned, married-couple-with-children model is doing well among the college educated...
...To be sure, they still want totransferasmuchpowertothestateaspossible,even in areas where a half -century of failure is undeniable, suchasnationalizedhealth.Butlimitsareatleastrecognized.EvensoderacinatedagroupasAmericanliberals understand that socialistic measures, if carried toofar,willimpoverishasociety.TheNewYorkTimes, practically the house organ of today's cultural aggressors, has learned that well-meaning economic measureslikerentcontrolharmthecitiesthatenactit(such as New York...
...Sheltered by their wealth, the rich have always been free to flout convention...
...IBELIEVE THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM isthewaningof ChristianityintheWest.Therecouldbenobetter demonstration of that than Tony Blair's recent decision to oppose a religious exemption for gay adoptioninEngland.Itwasonlythelatestskirmishin the Culture War, with orthodoxy once again going down to ignominious defeat...
...Reagan's priorities became the nation'sinthetwosucceedingdecades...
...the black rate has sincerisento69percent.Inthelast40years,therefore, white illegitimacy has risen more steeply than black...
...Furthermore, the free market system has its watchdogsonpermanentpatrol.Itwassaidofthesupply-siders in 1980 that they were as zealous about the economic "infrastructure" as the Marxists had been a century earlier...
...But in Marriage and Caste in America:SeparateandUnequalFamiliesinaPostMarital Age (Ivan R. Dee, 2006), Kay Hymowitz argues that separating marriage from child-rearing has had a moreprofoundconsequence.Thereisnotjustagrowing inequality, separating the college educated from the high school dropouts and the underclass, but these classes are increasingly self-perpetuating...
...though with opposite intent...
...MarxridiculedtheideathattheCommunistsadvocated "free love"--I think more because he needed respectability than because he disapproved of the idea...
...I never did understand why...
...Then Muslim leaders joined in on their side...
...Our commitments to moralpurposeslargerthantheself,whetheritistothe family, to religion or to the nation, are getting weaker acrosstheboard...
...Meanwhile, the archbishops of Canterbury, and York, and Westminster, representing the nation's Anglicans and Catholics, publicly appealed to Blair to grant one...
...Before the hurricane, more than half of young black men in the cityaged16to24werenoteveninthelaborforce.Half the city's population has since left, but it's a good betthat the underclass males who returned (or never left) still aren't looking for work...
...The prime ministerrecentlyrefusedtheirrequestforareligious exemption...
...manufacturingjobs,orreducingtheunskilledtominimum wage jobs...
...even the discussion of homosexuality was taboo...
...It is now so feeble that its nominal leader, David Cameron, refused to turnitintoapoliticalissue.HeagreedwithTonyBlair...
...It has become known as the Culture War, which just never quits...
...The white illegitimacy rate was about 3 percent in the mid-1960s...
...the denigration of gender differences;thedeclineofmarriage;thelossofshameassociatedwithout-of-wedlockchildbearing;therightsof homosexuals to marry, and to adopt children...
...Organs liketheWallStreetJournalkeepacloseeyeonlegislativeproposalsthatthreatentheeconomy.CultureWar issues, on the other hand, are relegated to Weekend and Arts pages...
...The disincentives to marriage are still at work elsewhere in the system...
...Beneaththesurface,therevolutionistsofthetwo erashadmuchincommon,buttoday'shavebeencontent to lay off the economy...
...Notice the speed and thoroughness with which the old order was swept away...
...C A P I T O LI D E A S 5 6 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R M A R C H 2 0 0 7 Theold-fashioned,married-couple-withchildrenmodelisdoingwellamong thecollegeeducated.Among lower-incomegroupsitisnot...
...In2004,almost55percentofwomenintheirearly20s whogavebirthweresingle...
...Hymowitz reports the case of a Cornellprofessorwhowassurprisedtofindthatonly 10 percent of her students came from divorced families (way below the national average of 50 percent...
...Mexicans and other Latinos are taking up the slack...
...Here's one telltale sign...
...IT IS VICTORIES inthe(predominantly)sexual arena that are truly important to today's revolutionaries.Andtheydoseemtoappreciate the important point that these goals are more achievable in a wealthy society than in an impoverishedone.Perhapsmorethananything, it is the rise in prosperity that has made such goals attainable...
...The professor then studied the records at the nation'stop50schoolsandfoundasimilarpattern.Educated women marry before they have children because, "like high status women since status began, they are preparing their offspring to carry on their way of life...
...Less than 40 years later, in Massachusetts and now in England, Catholic adoption agencies are not allowed to discriminate against homosexual couples seeking to adopt...
...If only they could knock over the economy, they strangely believed, the proletariat would inherit the earth and bliss would descend...
...The Culture War never quits, and I am convinced that the goal of the activists really is revolutionary upheaval, just as it was for the Marxists...
...Irving Kristol, an important figure in the supply-side counter-revolution of the late 1970s, conceded some years back that the Culture War was alreadylost...
...He ceded the latter terrain to Nancy Reagan, and the Culture War was essentially surrendered at that point...
...ThecollectivismoftheCommunists hasbeenreplacedbyaradicalindividualism...
...Ascent to the middle class is far more difficult and hazardous for single momsorunattachedmalesthanitisformarriedcouples, and so it follows that the sexual revolution has hitthepoorthehardest.(Whichiswhat"budgetcuts" are normally said to do...
...He points to the extraordinary rise of out-of-wedlock births in this country--now up to 37 percent of all births--and argues that one of the reasons for this unprecedented climb is the rise of prosperity...
...In 1964 a divorced Nelson Rockefeller was considered ineligible to run for president...
...John Paul II had some of this in mind when he referred to the culture of death...
...The couple might lose theirhealthcoverageiftheymarrybecausetheirjoint income could disqualify them...
...Britain's Labour leader Tony Blair saw the wisdom of preserving Mrs...
...A key event, not recognized as such at the time, wasthereluctanceofPresidentReagantogetinvolved in the battle to confirm Robert H. Bork, his own C A P I T O LI D E A S 5 4 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R M A R C H 2 0 0 7 Tby Tom Bethell OurPermanentRevolution SupremeCourtnominee.Reaganunmistakablyshowed that he regarded tax rates as more important than abortion rates...
...the right to assisted suicide, and so on...
...It's getting harder and harder to see gay people as an oppressed class," Maggie Gallagher commented...
...Later, free love practically defined the sexual revolution...
...It is largely low-income twentysomethings who are having a baby without a wedding ring," Hymowitz writes...
...The sexual revolution offered what many men have always wanted: sex without attachments, responsibilities, or consequences--the playboy philosophy...
...Maggie Gallagher, the president of the Institute forMarriageandPublicPolicyandtheauthormostrecently of The Case for Marriage (with Linda Waite), saysthat,ifweconsideronlyfirstbirths,"closetohalf" may now be to unmarried mothers...
...The prime minister himself wanted to grant an exemption, but several cabinet members threatened to quit...
...Today, in America, we have our own permanent revolution...
...The out-of-wedlock birth rate among whites is now 26 percent, which is what it was among blacks in 1965 when Daniel Patrick Moynihan described the breakdown of the black family...
...Buttheblackratewouldbeevenhigherwereitnotfor thedisproportionaterecoursetoabortionbyblacks...
...So how come the feminist movement sought to emulate men, by pretending that sex differences don't really exist...
...Things are already moving in that direction, as I realized on a recent visit to New Orleans...
Vol. 40 • March 2007 • No. 2
