Introduction
Skolnick, Arlene
THE POST-ELECTION stress disorder afflicting Blue Americans (wherever we live) continues four months after the election. We still obsess about what went wrong. Was gay marriage the...
...moreover, welfare, child care, and government-sponsored old-age programs undermine the family's functions as well as individual self-reliance...
...These arguments helped pave the way for the 1996 law ending welfare and the more recent drive to promote marriage as the cure for poverty...
...The paradox, according to Dombrink, is that Americans have grown more secular, tolerant, and pluralistic in recent years...
...Morone explains why...
...In addition, Wisensale found that in recent years the conservative think-tank network has spread to the states, where it has helped to shape policy in state legislatures...
...How can we speak to the tolerant, pragmatic side of American hearts and minds in defense of abortion, gay rights, and other hot-button issues without offending the traditionalist religious side...
...And yet, at the same time we are the most observant of Western societies...
...When such lines are drawn, social justice and progressive policies become unattainable...
...Did we suffer from a flawed candidate and a poorly managed campaign...
...He calls on the left to return to its own moral tradition—the social gospel that focuses on the common good and the construction of a just social order...
...We need, above all, to make the contradiction between the market and the family so clear that even Tom Frank's Kansans can see them...
...It's not easy to shift political frameworks, but it has been done in the past—as with the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement—and can be done again...
...Vice President Dan Quayle's attack on the television character Murphy Brown for becoming an unwed mother turned into a national joke, but it marked the beginning of an ongoing attack on single mothers, unwed or divorced—and the decline of the two-parent family—as the cause of all the nation's social ills...
...We have no shortage of good policy ideas—health care, child care, job training, and so forth, but unless we have a new story to replace the conservative jeremiad, there is no hope of seeing our policies enacted...
...Wisensale found that the major conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute focused on shrinking government spending and promoting the privatization of human services: they contended that big government is inefficient...
...Was gay marriage the determining factor...
...For example, polls consistently find that most Americans (59 percent in a November 2004 poll) support Roe v. Wade...
...At the time, the role of these organizations in shaping family policy was little understood...
...In the 1990s, Wisensale points out here, "family values" joined the earlier emphasis on smaller government...
...86 DISSENT / Spring 2005...
...The Howard Institute, a relatively small think tank based in the Midwest, reaches an extraordinary number of people around the world...
...The network has also gone global...
...As Morone argues, it is the unconstrained, unregulated market, not flower power, that undermines American families...
...Moreover, the jeremiad always designates DISSENT / Spring 2005 85 some groups as dangerous, immoral "others"— immigrants, the poor, racial minorities...
...Yet as Morone observes, it is the market more than the counterculture that erodes traditional standards by promoting sex, violence, and trivia in the media, and it is market-driven insecurity, low pay, and long hours that weaken the family...
...In 1991, Steven K. Wisensale wrote an article called "The Family in the Think Tank" for an audience of family researchers and educators...
...Tracing the conservative jeremiad to its Puritan roots, he points out that throughout our history individual wrongdoing and family breakdown have been blamed for social problems...
...Yet liberals themselves sometimes resonate to the moral decline theme...
...Why come out against "virtue...
...For liberals, this "marriage" of secular modernization and religiosity poses a challenge...
...Was it the threat of terrorism...
...We need to take seriously the alarm that many people feel about the rapid transformation of American life and culture...
...DISLODGING THE GREAT conservative narrative will also be made difficult by the formidable network of right-wing think tanks and their media empire...
...Today's conservative jeremiad is bolstered by the celebration of the free market...
...By most measures, Dombrink shows, only a minority of the public agrees with religious conservatives on what they define as their key issues: abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, assisted suicide, and cloning...
...ej AMES MORONE also deals with the appeal of what he calls "the great conservative narrative of American decline"—the widely held belief that the family is in crisis, moral standards have collapsed, and the social fabric is being frayed by a narcissistic flight from commitment and community—all of which can be blamed on the permissive counterculture of the 1960s...
...What progressives need more than anything else, Morone argues, is a compelling alternative narrative for our times...
...Dombrink warns that we should not underestimate the power of conservative laments about moral decline...
...Religion is thriving not in spite of this growing modernity, but because of it...
...How can we be more successful in 2006 and 2008, or are we doomed to remain a minority party overwhelmed at the polls by a rising tide of religious fervor and social conservatism...
...The three articles in this section offer some new insights into the progressive predicament and how to find our way out of it...
...Wisensale concludes with a plea, also made by linguist George Lakoff and others, that progressives need to learn how to define our ideas, reframe the debate, and put the right on the defensive...
...Except for the general glorification of the family over government, conservative think tanks at the time were pushing economic rather than culture-war themes...
...Even liberals can relate to conservative complaints about what the media make available to their children—Internet pornography, the pervasiveness of four-letter words in movies, the gratuitous sex and violence...
...First, John Dombrink takes issue with the dominant story line that emerged to explain the outcome of the election—that it was religion and traditional morality that led to the Democratic defeat...
...ARLENE SKOLNICK, author of Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty, is a member of the board of directors of the Council on Contemporary Families and a visiting scholar at New York University...
...He argues that public views on morality and family are far more complex and ambiguous than the simple red state-blue state dichotomy implies—rather, most Americans tend to be "purple" on values issues...
...Moral values in general...
...Its major policy concern is curtailing reproductive rights...
...it sounds plausible—don't divorce and out-of-wedlock births mean that the family really is falling apart...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
