Normally, what comes next is this: everyone talks himself silly for a week or so, and we go on to some other titillation. Murphy Brown’s baby equals JFK (the movie) equals Gennifer Flowers equals Long Dong Silver. This is our public life: a series of passing whirlwinds that raise dust then expire, leaving a thin residue of cultural anxiety on the coffee table.
This time, though, Dan Quayle-flawed, callow vehicle that he may be seems to have nudged presidential polities perilously close to something that really matters, something perhaps too precious to be entrusted to mere politicians. The stolid, secure two-parent family Quayle posited as an antidote to urban violence and moral decay is a symbol that cuts very close to the bone. Most Americans, especially those of Quayle’s age and younger, have measured themselves (consciously or not) against “Ozzie and Harriet”–or some similar shimmering image of nuclear bliss-and come up short or just different, often for reasons well beyond their control. Only about a third of American families structurally resemble the Nelsons these days. The divorce rate remains, stubbornly, one out of two. The out-of-wedlock birthrate has tripled since 1970; it is among the highest in the “developed” world. A nauseating buffet of dysfunctions has attended these trends-an explosion in child abuse, crime, learning disabilities, welfare dependency, name your pathology.
Logic dictates that changes in family structure alone can’t have caused this mess. Economics plays a role; Harriet now has to work in most two-parent families. And then there are the things Dan Quayle doesn’t talk about: the allure of excess, the deluge of crass propaganda-buying is more important than giving, having is more important than being part of. It often seems that the sterile ceremonies of consumerism are the most profound rituals Americans share as a people. These values questions-about how we’ve chosen to live our lives and how that’s affected our children, about the nagging sense that unlimited personal freedom and rampaging materialism yield only greater hungers and lonelier nights-have been quiet American obsessions for some time now, the source of a deep, vexing national anxiety.
“We have conducted a 30-year experiment in desublimation,” says Fred Siegel, a Cooper Union social historian. “Everyone gets to act out. There are no consequences. It’s been a disaster.” The acting out has been bipartisan. Self-actualizing liberals have been obsessed with personal freedom to the point of self-immolation; predatory conservatives have been obsessed with commercial freedom to the point of pillage. The very strong subtext of this presidential campaign is that both these indulgences have run their course. The 30-year spree has caused a monster hangover. There is a yearning for something more than the standard political analgesics. But any proposals that extend beyond platitudes inevitably provoke fierce contention, especially when the institution in question is the one at the very core of the debate: the American family.
For liberals, the initial impulse toward excess was benign. Blacks needed to be freed from segregation; women needed to be freed from stereotypes. The trouble was, no one could figure out where to draw the line on liberation. It became illiberal to reject any grievance or even to make moral judgments. The motives of criminals had to be understood rather than condemned. And if criminals rated empathy, who could cast judgment on a black teenager in the slums who chose to express herself by having a baby? Lifestyles were neither bad nor good; they were options. Options were* terrific.
This political fetishism helped drive a great many less imaginative people–blue-collar sorts, especially Roman Catholics–from the Democratic Party. In “Why Americans Hate Politics,” E. J. Dionne notes, “The polities of the 1960s shifted the balance of power within the liberal coalition away from working-class and lower-middle-class voters, whose main concerns were economic, and toward upper-middle-class reformers mainly interested in cultural issues and foreign policy.” The result was Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush, all of whom used social issues to pry blue-collar voters away from the party that putatively represented their economic interests.
The Republicans won not only the political argument but also the right to indulge in their own egregious obsession with the mystical healing powers of the market. “Greed is good” was the ’80s analogue to the ’60s “Do your own thing” (and the ’70s “You can have it all”). Many of the icons of the Reagan boom are now bankrupt or on parole. Their most visible legacy is the $4 trillion national debt that stands as a metaphor for the moral deficit incurred during the nation’s 30-year spree. “Both ends of the spectrum say the same thing: ‘As long as I get mine, the hell with everyone else’,” says Paul Weyrich, a leader of the religious right. “This was Ronald Reagan’s failing as president. He was great in the international arena, but I don’t think history will treat him kindly when it comes to domestic issues or values questions.”
Weyrich believes the coming debate over values could define American politics as profoundly as attitudes toward communism did during the cold war. “There will be different people on different sides of the barricades,” he says. “Some of those who have been in the conservative camp, but aren’t values-oriented, are going to be united with liberals who take a libertarian stance.” Somewhat to his amazement, Weyrich finds himself in substantive agreement with a relatively new group on the political scene: the fundamentally liberal-but officially nonpartisan-communitarian movement, which seeks to counteract the self-indulgent tendencies of the past 30 years by placing new emphasis on personal and civic responsibilities. Amitai Etzioni, the George Washington University sociologist and leading communitarian, believes the basic principles are so, well, basic that a broad-based alliance is possible: " I guess the moment that I realized that something had gone haywire," he says, “was when I saw a study that said most young people would insist on being tried by a jury of their peers-but didn’t want to do jury duty.”
There may well be limits to the alliance between the religious right and the moderate left. Communitarians are adamant about the desirability of two-parent families, but they also support the sort of government activism that’s never been big with the religious right-programs like family leave, gun control and national service. Worse, perhaps, they are ecumenical on such conservative hot buttons as abortion and homosexuality. There are other limits as well. Communitarians tend to be modest sorts. “We are swimming against the main current of American culture,” says William Galston, a University of Maryland social philosopher. " The goal is to bolster secondary, balancing values–the need for community, for common standards–in an individualistic culture."
Individualism-rugged individualism-has always been the American drug of choice. Alexis de Tocqueville, who may have coined the term, found it alarming. He defined individualism as “a mature and calm feeling which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and friends. He willingly leaves society to itself. Individualism saps the virtues of public life and destroys all virtues.”
By that standard, the past 30 years have been distinctly American. The excesses of the Reagan years have accessible names-Milken, Boesky, Trump, the savings and loan gang. The disaster that has overtaken American families has been quieter, more diffuse, but-as the data begin to trickle in, the casualty reports from the sexual revolution-incontrovertible. " From the child’s point of view, the breakup of the family has been very unambiguously unhappy," says Karl Zinsmeister, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The data are monolithically worrisome. None of these circumstances– divorce, single-parent families, stepparent families–are healthy. There is no precedent for what has happened in any other time, in any other place.”
Time for a caveat: plenty of children from divorced and single-parent families grow up to be sane, whole, brilliant and wonderful; plenty of children from even happy two-parent homes turn out to be monumentally screwed up. In any case, most single-parent families don’t happen by choice. All too often one man’s sexual liberation becomes one woman’s responsibility. The vast majority of these women move heaven and earth for their children. They are, as Dan Quayle noted, mopping up after his mess, “true heroes.”
But the numbers are daunting. There is a high correlation between disrupted homes and just about every social problem imaginable. According to research compiled by Zinsmeister, more than 80 percent of the adolescents in psychiatric hospitals come from broken families. Approximately three out of four teenage suicides “occur in households where a parent has been absent.” A 1988 study by Douglas A. Smith and G. Roger Jarjoura showed that “the percentage of single-parent households with [teenage] children … is significantly associated with rates of violent crime and burglary.” A study that tracked every child born on the island of Kauai in 1955 for 30 years found that “five out of six delinquents with an adult criminal record came from families where [a parent] was absent.”
There are other effects. The ability to learn is impaired, especially for boys growing up without fathers. A study by the National Association of Elementary School Principals indicated that girls from intact low-income families performed better on cognitive test’s than boys from broken high-income homes. A 1988 government survey of 17,000 children, Zinsmeister reports, found that “children living apart from a biological parent are 20 to 40 percent more vulnerable to sickness.” They are even 20 to 30 percent more likely to be injured in an accident.
These problems are, of course, far more intense in slum neighborhoods, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate often approaches 80 percent. Dan Quayle’s notion of a “poverty of values” rooted in welfare dependency and dissolute behavior gleaned from the popular culture is almost certainly true, so far as it goes. But the legacy of white racism, the loss of high-wage manufacturing jobs to the suburbs and less developed countries and the flight of the stabilizing black middle class to more congenial neighborhoods-after the passage of the civil-rights legislation in the ’60s-also helped to create the overwhelming sense of hopelessness that suffocates the slums.
And yet, the constant refrain from black leaders about the need for “more jobs, more opportunity” doesn’t ring quite so true as their demands for better schools, health care and policing. There are plenty of jobs available. They are lousy jobs, but they are available. The black leadership’s tendency to dismiss these as “dead end” seems flagrantly … American, and a window into the set of values that has been lost over the past 40 years. The Asian and Latin American immigrants (including many blacks from the West Indies) who flooded the cities in the past decade weren’t so proud. Many of them were willing to take two, three menial jobs at a time to save money to start businesses for themselves. But then, they weren’t quite Americans yet. They were the products of hegemonic, family-centered cultures, unhampered by 30 years of messages from a voracious marketing system.
There was a time when America’s culture was hegemonic, placid and family-centered. It was called the ’50s. As it happens, the pristine image wasn’t entirely a myth. The American Dream became a reality for a generation that had suffered through a terrible war and a Great Depression. Divorce rates decreased after a postwar spurt; disposable income increased. “It was a unique moment. There was an economy of abundance and a psychology of scarcity,” says Barbara Whitehead, a research associate at the Institute for American Values. The families of the ’50s hunkered down, saved money, lived conservatively in anticipation of the next depression. " Ironically, what we have now is the exact opposite," Whitehead adds. “An economy of scarcity and a psychology of abundance.”
Hegemony had its downside. “The culture was white, Protestant and male,” says William Galston. “The initial critique against its restrictive nature was difficult to rebut.” The initial critique came from distinguished scholars named Presley and Kerouac, James Dean and Chuck Berry. The revolt against the ’50s was cultural, generational, and it was easy to dance to. For a brief, shining moment the counterculture that flowered was biracial. The Berkeley sociologist Todd Gitlin has written that the strength of the civil-rights movement was reinforced by the fact that everyone was listening to the same, Top-40 music on AM radio. By the late ’60s, however, the “movement” and the music had splintered, FM had replaced AM and listeners had a choice of hard and soft rock, acid, soul, bubble-gum or a dozen other subcultural shards. Which raises an interesting point: the rebellion of the ’60s wasn’t only a sociological phenomenon; it was commercial as well. The youth culture was also the youth market.
This distinction marked the beginning of a revolution in marketing and technology that has had a profound impact on the shape of the values debate. Television brought the nation together in the ’50s; there were evenings when all of America seemed glued to the same show-Milton Berle, “I Love Lucy” and, yes, “Ozzie and Harriet.” But cable television has had quite the opposite effect, dividing the audience into demographic slivers: market segments. There are still shared national experiences-the gulf war, the Super Bowl, Johnny Carson’s farewell and the birth of Murphy Brown’s baby-but they don’t happen every night. Indeed, if you are a member of any identifiable subgroup-black, Korean, fundamentalist, sports fan, political junkie-it’s now possible to be massaged by your very own television and radio stations and to read your own magazines without having to venture out into the American mainstream. The choices are exhilarating, but also alienating. The basic principle is centrifugal: market segmentation targets those qualities that distinguish people from each other rather than emphasizing the things we have in common. It is the developed world’s equivalent of the retribalization taking place in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.
And it has serious consequences: it becomes far more difficult to sustain a sense of national community, to build a sense of common values. As the slivering of America has proceeded, the received wisdom has become that common values are impossible in so diverse a country, and perhaps not a very good idea, in any case. “What is the normative ideal?” asks Joyce Ladner, a Howard University sociologist. “I think we’re headed toward family pluralism. The two-parent model is predominant and perhaps ideal, but single-parent families are here to stay and in large numbers. The family of the 21st century isn’t going to look anything like the family of the ’50s.”
But there is a yearning, nonetheless, for the security associated with the good old days. David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values uses a photograph of the classic pluperfect ’50s family having a barbecue on the beach as a Rorschach test. “Members of the media and academic elites look at the photo and laugh,” he says. “They say things like ‘That’s what I’ve been fighting against all my life.’ But most other people look at it wistfully. One woman said, ‘I know the “Ozzie and Harriet” stuff is impossible, miss the familyness of it’.” Blankenhorn also knows the “Ozzie and Harriet” stuff is impossible, but believes that if the intact two-parent family isn’t reestablished as the dominant ideal, the effect on children will be disastrous. “The moral rule is that you do not bring a child into this world without a mother or father devoted to that child’s well-being at the highest level,” he says. " I’m not in favor of going back to the 1950s family, predicated on separate-sphere family roles with the woman playing the role of the lifelong homemaker. Roles can, and should, shift. But the number and identity of the parents in the household should remain the same."
This sounds like wishful thinking, as does much of the communitarian canon, but Blankenhorn and Amitai Etzioni can cite reams of polling data that say a shift away from self-indulgence, and toward nest-building, began in the late 1980s. One especially striking study, conducted by the pollsters Mellman & Lazarus for the MassMutual insurance company, indicates that the “family values” most important to Americans are things like providing “emotional support for your family,” respecting parents and children, and personal responsibility; the values deemed least important are “having nice things,” opposing abortion and “being free of obligations.” The 1987 stock-market crash might have been the psychological turning point in the rebirth of these sorts of family values; the national reaction to the Los Angeles rioting may well intensify the trend. Even reluctant pluralists like Joyce Ladner say the current anarchic tendencies can’t continue: “Everyone I know gays, ‘Enough is enough’.”
Ladner looks to the government to help support families, but most of the public remedies sound tepid or banal. There is a family agenda floating about in Washington-tax breaks, divorce-law reform (no more no-fault divorce where children are involved), family leave and more flexible work arrangements. There are also the communitarian notions of public service and reciprocal responsibility (the idea that you shouldn’t be able to get something from the government without giving something in return), both of which are extremely worthy but unlikely to reverse a national unraveling.
Ultimately, the rebuilding of community, of common values, is well beyond the reach of politicians and the assorted talking heads who clutter our lives. The big ideas about values are the oldest and the simplest. “A few weeks ago my wife got a flier from a book club promising NO RISK, NO COMMITMENTS,” says New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. " Not a bad deal, but you can lose out on a lot in life by not taking risks or making commitments. There is the idea that the only way to achieve real happiness is lose yourself in the service of others."
Now there’s a thought: old, simple, an ever-elusive goal, a principle all the great religions have held in common. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence.
