REAGANOMICS IS LITERALLY DESTROYING THE AMERICAN FAMILY

From the New York Times, the latest Paul Krugman:

Money and Morals

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.

And

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

More here.

When I heard a few years ago that single parent families were on the rise among white Americans, I hammered the last few nails into the coffin that was the notion that the same demographic shift among African-Americans beginning many years earlier was somehow about black culture, a notion that was always, at the very least, troubling. It's just that there didn't seem to be any persuasive competing narratives; everybody, including lots of African-American leaders, seemed to think that the phenomenon of the single black mother had something to do with life attitudes among black people.

But for a long time, even though I halfheartedly accepted this pseudo-sociology, it presented nagging questions. Yes, we're all individuals, all of us making individual decisions about how we live our lives, but when millions of individuals all independently make the same choices, there are definitely social forces at play. But what were those social forces? The vague "black culture" concept was unsatisfying at best, and potentially racist at worst. And if it was "black culture" pushing African-American women into single motherhood, what changed? Black families had been relatively stable for generations until the 60s or 70s, and I don't recall any aspect of the Civil Rights Movement or any other political and cultural movements of the era that championed the notion of the single parent family. To accept the "black culture" explanation that even hooked Bill Cosby, you have to have a pretty vivid imagination. You have to pretend that feminism, or the sexual revolution, or welfare, or the end of Jim Crow, or something, pushed an idea that, if you go back and look, nobody was actually pushing.

But here's something that was happening in that era: good unionized jobs were slowly starting to disappear, which affected wages and benefits for the entire work force, union or not. As usual, whenever there is any sort of painful economic shift, Americans of color were the first to suffer. And that lack of good jobs for black men now stands alone as the sole persuasive explanation for the dramatic rise in black unwed mothers. Indeed, in the above linked essay, Krugman goes on to cite the work of sociologist William Julius Wilson, who accurately postulated in the mid 90s that this was exactly what happened.

Thing is, the same economic trends, the dismantling of the middle class, and the massive push of the American work force into the shitty service sector, have continued unabated since the 70s, affecting white men today in exactly the same way it affected black men thirty or forty years ago. In short, Reaganomics is literally destroying the American family, and it's completely obvious now.

So conservatives can wag their fingers, shame the American people for not being married, offer bullshit marriage initiatives, insist that marriage is the key to success, but until they couple that rhetoric with a plea for economic justice, they're barking up the wrong tree. Because only a good economy that shares its rewards with everybody will give Americans realistic family opportunities.

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