The Family Values Sham By Harold Meyerson

[Demeter]

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12541

As conservatives tell the tale, the decline of the American family, the rise in divorce rates, and the number of children born out of wedlock all can be traced to the pernicious influence of one decade in American history: the '60s.

The conservatives are right that one decade, at least in its metaphoric significance, can encapsulate the causes for the family's decline. But they've misidentified the decade. It's not the permissive '60s. It's the Reagan '80s.

.....

Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the "flexibility" of our workforce decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring, and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh.

Problem is, disperse a vibrant working-class community in America and you disperse the vibrant working-class family.

Which is how American conservatism became the primary author of the very social disorder that it routinely rails against, and that Republicans have the gall to run against.

The party of family values? Please. If that's the banner that Republicans continue to wave, then they should certainly make Rudy Giuliani, who couldn't bestir himself to attend his son's high school graduation or his daughter's high school plays, their presidential nominee. No candidate could better personify the sham that is Republicans' and conservatives' concern for the American family.

Harold Meyerson is acting executive editor of The American Prospect. A version of this column originally appeared in The Washington Post.

[AX10]

1. K & R!

[Hekate]

2. Amen! KnR

For the longest time, the only way most middle class families could maintain their standing was on the backs of female labor -- sending Mom out to work at jobs that paid a lot less than Dad's, but made the difference. And now even that is over as so many families have slid into outright poverty, living from paycheck to paycheck.

Hekate

[tanyev]

3. Excellent article.

[Hissyspit]

4. .