Matt Yglesias

Culture as Economics

George Packer’s narrative piece on the white working class in Ohio is one of those excellent magazine pieces I’ll just recommend rather than attempting to summarize. Nor will I even really attempt to comment on it, though I would be interested in what some quantitatively oriented political observers have to say. Instead, I thought I would focus on this one point:

“These days, you have to struggle,” she said. “As a kid, I used to be able to go to the movies or to the zoo. Now you can’t take your children to the zoo or go to the movies, because you’ve got to think how you’re going to put food on the table.” Snodgrass’s parents had raised four children on two modest incomes, without the ceaseless stress that she was enduring. But the two-parent family was now available only to the “very privileged.” She said that she had ten good friends; eight of them were childless or, like her, unmarried with kids. “That’s who’s middle-class now,” she said. “Two parents, two kids? That’s over. People looked out for me. These kids nowadays don’t have nobody to look out for them. You’re one week away from (a) losing your job, or (b) not having a paycheck.”

This is an idea that’s starting to attract some attention from cutting edge political thinkers but that, I think, hasn’t yet garnered all the attention it deserves. I first encountered it in my then-colleague Garance Franke-Ruta’s article of several years ago:

Yet the broader social reality suggests that the focus of these middle-income voters on cultural traditionalism is not entirely separate from their economic aspirations. Social solidarity and even simple familial stability have become part of the package of private privileges available to the well-to-do. Behavioral surveys consistently show that, regardless of their political leanings, the better-off and better-educated live more traditional personal lives: They are more likely to marry, far less likely to divorce, less likely to have children outside of marriage, and more likely to remarry when they do divorce than their less accomplished peers. In addition, their kids are more likely to be academically successful and go to college, repeating the cycle.

The new Puritanism and cultural conservatism Frank described can also been seen as symptoms of how, in today’s society, traditional values have become aspirational. Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle class people they want to be like. It should come as no surprise that the politics of reaction is strongest where there is most to react to. People in states like Massachusetts, for example, which has very high per capita incomes and the lowest divorce rate in the country, are relatively unconcerned about gay marriage, while those in Southern states with much higher poverty, divorce, and single-parenthood rates feel the family to be threatened because family life is, in fact, much less stable in their communities. In such environments, where there are few paths to social solidarity and a great deal of social disruption, the church frequently steps into the breach, further exacerbating the fight.

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam pick up on this in Grand New Party, going so far, IIRC, to quote Garance’s article. I’ll quote Norman Ornstein:

Douthat and Salam’s biggest contribution comes in a chapter called “What’s the Matter With the Working Class?” They make a strong case for why the dissolution of families is significant: it leaves people in an increasingly disrupted society, so that their turn to social conservatism is understandable. The authors outline the twin problems of inequality and insecurity in a clear and convincing manner that should resonate as much with Barack Obama as with any Republican. Had Obama read this book before his now-famous “cling to guns and religion” comments, he might have phrased his analysis — which is not out of sync with that of the book — differently.

Of course the problem is that once you recognize the truth of this line of analysis, you’re still left wondering what, exactly, you’re supposed to do about it. Stopping committed gay and lesbian couples from getting married won’t, in the real world, help people build the sort of stable family structures that are an important part of emotional and economic support and security for those who have it. Nor does it really seem plausible to me that any government safety net, no matter how generous, could realistically fully make up the gap. And it’s hard for me to imagine a government “marriage promotion” initiative that’s heavy-handed enough to be effective, but not so heavy-handed as to be frighteningly authoritarian. But as a pure matter of electoral politics, I think it would probably be easy enough for an enterprising politician to talk a little bit more explicitly about this kind of thing and that would probably help candidates connect with people who, not wrongly, see linkage in their lives between “cultural issues” about family life and the economic challenges facing their family.