Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 103)

on political books inevitable—there’s no alternative history where you get to keep “breadwinner liberalism” unchanged, and if there were, none of us would want to live in that world. Here I’m reminded of the libertarian writer Brink Lindsey’s aphorism that “left and right are both pining for the ’50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.” Neither one has that option. Second, Self shows that an alternative form of the politics of the family was possible, one in which issues such as child care, health care, and an economic program of full employment that included women were fully realized. The fullest achievement of that agenda would have represented a kind of post-breadwinner liberalism that would support the shared aspirations of all families, including adaptive ones. That it didn’t happen is in part the fault of the movements themselves—as Self says, “the liberal-left insurgents of the 1960s and 1970s lost momentum, political allies, and purchase on crucial symbolic mythologies of the American family”—but was also related to larger economic and political forces affecting white men as well as the rights movements. model of the liberal left and the archetypal model of the right. If the focus was on children, it really wouldn’t matter whether they were growing up with one parent or two— married or unmarried, gay or straight—or in an adoptive or foster family. Kids-as-politics didn’t fully live up to Greenberg’s expectations, but it didn’t do too badly. Also in 1987, Senator Jay Rockefeller convened the federally funded Commission on Children, which had the valuable effect of co-opting several prominent family values conservatives to support some of the positive social supports that were necessary for children to thrive, such as health care, child care, and a children’s tax credit. While the commission’s recommendations were considered overambitious on their release in 1991, almost all of them eventually came to pass: significant increases in child care, Head Start, and the Earned Income Tax Credit; the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act; the creation of the Child Tax Credit and its hard-fought expansion as the Additional Child Tax Credit in 2001; and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1997. W hile kids-aspolitics didn’t stop the welfare reform of 1996, which was the inevitable outcome of the racial and gender backlash Self recounts, that bill’s other provisions—separate from the now-disastrous transformation of family support to a fixed block grant—greatly expanded child care and child support enforcement. Although the Affordable Care Act and additional low-end tax breaks in the Obama years have extended some of the gains for children, for the most part the bipartisan era of kids-as-politics crashed in about 2002, when the Wall Street Journal deemed the families that benefited from the Earned Income Tax Credit and the other tax benefits the “Lucky Duckies.” With this move, the right began a new stage in the culture war, in which economics itself would replace the divisive power of gender, race, and sexuality. We face a choice between an “entitlement society” that supports only people who “want things from government,” Mitt Romney tells us, or “an opportunity society.” Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, recently assembled data that supports the Romney worldview, warning that we are becoming “a nation of ‘takers,’ ” and his boss, AEI President Arthur Brooks, has published two books that warn of an existential showdown between the believers in free enterprise and the forces of government. The language of irreconcilable moral viewpoints, such as characterized fights about abortion rights or gay marriage, has been ported over into the economic field, and people who believe government has a role in supporting the needy or economic growth are treated as alien—“foreign to the American experi- A significant shortcoming of the book is that it drops the story around the early 1980s, even though the final section promises to cover the period from 1974 to 2011. Beyond the Carter years and the rise of both the religious right and HIV-AIDS activism in the 1980s, it thins out, and familiar anecdotes, such as the Clarence Thomas– Anita Hill showdown, substitute for the extraordinary archival research and littleknown characters of the earlier chapters. As a result, Self omits one of the more interesting chapters in the history of the politics of family, which I would call the era of kidsas-politics. This period lasted from roughly the late 1980s, when Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg circulated a strategy memo with the title “Kids as Politics,” through the early George W. Bush years. Putting children at the center of politics would, it was hoped, restore the “positive liberties” that Self says were displaced in the earlier fights, and renew a sense of the purpose of government. Children could form a kind of common denominator between the adaptive I’m reminded of the libertarian writer Brink Lindsey’s aphorism that “left and right are both pining for the ’50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.” Neither one has that option. ence,” as Romney said of Obama’s ideas. And so the fight is now fully back in the territory of economics, with the rising American electorate (unmarried women, millennials, professionals, and minorities) not only more socially tolerant but also more supportive of government’s role in the economy. Self’s book is a valuable reminder that the arguments about the family since the 1960s always had an economic dimension and were not a distraction. They also could form the basis of a richer liberalism that not only fully values the rights of individuals in their diverse identities, but also builds the kind of supportive economy and social contract that can enable everyone, in any kind of family, to make the most of his or her capacities. Mark Schmitt is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Washington Monthly 103

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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