Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

One of the slightly distressing things about Ross and Reihan’s Grand New Party is that they are adressing a problem that isn’t even on the Democrats radar screen: the fact that stable marriage is fast becoming an institution exclusively for the upper-middle class:

If you look at the marriage rates in the 1950s and 1960s across social classes, the upper-middle class, the working class and the poor all got married and divorced at about the same rate. The all had children in wedlock or out of wedlock at about the same rate. That’s changed dramatically over the past 50 years. So upper-middle-class Americans are still behaving like bourgeois, 1950s surburbanites. They’re getting married, they have low divorce rates, they’re very unlike to have children out of wedlock. That’s not true for the working class. What you see in the white working class, in fact, is a trajectory that parallels, in alarming ways, what the black working class went through in terms of collapsing marriage rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s. So we argue that that’s one of the biggest challenges facing the American working class, and it’s at the root of a lot of the inequality and a lot of the economic anxiety that are big factors in this election year.

And do democrats have much to say about this? Well, gay democrats do. The weird thing is that gay activists and writers, who have traditionally been ambivalent – to say the least – about traditional family structures are now the ones trumpeting the social and individual benefits of marriage. Well, if it’s good for gays, it’s probably good for everyone else, right?! Another reason why Democrats should start playing cultural politics that expliciptly celebrates the two parent (of any gender!) family is that the GOP is doing it anyway. And the way they address the anxiety that many working class people, surrounded by family break down, feel is by “protecting” marriage in the most reactionary way – by saying it’s under threat from gays. Also, they are able to demagogue things like violence and sex in movies, which isn’t only illiberal, but doesn’t actually accomplish anything excepting furthering the cause of demagoguery.

Now, I don’t know exactly what policies Democrats should propose, but I do know that they should start framing their current policy agenda in a way that appeals to people whose economic insecurity and social immobility are compounded by family breakdown. Now, if someone say, hired me at their magazine or gave me a book deal, I could easily find another Young Turk and actually think of a real policy agenda…