During World War II, Allied listeners to Axis radio propaganda – Lord Haw Haw in Europe and Tokyo Rose in the Pacific – could always count on hearing how Allied victory was impossible despite terrible allied “defeats” somehow coming closer and closer to the borders of the Reich or the shores of the Home Islands. Allied defeat, Axis radio intoned, was foreordained – one had to merely look past temporary setbacks to see the inevitability of a fascist victory looming ahead. History, as it turned out, had an Allied bias.
Something similar happened this past Tuesday when American conservatives’ own version of Lord Haw Haw – Fox News – questioned even their own election statisticians as Ohio was called for Obama. Suddenly, election returns, like falling Allied bombs, ripped away the illusions the American right had built for itself that Mitt Romney had a serious shot at winning the White House. Continuing the analogy, Der Leader himself, Karl Rove, engaged in a Downfall-esque Fuehrer rant on live TV, only instead of going on about how phantom divisions would save Berlin from the Russians, Rove claimed nonexistent Republican voters in deepest red Ohio would somehow turn back the wave of Democratic blue sweeping the GOP from the electoral map. It was not to be, however, and as shell-shocked Republicans emerged from the rubble of the 2012 election, they must have wondered how it had all gone so terribly, horribly wrong.
So how did Karl Rove’s “Permanent Republican Majority” end up a smoking ruin like the Thousand Year Reich? Victory, it is said, has a thousand authors while defeat only one. While that may technically be true, a major component of V-C Day (Victory over Conservatism) was the GOP’s astonishingly stupid decision to lurch to the right on social issues near-and-dear to hearts of the vast majority of American women. While not technically as bad a decision as declaring war on both America and Russia in the same year, the results of running a host of candidates inimical to the interests of American women speak for themselves.
Women’s rights: Democrats vs. Republicans
Consider, for instance, the partisan gender gap. Women have tended to gravitate to Democratic candidates since the mid-1960s – when women’s emancipation from their traditional role as mothers and wives began to pick up steam. Democrats, seeing this, wisely embraced the demands of women for sovereignty over their bodies and social autonomy and economic equality in their relations with men. Republicans, sensing an opportunity, aligned themselves with reactionary religious and social conservatives who, in essence, wanted to turn back the clock for women by undermining the legal rights to abortion, birth control and economic independence that women had won through legislation and the courts. Their goal, veiled in the Orwellian term “family values,” was to return women to their rightful place – in the home and subservient to men as God, or at least her all-male clergy, desired.
Initially, this strategy was successful in creating an alliance between ethnic Catholics, Evangelical Protestants and, out West, Mormons – groups that had long been at odds with one another over mostly irrelevant, esoteric theological matters. United by a common foe, religious groups that had previously viewed each other as Satan-worshipping heathens looked past their petty theological differences with one another to fight the larger enemy; e.g., modernity and its family-destroying scourges – birth control, unwed mothers, working women and abortion. Like the fascist Anti-Comintern Pact, it was an alliance of convenience between reactionary powers aimed at throwing back the latest incarnation of the Red Menace. And, it worked – for a time.
The long-run problem with this strategy is that the economic foundation upon which the traditional, male-led, two-parent family structure championed by conservatives is built has eroded to the point of irrelevance. In short, the U.S. labor market has shifted to an equilibrium that greatly rewards the delaying of marriage, family formation and childbirth until much later than has traditionally been the norm. The resulting “red” and “blue” family patterns that have emerged under this new economic reality, documented at length in the superb book, “Red Families v Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture,” has provided clear proof that religion-inspired conservative family values have failed miserably in the modern, post-industrial era.
In culturally conservative “red” areas of the country, the solution to the problem of economic change has been a doubling down on the traditional model of family formation. For ages, this model has stressed — with support from the pulpit — sexual abstinence and early marriage, with the idea being that moral condemnation of sex outside the confines of matrimony would lead young people to wait until the honeymoon which, due to hormones, would occur nearly as soon as adolescence. In the absence of birth control this, in turn, would lead to early and frequent childbirth – as anyone from a traditionally Catholic or Mormon family would confirm. So long as good-paying work for a young male breadwinner was easily available, this could be a viable option for those caught between traditional social norms and Mother Nature.
Red and blue states
The problem with this model, however, is that the economic base and social support mechanisms that would normally help a young, new “red” family have evaporated. Foregoing education for marriage and family right out of high school is effectively a one-way ticket to poverty. Economic stress, in turn, acts as an acid on already stressed marriages formed by young, emotionally immature individuals. Saddled with mounting bills, increasing economic insecurity and the mammoth responsibility of caring for children, many young couples find it impossible to cope. Normally, strong families, steady work and a supportive community would fill in the gap to help young couples through this difficult rite of passage – but in decayed communities ripped asunder by deindustrialization and cultural change, those supports no longer exit.
The result, in red areas, has been rising divorce rates, increasing numbers of broken families, increasing rates of single-motherhood, early childbirth and the host of social ills that go along with them – compounding the problem still further. The red family model, in short, works for no one in today’s economy except the already wealthy or the culturally-conservative religious elites who champion them. It certainly does not help millions of poor and working-class young people yearning for upward mobility at the same time their hormones are telling them to mate early and often.
In culturally liberal “blue” areas of the country, on the other hand, the solution to this problem has not been to double down on the traditional family model, but to embrace a new one that accepts non-procreative sex between young adults as normal. Whereas pregnancy at a young age, even during the teen years, is culturally acceptable in “red” areas so long as marriage is the result, in blue areas it is the pregnancy, not one’s wed or unwed status, that is seen as the tragedy as it destroys, or at least makes terribly improbable, the successful completion of the education necessary for long-term economic success. Teen marriages in red areas are celebrated, but in blue areas they are, by most middle-class individuals, mourned for the lost opportunity it represents.
Thus, delaying pregnancy is the key concern in liberal America and the legal environment in blue areas has as a result focused on making access to sex education, birth control and, ultimately, abortion, legal, safe, inexpensive and universal. While “blue” couples often risk infertility as a result of delaying marriage and childbirth, these families, when formed, are far more conducive to success as they raise children in stable, economically secure, emotionally mature, two-parent families – ironically, the “red” family ideal. Thus, if marriage and children are seen as the ideal beginning of adulthood in “red” areas, “blue” areas have increasingly come to see marriage and children as the ideal culmination of adulthood, not its beginning. From this difference stems red and blue America’s radically different notions of sexual morality and what constitutes the proper role of women in society.
Playing into the election
The data that can determine which model of family life is better suited for today’s realities, however, are now, like last Tuesdays’ election returns, conclusively in. Unfortunately for cultural conservatives, on nearly every measure of social well-being that can be imagined and measured, the blue family model that emphasizes cultural acceptance of non-procreative, pre-marital sex and consequent delayed marriage and child birth, is clearly outperforming conservative models of family life, especially for women. Women, once tyrannized by patriarchy and biology, have found that shucking off biology through medical means – the pill and abortion – has made it much easier to throw off patriarchy – both cultural and economic – too. Understanding this, women have rationally flocked to the party that has pledged to protect and expand the legal and social underpinnings of the new “blue” family model that has proven so obviously beneficial to them.
As evidence of this, note that Obama won women by a whopping 18 points – one of the widest partisan gender gaps on record. If women of all sorts make up a key part of the Democratic rank-and-file, then single women, the bane of preachers and priests everywhere and the group most threatened by a return to “red” cultural values, serve as the Democrats’ shock troops – they voted for Obama by an astonishing 36 points. As comedian Bill Maher quipped on election night, those numbers mean single women are telling the GOP one thing: “Get off of me!”
So, as Republicans begin to rebuild their shattered party, they will have to contend with the reality that cultural conservatism, in all its forms, is as dead as Germany’s bid for a global empire. Not only will the GOP have to deal with an electorate that is far more diverse than they would like, but they will also have to accept a new consensus, backed by empirical data, on a model of family life and cultural values on gender and sexuality that is strikingly at odds with the dearest-held beliefs of their fundamentalist base. Whether conservatives can manage this transition from the world of Lord Haw Haw-like ideological fantasy to empirical reality is the most important political question they, and the rest of the country, now confronts. If Republicans can admit the past is dead they can rebuild, like the Germans did after World War II, and eventually re-emerge as a viable national party once again.
If they don’t, and they continue to champion beliefs, values and policies that at best are dangerous anachronisms, then our problems may be just beginning.