Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

OPINION:

Are liberals against marriage?

The continued plunge in the American birthrate, amid prosperity and low unemployment, has finally made fertility a topic that’s OK to worry about even if you aren’t a deep-dyed reactionary.

This is a good thing, since the question of why the world’s wealthiest societies are failing to reproduce themselves is far too important to be left to weirdo Catholic columnists. The tangle of questions involved doesn’t map neatly onto the existing lines of liberalism and conservatism, and the more the left and center engage with what a recent Anna Louie Sussman essay calls “The End of Babies,” the better our chances of averting a P.D. Jamesian destination, a permanent civilizational old age.

Still, there is one key fact about the recent decline in the American fertility rate that inevitably revives, rather than transcends, a long-running right-left argument. While marital fertility fell in the 1970s after the baby boom ran its course, the baby bust of the past 10 years hasn’t affected married couples, whose fertility rate has stayed level or very modestly increased.

So while it’s important to debate questions like how the cost of child care affects childbearing decisions within marriages, the question of why marriage has declined so precipitously in the first place still looms over the fertility discussion. And with it comes a long-standing liberal-vs.-conservative disagreement about how much to emphasize economic trends versus cultural transformations — or, more tersely, neoliberalism versus cultural liberalism — to explaining the waning of wedlock.

My New York Times colleague Thomas Edsall entered that debate recently with a column accusing Attorney General William Barr and a raft of conservative intellectuals — Patrick Deneen, Mary Eberstadt, Robert George and others — of unjustly portraying liberal elites as somehow anti-marriage and reducing the complex story of the institution’s decline to a simplistic one of secular hedonism run amok. In reality, Edsall argued, liberals tend to have a more nuanced view of why marriage faltered than the right — one that emphasizes the importance of tectonic economic shifts but also acknowledges that “the sexual revolution and the personal autonomy movement had significant costs as well as notable gains.”

In response, I want to join my colleague in his praise of nuance and balance in the economics-or-culture debate, but offer a different take on how conservative and liberal accounts of the decline of marriage are evolving.

On the conservative side, I think there has been a general advance in nuance over the past five or 10 years, with some of the writers my colleague quotes — Deneen especially — stressing the interplay of social and economic liberalism, of left-wing and right-wing forms of individualism, in creating our more atomized, fragmented and post-familial society. (What Deneen calls “liberalism” is not the Democratic Party’s platform or a Yale-Harvard worldview but the general tendencies of liberal modernity — encompassing economics as well as culture in a mirror of the way that Sussman, writing from the left, uses “late capitalism” to encompass secularization as well as deindustrialization and crippling child care costs.)

This nuance has influenced both the cable-news right, with Tucker Carlson monologuing critically about modern capitalism’s impact on the two-parent family, and the younger generation of conservative politicians. If you read recent speeches by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, you can see a clear attempt to fuse social conservatism to a re-examination of Republican economic orthodoxies — with some idea, at least, of building a stronger economic substructure for marriages and families, and correcting libertarianism with a more communitarian-minded economics.

Barr’s recent speech attacking secular liberals is a somewhat different case: Edsall is right that it represents a more simplistic and partisan take, a view from 1980 that blames social liberalism for family breakdown without much nuance and doesn’t take enough account of social, economic and religious trends since. And Barr speaks for plenty of Republicans, which is why Rubio and Hawley have taken a lot of fire for their attempt at a new pro-family synthesis, in previews of post-Trump debates to come.

But whatever comes, the right’s why-marriage-declined story is presently contested, complicated, interesting and possibly getting closer to the necessarily complex truth.

Now what about the liberal side? To be extremely impressionistic, I would divide the modern progressive approach to marriage into three distinct phases. In the first phase, which covers the 1960s through the 1980s, there was a clear liberal-led attack on the institutional form of marriage as it existed then, on the legal and cultural structure that privileged heterosexual wedlock, pushed couples toward its rules and rituals, and then constrained them from divorce.

This assault was undertaken in a spirit of social optimism, in the name of personal empowerment and (eventually) female equality, and infused with a confidence that the old legal and moral structures were simply oppressive, that in an enlightened society most people wouldn’t need normative models of partnering and child rearing to flourish and succeed.

The second phase I would call the period of reconsideration, in which liberals continued to believe that the core legal and social changes of the 1960s and 1970s had been necessary and just, but increasingly acknowledged that the larger cultural revolution had incurred Edsall’s “significant costs.”

Liberals in this period continued to support no-fault divorce and legal abortion, continued to regard sexual fulfillment as an essential good and premarital chastity as an unrealistic ideal. But from the “Dan Quayle was right” arguments of the early 1990s onward, they also conceded that marriage is probably generally better for kids and maybe especially boys, that monogamy is often preferable to promiscuity and divorce is often undesirable, that welfare policy shouldn’t discourage wedlock and should maybe even encourage it, and that the decline of marriage at least contributed to the post-1960s struggles of the working class.

This is the social-liberalism-of-nuance that Edsall described in his column. It was especially powerful across the Bush and early Obama years — when the push to recognize same-sex unions was framed in deliberately conservative terms, when Barack Obama’s pro-family rhetoric and personal example were regularly cited as a positive influence on minority communities, when many sociologically minded liberals argued that there was an emerging “blue-state model” of marriage, egalitarian and secular rather than patriarchal and religious, that was showing the way forward even as families fractured more in culturally conservative regions that hadn’t adapted to feminism yet.

As a conservative, I think this liberalism-of-nuance had real limits. In particular, its favored model of marriage — as a capstone on a long period of professional development and sexual exploration, rather than a foundation for adulthood and a home for adult sexuality — was linked inextricably to the educated class’s privilege and ambitious self-control and didn’t work as well outside the precincts of the meritocracy.

But notwithstanding its blind spots, this liberal worldview was and is essentially pro-marriage, in the sense of believing that it’s good for society to have a single normative destination to which most couples arrive, a single normative institution in which most children will be raised — and in the sense of favoring a mild cultural and political pressure in its favor, encompassing forces and ideas (religion, gender difference) that are not necessarily progressive. (Elizabeth Warren’s 2003 coauthorship of “The Two-Income Trap,” with its defense of the single-breadwinner household, belongs decisively to this liberalism-of-nuance.)

Over the past 10 years, however — and again, I acknowledge that this is impressionistic — we have reached a third phase in liberal attitudes toward marriage, a new outworking of cultural individualism that may eventually render the nuanced liberalism my colleague describes obsolete.

This new phase is incomplete and contested, and it includes elements — in #MeToo feminism, especially — whose ultimate valence could theoretically be congenial to cultural conservatives. But in general the emerging progressivism seems hostile not only to anything tainted by conservative religion or gender essentialism but to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period, outside a bureaucratically supervised definition of “consent.” And it’s therefore disinclined to regard lifelong monogamy as anything more than one choice among many, one script to play with or abandon, one way of being whose decline should not necessarily be mourned, and whose still-outsize cultural power probably requires further deconstruction to be anything more than a patriarchal holdover, a prison and a trap.

The combination of forces that have produced this ideological shift is somewhat murky — it follows a general turn leftward on social issues after the early 2000s, a further weakening of traditional religion, the cultural ripples from Obergefell v. Hodges, the increasing political polarization of the sexes and, of course, the so-called Great Awokening.

But it does not feel like a coincidence that the new phase tracks with the recent decline in childbearing. If the new liberal hostility to marriage-as-normative-institution is not one of the ideological causes of our latest post-familial ratchet, it is at least a post facto ideological excuse, in which the frequent prestige-media pitches for polyamory or open marriages or escaping gender norms entirely are there to reassure people who might otherwise desire a little more normativity (and a few more children) in their lives, that it’s all cool because they’re in the vanguard of a revolution.

Certainly the new phase of liberalism is increasing the political polarization of both marital practice and marital beliefs. As sociologist Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia pointed out in a response to Edsall’s column, for all the bright talk about the blue-state, upper-middle-class marriage model, in the aggregate Republicans marry more and divorce less than Democrats, ideological conservatives are much more likely to be married than ideological liberals, and conservatives are more than twice as likely to describe marriage as something “needed” for “strong families.”

When I look at trends within elite progressivism, I don’t think this gap is likely to soon close. And one does not have to regard liberals as the enemies of marriage, in some crude Leninist sense, to see that this gap matters for how our ideological factions regard the institution’s importance, its future, its place in public policy, its continued diminishment or possible revival.

So in the never-ending right-left debate about how to explain the decline of marriage and what to do about it, the important developments are twofold. First, the emerging phase of conservatism is more inclined to integrate left-wing arguments about the effects of economic policy and neoliberal capitalism into its cultural diagnoses — though whether this integration will lead to a wiser right or just be swallowed up in Trumpian hypocrisy and folly is an entirely open question.

Second, the emerging phase of liberalism is less inclined to concede anything to conservatives on the cultural front. It is tracing a return to the spirit of the 1970s, to the promise of ever-widening liberation — and the long-term influence of that return on a society already shadowed by sterility and loneliness will be, shall we say, interesting to watch.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.