In the
introduction and first two chapters of Red
Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture,
Cahn and Carbone argue that state-level differences in family outcomes,
including teenage pregnancy and birth, age of first marriage and divorce rates,
abortion rates, and workplace effects on family life, are all the product of a
similar cultural divide in American families. This divide, which they identify
with the red/blue dichotomy familiar to those who watch the election returns,
boils down to a difference value-preference ordering. “Red families”, in their
analysis, prefer traditionalism as a source of societal order; “blue families”
prefer individual choice to ensure appropriate sorting. Both approaches, as
they explain, have negative societal externalities as they are currently framed
and executed in American politics.
The authors
provide a wealth of descriptive data in their demographic chapter, but don’t
engage in any sort of rigorous analysis. In particular, I am deeply concerned
about their facile equivalencies between the election returns and their
family-law results. The stasis of most family law, at least at the level where Cahn
and Carbone are interested, means that most of the consequences of law on marriages
and divorces are the relics of prior political regimes. While they argue that
the red/blue divide began appearing as recently as the 1960s, they do not, and
I think cannot, adequately explain how the “red family” approach appears in
states that are “blue” at the time. In other words, how, if there is such a
strong cultural correlation between Republican support and family law
consequences, are four of the five lowest teenage birth-rate states in 1988
Bush states?
More
methodological sophistication was called for here. Even a simple OLS regression
would have given us significantly more information about the scope, scale, and
size of the problem that Cahn and Carbone want to solve. But because they
refuse to even give us the complete statistics (unless there are appendices to
the book), it’s impossible to evaluate their analysis more rigorously. Instead,
they give us the five highest and lowest measures for each of their issue
areas, arguing that these “delimit the scope of the issue.” Except that instead
of delimiting the scope, these data points simply become disconnected from any
reality except where the authors have elected to attach them. There’s no there,
there, at least with the data we’re given this week.
Cahn and Carbone
want, as they put it, to “change the subject.” Instead of “sex ed,” they want “marriage
ed.” Instead of abortion, they want contraception. Instead of “family values”
or “traditional roles”, they want to create a workplace that is conducive to
family life. They claim that this is an approach that takes the benefits of
both cultural approaches, with none (or very few) of the negative
externalities. But their argument presupposes that both sides are equally
willing to view the other side as arguing in good faith, and thus, willing to
compromise. The evidence gathered since the book came out suggests that this
supposition is naïve.
First, a caveat:
in American politics, we all-too-frequently conflate between voters for a particular party and policymakers from that party. But the
elections literature seems to strongly suggest the truth of Jim’s description
of average Americans in Blazing Saddles:
“You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of
the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.” Or, as
Ben Casselman put it on election night a little less offensively, “The American
people seem to want a higher minimum wage, legal pot, easier abortion access,
and GOP representation. Go figure.” By this, I mean to suggest that the
electorate doesn’t make decisions based on the consideration of policy matters
the way that Cahn and Carbone want them to – or if they do, the relationship of
their policy views to reality is coincidental at best.
Thus, the “red
family” and “blue family” divide appears more to deal with how policymakers
want to believe that their constituents
see the world, rather than representing any sort of systematic divide in the
American worldview. That doesn’t make Cahn and Carbone’s analysis non-salient;
in some respects, it makes it more salient. A policymaker who honestly believes
in this divide will act in furtherance of it; and the continued growth of
gerrymandered “safe districts”, which Cahn and Carbone mention briefly, means
that this official may be able to maintain their tenure for decades, enshrining
the red/blue family law divide into law despite the fact that the divide is
irrelevant to most Americans.
But the basic
problem with Cahn and Carbone lies in their assumption that their two paradigms
are reconcilable. Starting from a theoretical approach, Cahn and Carbone don’t
explain why “red family” paradigms would ever want to compromise. If, as they
point out, the “red family” is predicated on a view of moral decay, of feeling
under siege by modernity, and of seeing doom and despair on the horizon for
those who don’t share their worldview, then why would mere externalities like
teenage pregnancy, divorce, and economic suffering induce them to compromise?
After all, the moral decay of the Republic, as “red families” see it, is an
instrumental problem; it is to be prevented, not to avoid its negative
consequences, but because it is a bad thing per
se.
The flip side of
this argument is that some “red family” adherents may actually prefer the
negative externalities of their policy preferences; there is some anecdotal
evidence to suggest that some political entrepreneurs on the right may prefer
this, including the treatment of Sandra Fluke, and of the PPACA’s mandate for
contraception coverage. The left could not understand why employers with a “Christian
worldview” would prefer a female workforce incapable of obtaining
contraception: after all, the coverage had to be provided by the insurer, not
the employer; the insurer could not add a surcharge or rider for the coverage;
and the alternative – a female workforce that misses a significant amount of
work due to pregnancy or other health issues – was a significant externality
that the employer would bear with the worker.
But this
presupposes that for these employers, that contraception itself was not the evil they sought to eliminate. Once that idea is
advanced, then there are two consequences relevant to my argument: first, the
employers’ approach in the contraception mandate cases begins to make sense;
and second, Cahn and Carbone’s argument and prescription is completely
exploded.
If the employers,
and “Christian worldview”[1]
thought leaders, were opposing contraception itself, and not the question of
whether they should have to provide health insurance to their employees that
provides contraception coverage, then it doesn’t matter whether it costs them
anything, or whether they are, themselves, required to provide it or an
intermediary is the one burdened – the evil, in their eyes, was that it was
provided at all. And if given a choice between suffering for good, and ease for
evil, then two thousand years of martyrdom point these Christians in one, and
only one, direction. And this paradigm is all too common among the noisiest of “red
family” adherents – that suffering is a sign of virtue. In short, negative
externalities are proof that the system is working as intended.
Cahn and Carbone
don’t, and can’t, resolve this paradox. And if the “red families” are, as PPACA
demonstrates, just as opposed to contraception as abortion, then their
soi-disant “sky blue nursery” is nothing more than a pipe dream. This means that
the “blue families”, which is a paradigm that at least acknowledges that other
paradigms may be appropriate for their adherents, have no reason to paint the
wedding chapel pink, as they describe. This means that two of their supposed
prescriptions for healing the divide they identify cannot work.
This leaves their
prescription for change in the workplace. Frankly, this was the only part of
the excerpt that made some sense to me, but again, it leaves out an essential
element of the analysis. Cahn and Carbone assume that familial interests are
the only ones acting in their preferred policy areas, but when they begin to
reach prescriptions that affect American workplaces, then they have a new
player to fight with – the employer. And the anecdotal data strongly suggests
that employers will suffer no change to their prerogatives in commanding and
controlling workers’ lives without a struggle, where advocates for workers and
families are likely to be in the same situation they’ve been in for the last
fifty years – outmanned, outgunned, and outspent.
[1]
I know that lumping Christian leadership in this way is spectacularly dumb, and
in fact, largely isomorphic with what I’m complaining about from Cahn and
Carbone; when I talk about the “Christian worldview”, let’s take it as said
that I’m talking about the loudest parts of the conservative Christian
movement, and the slivers of that movement that are as extreme or more so than
their leaders, and set aside the rest of the movement that would probably
follow more moderate leadership.