Family values is an oft-repeated in phrase in all presidential campaigns, but the definition has definitely changed over the past few decades. President Lyndon Johnson emphasized the importance of the nuclear family in his 1965 commencement address at Howard University. "The family is the cornerstone of our society," he told the young graduates and their families. "More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled."
Just a few months before Johnson's speech, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." The Moynihan Report, as it became known, strongly influenced President Johnson's Great Society anti-poverty programs, and deeply frustrated African-American leaders. After analyzing black unemployment data, the Moynihan Report concluded that while the problems of white racism and persistent joblessness contributed to African-American men abandoning their families, the real problem, according to Moynihan, lay elsewhere:
"In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is too out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well."
In sum, the goal of the Great Society was to stabilize poor families, particularly black families, through government programs. Yet as the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s — the sexual revolution, the women's movement, and the gay rights movement — gained strength, and as American manufacturing declined and the economy sank, conservatives adopted the family values rhetoric and decided that government wasn't the answer.
The nuclear family needed protection, the new Religious Right claimed, from the movements that challenged traditional gender norms. As the economy soured, the newly-elected Reagan Administration took a hard look at the money spent on Great Society-style programs, and concluded that welfare only contributed to the so-called pathology of the poor. "In the welfare culture, the breakdown of the family, the most basic support system, has reached crisis proportions," President Reagan explained in his 1986 State of the Union Address.
Brown University historian Robert O. Self explores the rightward shift of American politics through the lens of family values in his new book, "All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s."
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Comments [3]
liberals and conservatives both suck. libertarian would be they way i vote if i ever voted but we all know its a waste of time and thats what both sides are in denial about.
So close, and yet so far.
Notice Democrats didn't vote for the Civil Rights bill. Notice Lyndon Johnson said, as he signed the bill, "I’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for 200 years!" Notice how it wasn't very well funded.
The Civil Rights was always a Right wing cause. But the Great Society was a sort of trap. The Democrat party was desperate, and had to reform its image if it was to not be a footnote in history books today. And so they scapegoated the Republicans.
Honestly, all the historical evidence paints a very different picture than today's Liberal narrative. The Puritanical of Western Society (the right-wingers of old,) have been championing civil rights for the past 2 millenia. They shut down the Coliseum. (It was an African Christian pilgrim who did so.) They recorded and saved almost all the Greek literature on the subject of civility from the Germanic hoards after Rome fell by storing it away in Irish monasteries. When Islam began burning books on their way up through Mesopotamia into Europe, the crusaders beat them back. (And when the Crusaders began pillaging, the Vatican rebuked them for it.) Colonialism brought brought many atrocities, yes, but Christian missionaries used Colonialism to bring the Greek/Jewish culture of civility/hospitality to many foreign worlds, including Hong Kong, the most free city in the world, up until the Brittish, in a fit of Modern Liberal feel-goodism, sold it to the Chinese. And it was by an old Christian argument that the slaves were freed, and civil rights championed.
And none of that looks good for the tired old argument that Republicans exist to trample on your rights and chain you up to old out of date traditions, an argument originating from the likes of Lord Byron, who wanted an excuse to sleep with his half sister, and from old nihilist professors who espoused Fascism and suicide-vending machines.
The Liberal mind ignites more questions of propriety. Creativity of thought by anyone can come with problems: bad ideas can come into play, mistakes are made.
The conservative mind is willing to accept a blueprint of what life means and how it ought to be lived... It is written in stone. Follow the dots and you get somewhere.
What we are really talking about is who finds happiness in the family today. The Liberal family can go to far in freedom of thought and...
The Conservative mind might not deal with obvious issues which are not in the blueprint. For example, you may want to be Conservative, but you might be gay, which is do-able in this day and age but goes off the blueprint somewhat or you might be Conservative but love someone of a different race... do-able again but goes slightly off the chart.
I myself like to think liberally. I even like my mistakes; though the breakup of my marriage was painful, yet necessary from a liberal point of view.
Then the issue becomes how to raise kids: good luck to anybody who has teenagers. It won't matter if you are Liberal or Conservative till they hit their twenties.
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