The family as key to traditionalism
Emily B. writes
I was perusing the Corner (which I rarely visit and is still not in my bookmarks because of their seeming acceptance of homosexuality), when I came upon a post by Ramesh Ponnuru linking to his article, “A Supply-Side Tax Plan That is Pro-Family.” My point isn’t about the article, but about the fact that Ponnuru has been doing something for several years that is extremely important: seeing family as at the center of society and stimulating debate on financial policy aimed at putting it there and sustaining it there. We need our intellectuals and orators, like you, but traditionalists also need our wonks and think tankers to discuss and create policy that says “The Family” is at the center of our society.
I believe that traditionalism needs to be brought back the way liberalism came to be: incrementally and in a non-threatening way. First, the premise of every political debate needs to be set confidently that the family is at the center of society, rejecting the current liberal premise of equality as the highest ideal. Illegal immigration? “How will that affect the American family?” A tax hike? Ditto. Finances? Ditto. Lessening someone’s burden is extremely popular and hard to oppose. The middle class is large enough and thus powerful enough to vote for “family friendly” tax policy and redistribution of wealth towards itself. (According to the Family Research Council, the Baby Boom years were the very best years for parents financially, and some of the best for our nation, due to high child tax credits and low taxation. This radically changed in the early ‘70’s when middle class families became the most burdened group vis a vis tax load along with a transfer of wealth from them to trial lawyers, bureaucrats, etc.) This will help entrench the sanctity of the family and help it to prosper.
You were the one who taught me the basic difference between the liberal and the traditionalist view of society. Intellectuals spread the good news, policy wonks and others must establish the premise, and then introduce popular, hard to reject policy that cements our view. On a micro-level, this is how I helped my liberal atheist boyfriend become my traditionalist, Catholic husband. I appealed to what was good and traditionalist and expanded on it.
LA replies:
I agree with everything Emily says. Of course there are many conservatives organizations that have pushed various ways to restore and strengthen the family. Years ago, The Family in America was an excellent publication promoting the kinds of things Emily is talking about; I haven’t seen it in a while but I think it’s still publishing. At the same time, the conservatives movement, since the election of George (“Single Moms Have the Toughest Job in America and Need Our Help”) Bush, seems to have dropped any concern about illegitimacy, which up to ten years ago was a top concern of conservatives. Just another of the key issues they seem to have given up on, and all they care about now is sustaining a Shi’ite sharia government in Iraq.
I would add this. While family is central to social and moral order, it is not sufficient. Family-oriented, anti-abortion conservatives in America over the last 35 years has completely ignored another indispensable dimension of traditionalism, which is nationhood. A conservative movement that cares about strengthening the family, but that also supports open borders, since Third-world immigrants bring “good family values” and “expand the economy,” is a weird, almost perverted form of conservatism. To be true, conservatism needs to support all the basic dimensions of society, not just one or two of them while casting away the others. Conservatives need to see and defend society as a concrete whole. That is what has been disastrously lacking in the modern conservative movement for its entire history.
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Hannon writes:
Emily’s and your points are good reminders of the basic need for conceptualizing conservatism in a very basic, even popular form. When you said “Conservatives need to see and defend society as a concrete whole,” it occurred to me that the defense aspect is one that universally alienates liberals. They seem to believe that there is no need to defend our country or families against any internal or external threat (Cold War is over, Muslims are awesome. etc.), except from the ideas of those on the Right. To speak of defensive principles invokes cries of “fear-mongering” or worse. This is one of their primary and favorite means of dismissing and denigrating the concerns of conservatives.
However, if we still maintained many of our laws and associated cultural trappings at a pre-1960s status, which actually existed and served us well, these would not be thought of in terms of “defense.” It would be simply how we live and order our society. As Emily indicates, the intellectual responses to the ravages of modern liberalism may be inadequate in terms of reaching a large number of Americans who might describe themselves as decent and upstanding. If someone scoffs at these terms they are probably permanently left-leaning. A firm family-based approach is not new but is something to work on. No doubt we will need all the operative techniques we can muster to effect any change.
LA replies:
Once the way of life of a society has come under threat, it can’t simply be “lived,” it has to be articulated, defended, and restored.
What I’ve just said may be understood better by reference to Frank Meyer’s definition of conservatism in his essay, “The Recrudescent American Conservatism,” which I’ve quoted before. Meyer writes that the conservatism of which he speaks is not a “cast of mind or temperamental inclination,” but a “political, social, and intellectual movement” that “arises historically when the unity and balance of a civilization are riven by revolutionary transformations of previously accepted norms…. Conservatism comes into being at such times as a movement of consciousness and action directed to recovering the tradition of the civilization.”
(American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century, 1970, ed. William F. Buckley.pp. 75-76.)
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2008 12:47 PM | Send