Because young women in this new economy are uncertain that men are able to earn enough and will contribute at home, most are committed to “self-reliance over economic dependence within a traditional marriage.” This is true of 60 percent of white women and of middle- and upper-class women, too, but rises to more than 80 percent of working-class and poor women and 100 percent of African American women in her study. “Hoping to avoid being trapped in an unhappy marriage or deserted by an unfaithful spouse, most see work as essential to survival.” To hold out for the right partner and the right kind of relationship, women today must be resourceful and focused on finding work that allows them to be independent.53
While most people in the country think men and women are equally focused on pursuing their careers, among Millennials both men and women think women are more focused on their careers. The women, by almost three to one, say they are more career-oriented (28 to 10 percent). On college campuses, Rosin observed, many women welcome the “hookup culture” because it gives them the freedom to focus on their education and future professional careers.54
While most men join women in saying they prefer an egalitarian relationship with shared responsibility for income, home, and child care, the difference is that the men are content to fall back to a breadwinner role. That is why Gerson describes them as “neotraditional men.” Men are doing more housework and parenting than in the past. One in five children under five with a working mother has a father as the primary caregiver; almost 10 percent of all households with minor children and one-quarter of single-parent households are headed by a father alone, more than ever before.55
But almost 30 percent of men still prefer a marriage where the man is the primary breadwinner and the woman has primary responsibility for the home.56
So with men and women on these divergent paths, it matters a lot if there is a pay gap where women are making less than men for their work. The economy is incredibly challenging for the vast majority of working women and working men, as we saw in chapter 4, though working women are doubly challenged because they dominate employment in occupations that are growing and low paid, such as home health care, food services, and retail. Two-thirds of those earning less than $10.10 per hour, the proposed federal minimum wage, are women. And for those women employed in restaurants in major cities, bring into the equation that 90 percent report experiencing sexual harassment at work and half say it happens weekly.57
Men still dominate higher-paying occupations in fields such as law, medicine, and science and engineering. They still dominate employment in manufacturing and construction, where pay is above the median.58
Men are also still dominant in public office. In the U.S. Congress, only twenty senators and just 18 percent of the House of Representatives are women. At the state level, women account for just 10 percent of governors and 24 percent of state legislators. Men are still dominant in university teaching, where women hold only 44 percent of the tenured positions, and only 24 percent of women in academia are in tenure-track positions. Men still dominate at the C-suite level in America’s corporations, as female CEOs run just 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 companies. And only 19 percent of the board members of American corporations are women, though at least they do not work for Japanese companies, where only 3 percent of corporate board members are women.59
A Harvard Business School study of male and female graduates shows how much choices about family responsibilities block women from reaching the highest levels of companies. The women and male graduates begin with very similar career goals, though the men are much more likely to end up in senior management positions. The male graduates are able to pursue their goals because 60 percent expected their careers to take priority over those of their wives, who would have the primary child care responsibility—and that is what happened to them. Starting out, only about 20 percent of the female graduates thought their husband’s careers would take precedence, though it did for twice that many. Half of the women thought they would handle a majority of the child care, but three-quarters ended up caring for the children. And those different family experiences had a decisive impact on salary and whether one reached senior management.60
Employers and government could do what Google did when it extended paid maternity leave from twelve to eighteen weeks. That ability to afford to care for a newborn led to a decrease by 50 percent in the number of new moms choosing to leave Google. It turns out it was better for Google to do more to keep their experienced new mothers at work than to train new employees. In short, extended paid leave allowed working women to stay in the labor force and maintain their seniority at their company, Google said.61
While the gap in wages for men and women has nearly closed for Millennials—woman’s hourly earnings are 93 percent of men’s—the pay gap continues to matter in so many ways. Women work fewer hours than men because women are still dealing with the majority of the responsibility for the home and children. And with all due respect to the Millennials, the pay gap is alive and well for older generations and in occupations where women predominate. Nine in ten nurses are women, yet women nurses earn $5,000 less than men, and that gap, even controlling for specialty education and working hours, has not narrowed in 25 years, according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Among all workers, women’s hourly earnings are 84 percent of men’s—and the cumulative effect of decades of lower pay and even less shared responsibility by men for home and child care plays out in retirement with lower Social Security benefits for women.62
So women have not drunk the Kool-Aid. They see opportunity and are adapting, though they firmly believe the playing field is tilted against them. A large majority of women (62 percent) believe men earn more than women for the same job, yet fewer than half of men believe that (47 percent).63
What about the prospects for getting a top-level job? Professional and working-class women have very different points of view about the opportunities before them. A nearly universal 71 percent of college-educated women think it is easier for a man to get a top-level job in business and government, but that drops to a still considerable 47 percent of women without a college degree. By the way, working-class, non-college-educated men are the most likely to say that it is easier for women to get those top jobs.64
This is the bottom line: a majority of women believe they have less opportunity than men and that the country has yet to achieve equal opportunity for women and men.65
Working women focus on what they must do in this new economy and they are adapting, though getting almost no help from government or employers in managing work and family, which makes life all that much harder. That they believe the playing field is tilted against women, particularly as they move farther up the job and status ladder, may well prove politically explosive very soon and force a focus on a reform agenda.
* * *
When one reflects on the contradictions of the new economy, liberal and some conservative commentary concludes that the country will be forced to address them or there will be some kind of mental or political breakdown. But will that be true for the contradictions in our society? Will the country be forced to address the marriage crisis, the numbers of children raised by a single parent, and the state of both working-class men and working women on their own? These contradictions also produce slower economic growth, more financial stress, people scrambling to survive, more poverty, and less upward mobility. They produce family breakdown and the breakdown of social solidarity, but will that stir a new politics with radical new ways to address them?
When working-class men are so economically, culturally, and politically marginalized—increasingly disconnected from church, community, and family, and unable to adapt to change—how do you get the country mobilized to address their condition as a national priority?
When college-educated women and college-educated men have rallied in recent years to strengthen their marriages to raise children in two-parent households, how do you get them to address the marriage crisis that i
s now largely a problem of the working class and the poor?
Yet it is just such growing contradictions that create the ingredients for a change in the public agenda and revolution in family policy.
Part III
POLITICAL DISRUPTION
6 REVOLUTIONS AND COUNTERREVOLUTION: THE BATTLE FOR AMERICAN VALUES
The seismic transformations happening in America today—increasing racial diversity, rising immigration, growing secularism, evolving family structures, and swelling metropolitan centers—are not simply economic and demographic changes. They matter so much because they are tied to revolutions in America’s values, particularly the values held among Millennials and those living in the cities. These revolutions have produced a furious counterrevolution and battle for America’s values—though it is a counterrevolution that cannot prevail.
Among the ascendant groups and in the regions where they dominate culturally, people are more likely to value equality, equal rights, and fairness. They are more empathetic and worry more about harm to the vulnerable. They want to see compassion for those in need. They are more open to diversity, differences, outsiders, and newcomers, people that live different lifestyles and are from different cultures. Tolerance is a virtue. They value a kind of individualism that signifies individual autonomy, self-expression, and sexual freedom for men and women. They welcome the emerging pluralism of family types and reject the traditional family and its roles. They honor education beyond its instrumental value. Education is the key to individual fulfillment and opportunity. And science and technology are the keys to learning discoverable truths.
They consciously do not turn to traditional authority for moral absolutes and they devalue those who depend on faith-based conclusions.
Those battling against these seismic transformations in values honor an individualism that is grounded in personal responsibility, self-reliance, self-restraint, and self-discipline. If the individual is not encouraged to learn self-direction and self-reliance, they think, that person will become idle and dependent. Accordingly, they value industriousness, conscientiousness, and those governed by a strong work ethic. Their beliefs are grounded in their faith. They seek purity before God and admire those who live a sanctified life. Thus they honor marriage and the traditional family, with the man playing the breadwinner role. And they honor faith-based moral absolutes and respect traditional authority. They value patriotism, love of country, and those who defend it from our enemies. U.S. citizens come first.
And they deride those who fetishize diversity, multiculturalism, and misplaced compassion, and who cannot understand the primacy of faith in making moral judgments.
These revolutions and the counterrevolution are producing an increasing cultural and political polarization in America, though the polarization is hardly symmetric. History is on the side of the ascendant revolutions, and thus the opponents must never let up and, indeed, must engage with increasing intensity if they are to forestall the Armageddon. When we look back and ask how America became so polarized and gridlocked, we will likely focus on 2004, when the culture war was joined so strategically.
Defenders of traditional values have been able to wage a counterrevolution of increasing ferocity by encamping in the twenty states of the South, the Appalachian Valley, and parts of the Plains states and the Mountain West. These are the most race-conscious, Evangelical, religiously observant, and rural parts of the country. From this base, conservatives have fervently joined the culture war to reassert endangered values and warn of the high risks of the new mores.
Because race and religion are so central to the conservative counterrevolution, America continues to battle over modern social transformations taken for granted in most developed countries, to the bewilderment of large parts of the country. To be sure, America’s civil, women’s, immigrant, and gay rights revolutions have fundamentally changed the country, though they are all still contested by conservatives from the conservative heartland and thus unfinished.
The debates over public policy get red-hot because they become the scorecard that signifies what values are to prevail. The ascendant majority takes for granted that the country will invest in education, promote equality, build a stronger safety net, support the growing marriage diversity and acceptance of gay marriage, honor America’s immigrant diversity, and get moving on addressing climate change.
To stop the revolutions, Republicans are battling to restrict access to abortion and even contraception and against demands for equal pay for women. They are defending the institution of marriage and religious liberty as the Supreme Court accepts the legality of same-sex marriage. The Republican Party continues to resist voting rights for blacks and Hispanics and battles to reverse President Obama’s actions to give legal status to undocumented immigrants, including even the “DREAMers” who came to the United States as minors. They battle to end unemployment benefits and Obamacare subsidies, which they view as welfare undermining the incentive to work.
Consider the Republicans’ obsession with contraception. The birth control pill is used by 82 percent of women of childbearing age, yet conservatives took the fight to limit the contraceptive coverage in the Affordable Care Act up to the U.S. Supreme Court. That “Obamacare” covers birth control without copays seems an “implicit endorsement of a value system that says it’s perfectly O.K. to have sex without the goal of having a baby,” it occurred to Linda Greenhouse in her New York Times column. She concluded rightly that this is “a war not on religion or on women but on modernity.” For those battling against these revolutions, this is a battle over race, gender roles, faith, and America.1
That is largely why Republicans have been able to build intensity and electoral turnout in their base in each successive electoral contest and sweep the twenty states of the GOP conservative heartland in the so-called off-year elections of 2010 and 2014. The Republican base has a rising stake in forestalling a Democratic win, and thus for them all elections are national. And with the rural bias in the U.S. Senate and House elections, Republicans sit atop the U.S. Congress and dominate off-year elections for now.
But the revolutions and counterrevolution produce the opposite result and trend in presidential elections, as we shall see in the next chapter. Dialectically, the Republicans’ growing success in mobilizing for the off-year elections only increases the probability that Democrats will win in the next national, presidential election. And Republican control of the U.S. Congress and total Republican control of nearly half the states will only compound the party’s problems. Its efforts to nullify the president’s executive order on undocumented immigrants, repeal the Affordable Care Act, make abortion illegal, block the president’s actions on coal and climate change, and limit the right to vote will only further alienate the Republican Party from the country.
Democrats will not produce a landslide national election that shifts the partisan plates until they get serious about battling for reforms that address the country’s growing economic and social contradictions. Only then will the broad coalition of ascendant groups become equally invested in defending their vote and values.
We are truly in an “interregnum,” like the one described by Antonio Gramsci, when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” during which “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”2
RACE AND THE COUNTERREVOLUTION
The battle over American values is rooted in race, America’s black-white history, and America’s growing racial diversity.
The public believes that white America is on the brink of becoming a minority in an increasingly diverse country. The country erroneously thinks racial minorities already constitute 49 percent of the population—well above the actual figure, 37 percent. While all races expect America to become a minority-majority nation, white Americans believe racial minorities count for 48 percent right now and that they will form a 63 percent majority in 2050—10 points above the census projection.3
The rub is that African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians welc
ome the growing diversity and are confident in its collateral benefits for the country. So are college graduates, those with advanced degrees, liberals, and unmarried women. The same is true among the Millennials—a generation that is not only diverse, but is also increasingly entering into interracial marriages such that one in five newlyweds marries out. That the great majority of Millennials say Barack Obama is “mixed race” rather than African American underlines their identification with this postracial world.4
However, the three groups in the country most wary of diversity and becoming a minority are white conservatives, white Republicans, and white Evangelicals. White seniors and the white working class are none too excited either.5
It is hard not to conclude that their reaction to this growing racial diversity reflects a deep racial consciousness and aversion to racial minorities. A striking 62 percent of Republicans and white born-again Evangelicals believe more diversity will cause “crime and problems in our neighborhood [to] go up” at a time when crime rates are plummeting to the lowest levels in decades. By contrast, just a third of liberals and college graduates and only a quarter of postgraduates expect diversity to bring higher crime rates.6
In my work with white working-class voters and Reagan Democrats, I called for Democrats to take much more seriously the threats these voters faced as they sought to protect their families and neighborhoods. It was very easy for the elites and professors to lecture whites on school busing and crime from their protected enclaves. But much has changed over the past thirty years, and these new findings are of a different character—as the expected “problems” with growing diversity are detached from the real problems facing their communities.7
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