What baby boomers had in common with contemporaries abroad was not Vietnam, but their numbers, affluence, security, and freedom, and the televised example of their peers all over the world. In childhood, they had all had the same baby-sitter, TV—a baby-sitter more entertaining than the parents. Its incessant ad message was the same: “Kids! You need this—now!”
WITH MILLIONS OF young women “liberated” from parents, teachers, and preachers, with money to burn, and with the in loco parentis authority of dons and deans crumbling, the revolutions rolled over the campuses: the antiwar movement (“Hey, hey, LBJ, / How many kids did you kill today?” and “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh / The NLF is going to win!”); the drug revolution (“turn on, tune in, and drop out”); and the sexual revolution (“make love, not war”).
Then came the women’s movement, modeled on the civil rights movement; it won converts even in Middle America. As blacks had demanded equal rights with whites, women demanded the same rights as men. Nothing less than full equality. If the boys can sow their wild oats in frat houses and singles bars and with one-night stands, why not us? But as nature did not design the sexes that way, and the consequences of promiscuity are unequally borne by women, in the form of babies, solutions had to be found. The magic of the marketplace did the rest. If you forgot to take the pill, or the contraceptive didn’t work, the local abortionist would not fail.
The old sanctions against promiscuity collapsed. Nature’s sanctions—unwanted pregnancy and fear of disease—were taken care of by the pill, available abortion, and the new miracle drugs. No need for shotgun marriages. One teary-eyed trip to the Center for Reproductive Rights gets the job done. The fear of social stigma—loss of reputation—was lifted by a popular culture that celebrated the sexual revolution and applauded as “swingers” girls who in the 1940s and 1950s might have been called less attractive names. The moral sanctions—the sense of shame and sin, of violating God’s law, of risking one’s immortal soul—were eased by a new breed of “Are-You-Running-with-Me-Jesus?” priests and pastors who won huge popularity by explaining that He (or She) was just not that kind of “judgmental” God and, hey, “Hell is only a metaphor!”
Not only did the old sanctions collapse, a new way of measuring morality emerged to justify and even to sanctify “doing one’s own thing.” Under the new code, morality was now to be determined not by who slept with whom or who inhaled what—trivial matters of personal preference—but by who went South for civil rights, who protested apartheid, who had marched against the “dirty, immoral war” in Vietnam. As has often been true in history, a new moral code was crafted to justify the new lifestyle already adopted. As they indulged themselves in sex, drugs, riots, and rock and roll, the young Jacobins had the reassurance of their indulgent and pandering elders that, yes, indeed, “This is the finest young generation we have ever produced.” Has it not ever been so with revolutions? “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young, very heaven!” burbled the great Wordsworth of an earlier revolution that turned out rather badly.
IN THE 1960s, both a student rebellion and a cultural revolution rolled over the campuses. When the rebels graduated, got jobs, and got married, they ceased to be rebels, taking their place in the country of their parents and voting for Ronald Reagan; though it took some—our president comes to mind—perhaps longer than others to “break away.”
The sixties’ rebels, however, were not the revolutionaries. Converts to the revolution came to college thinking and believing one way and left thinking and believing an entirely different way that changed their whole lives. Hillary Rodham, the Goldwater Girl who came to Wellesley in 1965 and left as a social radical in 1969, with new values, a new moral code, and a steely resolve to change the corrupt society in which she had been raised, is as good an example of the revolutionary as Mr. Bush is of the rebel.
The cultural revolution that swept America’s campuses was a true revolution. In a third of a century the Judeo-Christian moral order it defied has been rejected by millions. Its hostility to Ozzie-and-Harriet America has been internalized by our cultural elites, and through their domination of our opinion- and value-shaping institutions—film, TV, the theater, magazines, music—these evangelists of revolution have spread their gospel all over the world and converted scores of millions.
We are two Americas: Mother Angelica and the Sunday sermon compete with Ally McBeal and Sex and the City. And the message the dominant culture emits, day and night, reacts with mocking laughter to the old idea that the good life for a woman means a husband and a houseful of kids. And there are now powerful collateral forces in society that are also pulling American women away from the maternity ward forever.
(A) The New Economy. In an agricultural economy, the workplace was the home where husband and wife labored together and lived together. In the industrial economy, the man left the home to work in a factory, while his wife stayed home to look after the children. The agricultural economy gave us the extended family; the industrial economy, the nuclear family. But in the postindustrial economy, husband and wife both work at the office, and no one stays home with the children. Indeed, there may be no children. As political science professor James Kurth of Swarthmore writes:
The greatest movement of the second half of the nineteenth century was the movement of men from farm to the factory … . The greatest movement of the second half of the twentieth century has been the movement of women from the home to the office … . [This] movement separates the parents from the children, as well as enabling the wife to separate herself from her husband. By splitting the nuclear family, it is helping to bring about the replacement of the nuclear family with the non-family.6
As men’s jobs in manufacturing, mining, farming, and fishing are no longer needed, or are shipped overseas, the skills and talents of women are now more desirable. There are also opportunities in government, education, and the professions open to women today that their mothers and grandmothers never had. Businesses, large and small, offer packages of pay and benefits to lure talented women out of the home and keep them out of the maternity ward, where they are “no good to the company.”
It is working. In the scores of millions, American women have left the home for the office to work beside and compete with men. By the tens of millions, women college graduates have put off marriage, many forever. “You can have it all!” the modern woman is told—baby and a career. With nannies, courtesy of open borders, with equal-pay-for-equal work, maternity leave, and daycare, courtesy of government and the company, the lure is not a lie. What you can’t have is a brood of kids back home while keeping pace with the competition at the office.
Forced to choose, women are choosing career, or career and the joy of motherhood, once. The Global Economy works hand in hand with the New Economy, transferring manufacturing jobs from high-wage Western nations to the low-wage, newly industrializing nations of Asia and Latin America. With Working America’s yellow brick road to the middle class down to one lane, wives must work to keep up with the Joneses next door. So children are put off, sometimes for good. In 1950, 88 percent of women with children under six stayed home, where they often had more kids. Today, 64 percent of American women with children under six are in the labor forced.7
“How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” was said of the World War I soldiers who went off to Europe. Well, how you gonna get’em back in the’burbs, after they’ve seen D.C., one might ask of the talented women lawyers, journalists, PR specialists, and political aides who have enjoyed the great game in an exciting city.
Writing in the Spectator, Eleanor Mills is an authentic voice of her generation: “The fact is that girls like me—i.e., healthy, hearty, middle-class women in their 20s—are just not breeding.”8 Why not? Because, she writes, “my generation’s twin preoccupations are, unfortunately, looks and money.”9 She quotes one of her many childless contemporaries:
“If I had a kid,” said Jane, an advertising executive, thoughtful
ly, “I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I take for granted. Every Saturday at 10:30 A.M. when we are still in bed, my husband and I look at each other and just say, ‘Thank God we weren’t up at 5 A.M. caring for a brat.’ We have such a great time just the two of us; who knows if it would work if we introduced another person into the equation?”10
“The rich are different from us,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald. To which Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” But the rich also have fewer children. Using Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation is usually the right one—the best explanation for the sinking birthrate in the West may be the simplest. As America’s poor enter the middle class, and the middle class becomes affluent, and the affluent become rich, each adopts the style of the class they have lately entered. All begin to downsize their families; all begin to have fewer children. A corollary follows: The richer a nation becomes, the fewer its children, and the sooner it begins to die. Societies organized to ensure the maximum pleasure, freedom, and happiness for all their members are, at the same time, advancing the date of their own funerals. Fate may compensate the Chinese, Islamic, and Latin peoples for their hardships and poverty in this century with the domination of the earth in the next. Indeed, do we not have it on high authority that “Blessed are the meek … they shall inherit the earth”?
(B) End of the “Family Wage.” In the 1830s, as America’s industrial revolution was about to begin, the Philadelphia Trade Union warned its members about the hidden agenda of what it called “cormorant capital”:
Oppose [employment of our women folks] with all your minds and with all your strength for it will prove our ruin. We must strive to obtain sufficient remuneration for our labor to keep the wives and daughters and sisters of our people at home … . That cormorant capital will have every man, woman, and child to toil; but let us exert our families to oppose its designs.11
In 1848, the year of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the labor publication Ten Hour Advocate editorialized: “We hope the day is not distant when the husband will be able to provide for his wife and family, without sending [the wife] to endure the drudgery of a cotton mill.”12
This vision of American free labor was at war with the view being espoused by Marx and his patron and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: “The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex into public industry and … this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”13 Is it not a remarkable coincidence how global capitalism’s view of women—as units of production, liberated from husbands, home, and family—conforms so precisely to the view of the fathers of global communism?
As Allan Carlson, who also publishes The Family in America, writes, there was a consensus in America, not so long ago, that employers should pay fathers a “family wage” sufficient to support their wives and children in dignity without their having to leave the home to go to work.14 That was considered one of the defining characteristics of a good society.
The idea is enshrined in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. In books such as A Living Wage, Catholic social critic Fr. John Ryan championed the idea and stressed the need to “moralize” the wage contract to protect the home. “The State has both the right and the duty to compel all employers to pay a living wage,” wrote Father Ryan.15
This idea was widely accepted. Carlson notes that the “wage gap” between men and women actually widened after World War II. In 1939, women earned 59.3 percent of men’s pay; by 1966, that had fallen to 53.6 percent.16 In the 1940s and 1950s, the culture, with a good conscience, separated men and women in the workplace. In newspapers, the “Men Wanted” ads were run separate from the “Women Wanted” ads. Only rarely could working women be found outside such occupations as clerk-typist, secretary, nurse, schoolteacher, or salesgirl. Carlson writes:
To an observer from the Year 2000, the most amazing thing about this system was that it was both understood by the average people and popularly supported. In opinion polls, large majorities of Americans (85 percent or more), women and men, agreed that fathers deserved an income that would support their wives and children at home and that the labor of mothers was secondary or supplemental. This was seen as simple justice.17
This system fell apart in the 1960s, when feminists managed to add “sex” to the discriminations forbidden by the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had been written to protect the rights of African Americans. This turned the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into a siege gun against the family wage. “Men Wanted” ads were declared discriminatory and outlawed. Gender equality replaced “moral contract.” The rights of individuals took precedence over the requirements of family. Women’s pay soared, and as women began moving into occupations that had been largely restricted to men—medicine, law, the media, the academy, the upper bureaucracy, and business—families began to crumble.
Between 1973 and 1996, writes Dr. Carlson, “the [real] median income of men, aged 15 and above, working full-time, fell 24 percent, from $37,200 to $30,000.”18 Marching under feminist banners—equal pay for equal work, and equal pay for comparable work—women moved into direct competition with men. Millions succeeded, shouldering men aside with superior performance. Their pay rose steadily, and the absolute and relative pay of married men stagnated or fell. With their families under pressure, married men began to yield to wives’ insistence that they “go back to work.” Young men found they no longer earned enough in their late teens or early twenties to start a family, even if that had been their hope and dream. Stripped of the duties of fatherhood and family, many of these young men wound up in trouble—and even in prison.
America’s young women found they could achieve independence on their own. They need not get married, certainly not yet. More and more did not marry. In 1970, only 36 percent of women aged twenty to twenty-four were unmarried. By 1995, 68 percent were in the “never married” category. Among women twenty-five to twenty-nine, the “never marrieds” had soared from 10 percent to 35 percent.19
The young family with a batch of kids is now an endangered species. Only the young rich can afford that “lifestyle,” and they are uninterested. With the Democratic party so beholden to feminism that it cannot even oppose partial birth abortions, and the GOP in thrall to libertarian ideology and controlled by corporate interests, the call of the gods of the marketplace for more women workers prevails over the command of the God of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.”
Many conservatives have succumbed to the heresy of Economism, a mirror-Marxism that holds that man is an economic animal, that free trade and free markets are the path to peace, prosperity, and happiness, that if we can only get the marginal tax rates right and the capital gains tax abolished, Paradise—Dow 36,000!—is at hand. But when the income tax rate for the wealthiest was above 90 percent in the 1950s, America, by every moral and social indicator, was a better country.
The reformed radical and Christian convert Orestes Brownson saw this new idolatry of “Mammon worship” rising in the America of the nineteenth century: “Mammonism has become the religion of Saxondom, and God is not in all our thoughts. We have lost our faith in the noble, the beautiful and the just.”20 A century later, another convert from a failed materialistic faith would remind us again. Wrote Whittaker Chambers, “Economics is not the central problem of our age, faith its.”21
(C) The “Population Bomb” Hysteria. Then there was the antipeople movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the elite’s backlash against the baby boom. Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, was its guru, and his bestseller, The Population Bomb, did for population control what Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had done for environmentalism. Ehrlich was a twentieth-century reincarnation of Thomas Robert Malthus, the British demographer whose prediction of world starvation proved so spectacularly wrong in the nineteenth century. Malthus had written:
“It may be safely asserted … that population, when unchecked, increases in geometrical progression of such a nature as to double itself every twenty-five years.”22 As the world’s food production could not double every twenty-five years, said the gloomy parson, mass starvation was dead ahead.
Malthus proved as wrong about food production as Ehrlich did about the world’s resources, which he assured us were running out. Today, the six billion on earth live in far greater freedom and prosperity than did the three billion in 1960, the two billion in 1927, or the one billion in 1830. Political incompetence and criminality, foolish ideas and insane ideologies, are the causes of starvation and misery, not people.
Published by the Sierra Club, Ehrlich’s book became required reading in many high schools. By 1977, former secretary of defense and World Bank president Robert McNamara was playing Henny Penny to Ehrlich’s Chicken Little, warning that “continued population growth would cause ‘poverty, hunger, stress, crowding, and frustration,’ that would threaten social, economic and military stability.”23
In 1978, a congressional select committee on population announced that the “major biological systems that humanity depends upon … are being strained by rapid population growth … [and] in some cases, they are … losing productive capacity.”24 As Jacqueline Kasun, author of The War Against Population, writes, about this time the Smithsonian Institution created a “traveling exhibit for schoolchildren called ‘Population: The Problem Is Us,’ [that] featured a picture of a dead rat on a dinner plate as an example of ‘future food sources.’”25
The Death of the West Page 4