Is this Really a Blind Spot?

Nick Kristof has got an op-ed out now that’s going to make a lot of people mad. It makes me mad! I know this guy has got a bunch of prizes and things and famously reported on Darfur and Tiananmen square, but also he seems like such a fucking dullard. He’s a Harvard guy, and his Harvard guy friends all say that he’s great, but the thing is that he can’t even frame an argument precisely.

Look at this. (This is a copy of his op-ed from some newspaper in Cochise, Arizona; I don’t know if they license it or just stole it or what but it doesn’t seem like it has a paywall.) Kristof’s basic argument is that Liberals have a Blind Spot and it’s that we REFUSE to ADMIT that children are just better off if they come from two-parent households. Why — WHY! — can’t Liberals simply acknowledge the material fact of the Breakdown of the Black Family (it’s mostly Black families breaking down, btw).

This is a famous argument, Right Wing dullards make it all the time, they love it because it has a lot of superficial data to back it up. Kristof complains that Daniel Moynihan was attacked as being a racist for worrying about the breakdown of the Black Family back in the 1970s (and also because he suggested a bunch of policy proposals which made everything worse; Kristof seems to understand that those policies DID make things worse, but has little interest in questioning whether or not the bad policy recommendations came from a bad initial assessment of the nature of the problem!).

And the basic problem is that it’s misleading. Look, here’s what Nick Kristof and a ton of rightie dipshits that I argue with in Instagram comments all the time tell me that I’m blind to: the FACT is that TWO-PARENT FAMILIES are BETTER for CHILDREN why do you IGNORE THE REALITY? The “reality” when rightie dipshits say it is that Black people are just basically worse than white people, which is why their families are collapsing and thus their children are suffering.

That’s not exactly the reality that Kristof thinks I’m ignoring, though I’m hard-pressed to guess what it is if it isn’t that. He talks about the Breakdown of the Family like it’s a natural disaster; a hurricane or an earthquake that is simply happening and that Liberals are ignoring. But:

“Let me interrupt this column with a shower of caveats. Many children raised in part by single moms do extraordinarily well; one was a two-term president in the 1990s, and another served two terms until 2017. And I think the big driver for the rise in single-parent households is bad decisions by policymakers that led to mass incarceration and a collapse of earnings for working-class men.”

Okay. But. The liberal (and here I am using “liberal” and “left” as two groups with a fair degree of political overlap, if you’re a hardcore Leftist and mad at me about it eat shit, I don’t care) position is that…mass incarceration is bad? Because of how it breaks up families? The Sentencing Project, one of many campaigns dedicated to ending mass incarceration, lists the damage to families right on their front page (emphasis mine):

50 Years and a Wake Up: Ending The Mass Incarceration Crisis In America

The campaign raises awareness about the dire state of the U.S. criminal legal system, the devastating impact of incarceration on communities and families, and proposes more effective crime prevention strategies for our country.

Is this a right-wing organization? Is this a product of Traditional Family Values? Is this a Republican initiative? No doubt the Sentencing Project, like many projects of its nature, prefers to remain non-partisan in terms of its associations, but if you had to guess where on the political spectrum it would fall, where would you say “trying to get people out of prison” falls?

So, what’s the fucking blind spot here?

Conservatives promulgate this idea that they are “pro-marriage” — and that, by extension, liberals are “anti-marriage”, sort of in the same way that when I say that none of the products at my grocery store contain glass, by implication I suggest that all of the products at YOUR store do — and Kristof, again just like an absolute fucking dunce, seems to want to repeat this without qualification.

The collapse of marriage has happened mostly among less-educated Americans, including those who are white, Black or Hispanic. While many college graduates in theory embrace all kinds of family relationships, they remain traditional in their personal behaviors, mostly having children after marriage and raising their own kids in two-parent households. Brad Wilcox, a sociologist and family expert at the University of Virginia, calls this “talk left, walk right.”

Brad Wilcox — excuse me, W. Bradford Wilcox — is listed here as “a sociologist and family expert at the Universe of Virginia”. What remains unlisted is that he’s a visiting scholar at the ultraconservative American Enterprise Institute, that he’s a senior research fellow at The Institute for Family Studies (an organization founded to advance right-wing ideas about marriage and which promotes the nonsense “Success Sequence” that Ben Shapiro is so horny for), or that he’s got a book coming out about how Americans need to “defy the elites” by getting married.

I mean, why not just repeat this guy’s pithy attitude about which “sides” approve of marriage, even when your man’s thesis is contradicted by his own data (W. Bradford suggests that it’s the *elites* that hate marriage, but also those same elites are also much more likely to get married! Weird! Almost like, maybe, there’s something else going on here?)

What IS going on here, though? The basic problem is that Nick Kristof is a stupid guy, who has failed to recognize the basic sleight of hand that the right wing performs on stupid guys who have opinion columns in the Times.

No one actually doubts that children do better when they come from two-parent households — as Kristof points out, this is often simply a question of arithmetic; two-parent households are more likely to be two-income households, and two-income households mean less poverty. (But wait, does that mean that it’s not the number of *parents* that are important, but the amount of *money*? Hm, I wonder if there’s any supplementary data to this, like how earlier in this very article Nick Kristoff suggested that this problem was caused by lower wages and the dismantling of the welfare state). The difference is this:

The Right Wing says that children do better in two parent households, and therefore it’s bad to be a single parent.

The Left Wing says that children do better in two parent households, and that’s because it’s hard to be a single parent.

You’ll notice that these are not, strictly-speaking, opposites. This is not a Right Wing: Marriage is Good! Left Wing: Marriage is Bad! argument. This is not a You Should Get Married / You Shouldn’t Get Married construction, even though that’s how W. Bradford portrays it, and how Kristoff brainlessly repeats it.

The actual difference plays out very clearly in policy, and when you frame it this way everything makes a lot more sense:

the Right believes that there is a correct way to have a family (two parents, a man and a woman (W. Bradford Wilcox doesn’t say that part but come on, you know), churchgoing, &c, what have you), and that society should be organized to punish the bad kinds and reward the good kinds.

the Left, meanwhile, believes that there is no specific correct way to have a family, but some ways are harder than others, and the ways that are harder should be given more support than the ways that are easier.

(This is the same argument between the Right and the Left about everything; Conservatives hate taxes because rich people (the correct kind of people) pay them while poor people (the bad kind of people) get them. “Why are you PUNISHING people for SUCCESS?” An incomprehensible argument to a Leftist, since taxes aren’t punitive, they’re a tool for helping people who need help.)

As a Liberal — and correct me if I’m wrong about this, maybe you’re a Liberal who disagrees with me — I am not opposed to marriage. I think W. Bradford Wilcox’s data, that shows that “college educated elites” (i.e., people that are more likely to have money and career prospects) show that, given adequate resources, most people prefer to have their children in two parent, married households! That’s fine! If people want to do that they should! I myself am married, and raising children in a two-parent household!

What I am is opposed to systems that coerce people into marriage. I do not believe that “the breakdown of the family” is something that is happening because of an innate moral failure (that coincidentally primarily affects Black families!), I think that for the most part people who do not get or do not stay married probably ave pretty good reasons for that! I think human beings have, and should be encouraged to have, a good sense of whether they should stay in a marriage.

I think it’s also pretty stupid to pretend that, while it may be the case that being married benefits children in general, that’s not the same thing as every marriage benefiting children specifically. All things being equal, maybe it’s better to raise children in a two-parent household! But all things are often NOT equal, and while a child raised by two loving parents might be better off than a child raised with only one, almost certainly a child raised with one loving parent would be better off than one raised in a household where his mother is trapped in an abusive marriage. I strongly suspect that this would have negative future outcomes. A society, therefore, with every child raised in a two-parent household is actually necessarily bad (because it means some children are being raised by abusive parents, unless we’ve got some other way of eliminating that?), whereas a society with some single parent household is probably good, because there are many specific circumstances in which raising a child as a single parent is actually better than the alternative.

Thoughtlessly repeating Right Wing “criticism” of the Left in order to curry favor with supposed centrists — the kind of clumsy, ham-handed rhetoric that Harvard men love to do because it makes them feel smarter than everyone else — obscures the fact that the essential argument on the subject of family is not that Republicans think that Families are Good and Democrats think that Families are Bad. The essential argument is that Conservatives believe that some families are good and that only those families should be supported according to how good they are, while Liberals believe that all families are good and they should be supported according to how much support they need.

Until you’re willing to frame the argument like this, from first principles, everything else is just blowing around a lot of hot air.