Someone opened up three boxes of wine at the department today to celebrate the end of the semester, so I’m too buzzed to comment intelligently on these things, but earlier today I read two articles I wanted to pass along….
Jonathan Rauch on how “family values” may weaken families in Red States:
You can do a good job of predicting how a state will vote in national elections by looking at its population’s average age at first marriage and childbirth.
Six of the seven states with the lowest divorce rates in 2007, and all seven with the lowest teen birthrates in 2006, voted blue in both elections. Six of the seven states with the highest divorce rates in 2007, and five of the seven with the highest teen birthrates, voted red. It’s as if family strictures undermine family structures.
And Noah Scheiber on president Haley Barbour’s lobbying ties:
The reason is that, as Brad Plumer and I documented in this piece several years ago, Barbour has never convincingly demonstrated that he severed ties to the lobbying firm he founded, Barbour, Griffith, & Rogers (BGR), when he became governor of Mississippi in 2004. At the time, we were struck by the way Barbour had twice-vetoed and continued to oppose a wildly popular “tax swap” plan that would have cut the state’s hugely regressive grocery tax and replaced it with a tax increase on tobacco. The thing that caught our eye was that BGR had received some $2 million in revenue from tobacco companies since Barbour became governor. If Barbour had an interest in his old firm, as documents we obtained suggested, then it would be a massive conflict of interest, to say the least.
OK, so keep that in mind as you read the following: Last month, Amy McCullough, a dogged reporter with the Mississippi Business Journal, wrote an important piece laying out the way Barbour’s old firm had helped the subsidiary of a longtime client, Southern Company, obtain $270 million in Department of Energy money for a clean-coal facility in Kemper County, Mississippi. The facility will cost far more than that–at least $2.4 billion–and the difference will be born by local ratepayers. As governor, Barbour has been overwhelmingly supportive of the project, which would distinguish his administration from its counterpart in Florida, which recent bagged on a similar project.
(italics mine — I left off the opening originally)
DougJ out. I’ll be back later with an ill-considered anti-TalkingPointsMemo screed for the weekend.
anonymoose
tease.
Dave C
TPM was the first blog I ever read (starting back in ’03, I believe). I predict that thread will be massive and hilarious.
asiangrrlMN
As for the second link, what? A politician lied? Color me surprised.
You didn’t say how many plus you are, DougJ! The first link’s conclusion is of no surprise to me, but I was interested to read in the hypothesis re: Adults forming marriages and marriages forming families. I’ll have to think that one over a bit more.
@anonymoose: Exactly what I was thinking!
Xenos
I won’t link to the red families/blue families article by Lakoff, because anyone who would want to read it has already done so, and because it is way too reductive of the significant cultural issues. Instead I will give the standard declaration that this is all about the patriarchy, and let anyone who finds that interesting find their way to BitchPhD.com.
I must be getting too meta if I am giving footnotes without bothering to actually say anything.
Xenos +0, and it is a damn shame.
Alice
How exciting! You better deliver the goods on this one.
taylormattd
Oh come on Doug. Just polish of the box of wine and launch a blistering attack on Josh. It’ll all be good if you write DougJ +9 at the end of the post. :)
DougJ
@Xenos:
It’s not by Lakoff. I’m insulted that you thought it might be. I really recommend the piece.
Catsy
“As if”?
Correlation is not causation, but the link between ignorant, anti-science, faith-based policies and an emphasis on more marriages versus better marriage choices and the statistics cited seems pretty cut-and-dried.
The states that are dominated by an ideology that prefers children to be ignorant of sex and contraception has a higher teen pregnancy rate than states that emphasize facts and education? And the ones that fetishize marriage to the point where people unsuited to a life together get married because it’s what’s expected end up with a higher divorce rate?
Shocking!
Notify Ted Koppel, we have a story on our hands.
robertdsc
DougJ marrying one of his commenters? For shame!
Cerberus
Adding to Link One up top, feminists have noted this for decades now. “Family values” is an attempt to continue supporting patriarchal male-dominance at the expense of women and children and prop up an ownership model of both.
Where that system has the most traction in limiting the freedom of women and children will also have the most people invested in prolonging it, same as has happened for centuries regarding the limitations of freedom on black men.
In short, this would be the patriarchy in a nutshell and why promoting feminist values is also really good for liberalism. Cultures with less of an investment in hating on the women-folk tend to also be less hung up on proving their dominance of other groups such as gays, minorities, the poor, random people in other countries, other religions, etc…
DougJ
@robertdsc:
Ha ha. That really made me laugh.
Mark S.
I don’t see why the sexual mores of Bronze Age goat herders aren’t perfectly fine today. Advocating change in this field sets my Burkean Bells to DefCon 5.
Zifnab
I always loved this so-called “paradox” of practiced and preached moral codes. If you’ve completely swallowed the wingnut line – that liberals hate families and encourage poverty-stricken drug abuse and decry basic moral tenants – I suppose it could be strange to note how the Heartland of Idaho has over twice the divorce rate of Godless Massachusetts, or how Soc ialist Vermont’s graduation rate is 20% higher than that of Real America South Carolina.
But when you stop immersing yourself in moralizing bullshit, it’s much easier to notice that Red State and Blue State politicians all campaign to the same tune. The difference is in the policy. Progressive policies simply have a higher success rate than their regressive peers.
Raunch will forever ponder the conservative’s dilemma, because he can’t get passed rhetoric to observe results.
dmsilev
As soon as you find yourself developing a bizarre psychosexual obsession with Bill Clinton, it’s time to back away from the abyss.
dms
Bulworth
Does any of this have to do with their rather tabloidistic post about the TSA scanner and a TSA staffer’s parts? Sometimes I’m afraid they vere depressingly close to Politico/Drudge territory.
Tonal Crow
@Zifnab: Empiricism — the root of science — is wingnuts’ Enemy # 1.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
As a TPM fan, my flamethrower will be fully fueled and ready for bidness.
DougJ
@Bulworth:
You got it.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@DougJ:
Nobody is perfect. Some more less perfect than others.
scav
And I noticed that brief Et tu Josh? linky thingy that 404ed, so we should be close . .
Xenos
@DougJ: (looks it up for the first time in a couple years)
You are right, dammit. Lakoff is cited, but some mathematician cat from the northeast with the first name ‘Doug’ wrote it. Is that why you are offended by my citation error?
As for the analysis — it is sound, but just to a point. There are issues of class formation, state power, and lumpy economic development that have huge influences on these families, and strongly change how the people who deviate from familial norms are treated and how firm a hold the different family systems have on their members.
And then we can start talking injecting some historical analysis and start talking about how different ethnic traditions operate and how divergent religious systems mix the whole dam mess around.
kay
@Cerberus:
I don’t think that’s true of the red state (really) young fathers. With child support and joint custody (which they all want, and try to manage) they’re right there struggling at the bottom with the red state really young mothers. Whether they marry young with a pregnancy and then divorce or don’t marry at all, it’s the same result. I don’t think they’re “invested in prolonging it”. In my experience, the young women do a little better at establishing themselves as independent adults (unmarried parents) than the young men do. I don’t know why that is.
I think the men wander it into it and can’t climb out, like the women do. The hurdles it sets up, for both men and women, are really high. If this is set up to further a ruling patriarchy, I don’t think it’s working anymore.
DougJ
@Xenos:
Where is Lakoff cited?
Violet
I’m looking forward to that. TPM has become next to useless, imho. Occasionally there’s something interesting there, but mostly it’s the same stuff you can find anywhere, and not much of that. What happened to the old TPM?
Blue Gal
In addition to Lakoff, there’s an excellent New Yorker article –Red Sex Blue Sex — Highly recommended.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_talbot
Doctor Science
I read the article, and can only the hope that the book has more of an historical leg to stand on. Rausch says:
The situation he describes as having endured “for generations” was a pecularity of the 1950s. That decade had the youngest average marriage age on US record; it was only in the 1980s or 1990s that marriage age rose higher than in the late 19th century.
Before — and after — the 1950s, lower-class American women usually worked for money, whether directly (as servants, in factories, etc.), or indirectly, for the family’s farm or household business.
Joel
You could reverse the cause and effect and have an equally plausible hypothesis:
The high “family failure” rate leads residents of a given state to vote for reactionary, restrictive measures to counteract (poorly) those problems.
Xenos
@DougJ: If we are talking about the same article, Lakoff is mentioned 27 times, and is given credit for defining the categories of ‘strict father family’ and ‘nurturant parent family’.
I was probably being unfairly snarky and ‘more marxist than thou’ in my critique, in any case. It is not a bad discussion of some provocative ideas. I would be curious to see what aimai, for one, would have to say about it.
Martin
The right-wing social values platform is modeled directly after the saying “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”
I don’t think they’ll ever get it.
terry chay
@Xenos: He is definitely not talking about the same thing.
The article you mention is a Red Family, Blue Family article written in 2005, and this one is based on a book that was just published called “Red Families v. Blue Families.”
I can see where the confusion lies, but it’s not the same.
Very disappointing they go by state since we have county-by-county breakdowns of people’s national votes. I’d like to see the same analysis done on every cohort and breakdowns wherein.
Chuck
@Joel:
The fact that the “red state ~ broken homes” correlation has held so firmly for so long in study after study does at least show that not only has “real (redstate) America” been fucked up for a long time, their atavistic regressive attempts to fix it can at the most generously be said to have not done shit.
Cerberus
@kay:
Actually that’s just part of the “patriarchy sucks for everyone” package. And having it make the “winners” lives suck more than they need to is part of the hard sell.
If life sucks this bad now, then imagine how bad it would be if she was all uppity and demanding equal “special” rights that would make her life better at the expense of yours. So, suck it up and keep prolonging the patriarchy and fight for the status quo because change would only make your shitty life worse.
See also the same with regards to racism. Hey, give up what little social safety net you have to stop the “them” from improving their lives at “your expense”. Please ignore that this isn’t how rights work and that the actual data shows that greater egalitarianism aids everyone and makes everyone’s lives better, even those who used to be in the dominant position.
RichJ
Are you at the U of R, Doug?
DougJ
@Xenos:
No, that’s not the article I linked to.
And it’s not the article mentioned in the article I linked to either. Unless I’m missing something, that article has nothing to do with any of this.
Robert Waldmann
On the Rauch observation, the causation might not be from family strictures to family structures. It could be that the’re red because they wed. That is trouble with unwanted pregnancies in a state are caused by something else and then make people in that state conservative.
I think the most likely explanation for high teen pregancy rates and resulting shotgun marriages and high divorce rates and all that are conservative attitudes and policies which are bad for families because
1) sexophobia leads to abstinence only sex ed, difficult access to contraceptives and no abortion services so it leads to more unplanned births.
2) Locking up a large fraction of men (and rendering them less employable when released) leaves the never jailed guys guys free to be promiscuous without the competition.
3) Low spending on schools leads to lower ability to control pregnancy.
I think 2 is actually important.
However, I can imagine another original cause such as say poverty due to say an economy historically based on agriculture. Then pregnancy trouble makes people Republican (maybe not the involuntarily pregnant ones) because
1) They think sex is bad and Democrats are suspected of being pro sex (we are).
2) What with scraping for money and changing diapers and such, they can’t keep up with the news, so they haven’t learned of the proof that Republicans are evil and incompetent.