Reihan and I will be discussing Grand New Party with a group of highly intelligent people this week at TPMCafe, so check it out if you dare ...
« Generation Kill (II) | Main | Those Were The Days » Debating GNP14 Jul 2008 04:21 pm Comments (9)
Can someone point out to Reihan he's not white, and the GOP already have their token Indian quota for this decade (Jindal, preceded by D'Souza) Seriously, how the fuck can he work with people who go back and forth with Sailer etc etc. 
I'm pretty sympathetic (no surprise here) to Kerry's argument, which Andrew Sullivan echoed earlier today: using the tax code and various other government programs to privelege one activity (raising children in a two-parent family), however virtuous, is a form of social engineering. And just like other attempts at social engineering on the left (think of some of the anti-poverty programs of the '70's) not likely to have a significant impact on the problems it is designed to address, anyway. But such is the face of social conservatism in America.
With supporters like 'i' on your side, who needs enemies? Isn't there a difference between "forcing" and "promoting"? I'm pretty sure there is. I appears that GNP is more into promotion, or maybe "incentivizing" or something. And Dana Goldstien does acknowledge the value of a stable family to the poor and working class. In fact, she apparently supports a lot of the book's ideas, though not the "blame sexual liberation" part of the rationale. If nothing else, it's a pretty interesting group of commenters assembled.
I was responding to the first post by Kerry, which basically reads as a screed against traditional two parent families because they place disproportionate burdens on women. In other words, she is ideologically opposed to the institution that is statistically most beneficial to lower income women (and children).
I'm pretty sympathetic (no surprise here) to Kerry's argument, which Andrew Sullivan echoed earlier today: using the tax code and various other government programs to privelege one activity (raising children in a two-parent family), however virtuous, is a form of social engineering. And just like other attempts at social engineering on the left (think of some of the anti-poverty programs of the '70's) not likely to have a significant impact on the problems it is designed to address, anyway. Yeah, it's worse than that. It's social engineering in an anti-feminist direction, a systematic attempt to reimpose conservative Catholic sexual morality on society and reverse the single greatest achievement of the last 2,500 years of western civilization, the equality of women. I was responding to the first post by Kerry, which basically reads as a screed against traditional two parent families because they place disproportionate burdens on women. In other words, she is ideologically opposed to the institution that is statistically most beneficial to lower income women (and children). In other words, you are ideologically opposed to making it easy for women to leave bad marriages, pursue their careers, and have the sex lives they want to have, while making their own determinations about whether their lives are beneficial for them and their children (if they choose to have them).
"In other words, you are ideologically opposed to making it easy for women to leave bad marriages, pursue their careers, and have the sex lives they want to have, while making their own determinations about whether their lives are beneficial for them and their children (if they choose to have them)." Uh, no, calm down; you sound a little worked up. I acknowledge that there are trade-offs here; the better the incentives for marriage, the more difficult it is to forgo those incentives - that's why I support modest incentives. That addresses the 'leave bad marriages' piece. The rest is just a boilerplate rant, particularly the part about pursuing careers. None of these proposals are aimed at preventing women from pursuing careers, in fact they promote easier transition in and out of the workplace.
i: That's a different position than the one you advocate above in criticizing Ms. Howley. I still disagree with it, but I agree the things you are talking about are pretty much on the margins. But in criticizing Ms. Howley, you asserted that a (debatable) statistical claim about two parent families being better for women and children should have talismanic significance. No, it shouldn't. The lives and choices of individual women should prevail over that sort of claim, because otherwise, women end up being denied their right to make life choices that the Ross Douthats of the world think that their deity would disapprove of.
Okay Dilan, Let's debate then. As R&R point out in their book, and as commenter i mentioned above, there is a mountain of evidence suggesting that chldren from two-parent homes do better than children from single-parent homes. In a similar fashion, there is quite a bit of evidence suggesting that married mothers are better off on a host of indicators than single mothers. Where is your evidence to the contrary on these two related issues?
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Wow...if by 'highly intelligent' you meant 'crazy', you were right if the introductory post was any indication. You and Reihan must be pretty evil people to want to force marriage on people with children. The ironic thing about the post to me is that it is a perfect illustration of a phenomenon described in the book. A liberal, educated woman with lots of options views the family structure as an outdated relic that is discriminatory to women, disregarding the mountains sociological data demonstrating the importance of the family for the health of the country, not to mention children.
As the book points out, this works fine for her because she has lots of capital to fall back on, however it does not work well for the poor and the lower middle class. If she cared about helping people, rather than promoting a half-baked ideology, she might conclude from the data that promoting the family would be a valuable part of attempts to help the poor and lower middle class. Instead, she basically rails against R&R as oppressors of women, by which apparently, she means, her.
Posted by i | July 14, 2008 4:56 PM