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rayiner 5y ago

> Liberals are invested in social theories that reject the importance of fathers in socializing boys? In academia, public policy, and political messaging, yes. With a few exceptions. > Are you sure you're not getting this stuff from Youtube, and kind of winding yourself up? I don’t watch YouTube. It doesn’t even really come up in right-wing media, because much of the Trump right is itself a product of the post-family values 1990s. It comes from my own observations of “stuff my liberal parents take as axiomatic that I can’t say among my friends with graduate degrees.” > Stable two-parent households, high education, and liberalism are all correlated. That’s true. You have lots of people who preach permissiveness and self fulfillment in public and practice rigid conformity in their own lives. Growing up I reconciled this as the way my parents did: “things it’s okay for Americans to do versus but not for us to do.” I find that suboptimal now.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
>> You have lots of people who preach permissiveness and self fulfillment in public and practice rigid conformity in their own lives. Growing up I reconciled this as the way my parents did: “things it’s okay for Americans to do versus but not for us to do.” I find that suboptimal now. Are you the product of an immigrant family? Because it sounds quite like something many immigrant parents would say.
- rayiner 5y ago
  > Are you the product of an immigrant family? Because it sounds quite like something many immigrant parents would say. Not only that, I'm one of those immigrant kids who thinks my parents were wise and correct, instead of rebelling.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    Did you always think your parents were right? Were there moments in life you thought they should be questioned if not ignored?
tptacek 5y ago
This just isn't persuasive. You can find support for any wacky idea "in academia", at any end of the political spectrum --- I don't go around saying that conservatives are deeply invested in the idea of a Catholic Integralist theocracy, and so I object to the idea that you get to drag out someone's Masters in Tumblr Theory graduate thesis to win arguments. Meanwhile: in public policy? In political messaging? Support your claim with evidence, and serious evidence, lest I see whatever BLM thing you come up with and raise you Lauren Boebert. I suspect that what's happening here is that you've mistaken the notion that people have itchy trigger fingers about people trash-talking single moms (they do) with the idea that people widely believe "single mom" is an optimal child rearing arrangement (they do not). I live in the People's Republic of Oak Park, and you'd be run out on a rail from the Oak Park Progressives group for writing a post about how dads are overrated. Just for the sake of clarity, and to keep the discussion on the tracks, I'm dialing up my rhetoric: I think these beliefs you have about "liberals" are the outcome of Internet poisoning, not a reflection of reality. Again: the best proxy we have for measuring social liberalism is educational attainment. People with college degress --- I'm not valorizing them, I didn't go, I think college is an overrated luxury good --- are much more likely to have stable single-parent homes that people without; to the extent that this "nuclear family" gap exists, it's "conservative" voters who are likely to be on the single-parent end of it.
- rayiner 5y ago
  > I suspect that what's happening here is that you've mistaken the notion that people have itchy trigger fingers about people trash-talking single moms (they do) with the idea that people widely believe "single mom" is an optimal child rearing arrangement (they do not). I think they are so afraid of being accused of "trash-talking single moms," or alienating the academics and activists, that they won't advocate in the culture and politics for two-parent families. The functional result is similar: When was the last time you heard a Democrat talking about the importance of two-parent households? What major Democrat-aligned think tank or advocacy organization is pushing policies to promote two-parent households and decrease out-of-wedlock child births? Where are the Hollywood movies addressing the social upheaval caused by divorce? > Just for the sake of clarity, and to keep the discussion on the tracks, I'm dialing up my rhetoric: I think these beliefs you have about "liberals" are the outcome of Internet poisoning, not a reflection of reality. My problem is that the right-wing outrage bait originates where I am: the high school I attended, the law school I attended, my kids's school, etc. On this particular issue, I got shouted down on my high school's facebook page for pointing out that poverty rates are vastly lower among two-parent families. Do those folks represent the liberal mainstream? I think that's besides the point. If those folks shout down enough people, everyone else will stick to points that don't incur their wrath. > Again: the best proxy we have for measuring social liberalism is educational attainment. People with college degress --- I'm not valorizing them, I didn't go, I think college is an overrated luxury good --- are much more likely to have stable single-parent homes that people without; to the extent that this "nuclear family" gap exists, it's "conservative" voters who are likely to be on the single-parent end of it. This is true, but I draw the opposite conclusion from it. Economic success today is strongly tied to success in academic institutions. People with high levels of social capital go to those institutions, learn a bunch of wacky ideas, but live in their own lives the way people with their class always have. But everyone else downstream suffers the consequences. E.g. corporate lawyer posts "sex work is work" but she doesn't mean it for her kid. And she doesn't live in a community where being pressured into sex work is a real threat facing young women. But destroying that taboo has consequences that flow down into lower class communities where those pressures do exist. Meanwhile, those downstream communities have less ability to resist harmful cultural changes. They're not going to college where they learn what to say while being able to observe that the successful people are doing. They often lack the social capital that insulates them from the broader culture. The social institutions they relied on to transmit values and enforce norms, like churches, have often been weakened by decades of attacks. Folks in those communities will get divorced and have kids out of wedlock--because the taboos have been destroyed in the broader culture--but they'll unsurprisingly be mad about the consequences.

ambrozk 5y ago

I think there are a significant number of liberals, and not just crazy people on the internet, who think this. A data point: a while ago, I fell down a rabbit hole arguing with social justice people online who maintained that the notion that fatherlessness in the black community was problematic was a "myth." They justified their claim on the basis of a US government report which indicated that single black fathers spent more time with their kids as single white fathers. Seeing as this was a clear instance of Simpson's paradox (since non-single fathers of all races spend more time with their children than single fathers of all races, and there are more black single fathers than non-black single fathers), I assumed they'd just misappropriated unbiased research. But digging into the surveys they cited, I found that the researchers themselves had misrepresented their research in press outreach, in their official capacity as researchers. It was such an obvious case of statistical malpractice, I was shocked to see highly credentialed, well-published researchers engaging in it. What I have taken from this incident is that there are a substantial number of activists who have become so invested in social justice for African Americans that they will automatically discount any theory which they believe might place the locus of responsibility for change within the black community, even if the evidence for that theory is very strong.

tptacek 5y ago
I wrote this terribly, let me try again. I believe children are better off being raised by two parents than by one. I might also bristle in a discussion about crime and poverty if someone parachuted in and said that the real problem was single-parent families. I'd perceive it as an instance of the just-world fallacy. Things are much more complicated than that. If I tried to express that by arguing that two parents were not in fact valuable for children, I'd be overplaying my hand. I'd be wrong. But I'd be wrong in the service of pushing back against the just-world fallacy, not in valorizing single parenthood. I think you'd have a hard time finding a lot of liberals who, outside of charged discussions about crime and poverty, would argue that children don't benefit from having two parents in their lives. For posterity, the previous iteration: It's not hard to find situations where people will push back on two-parent households, because many of these discussions boil down (or are perceived to boiling down) to a just-world argument in which the fact that, holding income equal, a randomly selected Black family will live in a neighborhood with people making many tens of thousands of dollars left than a white family at the same income level. They're not right when they make those arguments; they're overstating their claim, fathers are important, two parents are beneficial, &c. But that's not really what they're arguing. And then there are people who believe, I don't know, fathers are somehow malign? A single parent is better than two? But that's a fringe belief.

tptacek 5y ago
It's easy to find Democrats talking about the importance of fatherhood, and that's backed up by public policy: for instance, a goal of Paid Family Leave is ensuring that fathers have time with new children, not just mothers. It's harder to find Democrats extolling the virtues of two-parent families. But that's no surprise: "two-parent family" is coded right-wing, and politically involves not just the importance of kids having two parents, but also of pushing back on equity in the workplace for women, or benefits for single parents (and, if you go far enough back, say to the 1970s and 1980s, towards liberalized divorce laws). So I think the claim that liberals avoid talking about family values fails. They use different language than conservatives, but that's just how politics works. You can exploit the semiotics of political messaging to paint either side any way you want, but the idea that liberals are opposed to two-parent households is inconsistent with what liberals advocate for. An appeal to what gets shouted down on Facebook groups† also isn't persuasive. First, note that you didn't get shouted down for saying that fathers are important (which is how you'd code an appeal to two-parent child-rearing --- single-parent households in the US are overwhelmingly, like >85%, led by mothers). But also: Facebook groups are cliques. There are popular Facebook groups in Oak Park that would ban you for arguing against abolishing the police. But defunding the police failed on our last ballot by something like 70-30. Biden carried our precincts overwhelmingly; by a far higher margin than Cook County as a whole. Finally, for all you're saying about the downwind effects of elite liberal take-havers saying it's OK to pursue single parenthood, in context what you're trying to say is "violent crime statistics that prominently feature Black people is a natural consequence of liberals de-emphasizing two-parent households". I'm sorry, that's plainly false. None of the circumstances this thread talks about have anything to do with BLM talking about people being raised in part by aunties and grandmas, or anything said on Twitter. I said upthread and I'll say it again: it wouldn't be fair for me to try to paint conservative thought by what Sohrab Ahmari believes, let alone Marjorie Taylor Greene. But that's effectively what you're doing when you suggest that BLM-Facebook-thought defines liberalism. Liberals overwhelmingly believe in the importance of two-parent child-rearing. † (As someone somewhat active in local politics, I'll add that Facebook is deeply problematic --- it stands in for public comment and discussion, but provides none of the safeguards of open meetings laws. There's also a trend towards municipalities outsourcing this kind of discussion to platforms like Granicus, with the same problems: private entities can control public speech, which is fine until they become the government's own formal mechanism for collecting feedback. It's a whole can of worms.)
- ambrozk 5y ago
  A lot of what you said is reasonable, but I think you're really stretching your argument when you say that 1) liberals refrain from advocating for the "two-parent family" because to do so would imply pushing back on workplace equity and benefits for single parents, and 2) support for fathers' inclusion in paid family leave is proof that liberals care about two-parent families. I think you are seriously underplaying a very real strain in left-wing thought, which views the "traditional family" with extreme suspicion, and associates exhortations for couples to marry before they have kids, to stay together for the sake of the kids, and so on, as essentially patriarchal, religious encroachments on personal liberty. Since you want hard poll evidence, I browsed Gallup and found a poll: 41% of Republicans vs. 61% of Democrats think having kids outside of marriage is "morally acceptable". [1] 61% of Republicans vs. 73% of Democrats think divorce is acceptable. [1] Interestingly, you can look at [2] and see that these issues fall pretty neatly into OP's argument about "luxury beliefs". For instance, on the "having kids outside of marriage" issue, only 38% of black Democrats think it is morally acceptable, but 64% of non-black Democrats think it is morally acceptable. The black vs. non-black numbers for sex outside of marriage are 46% to 68%. Given the prevalence of exactly these behaviors in the black community relative to the white community, I think that this constitutes pretty hard evidence that OP's "luxury beliefs" hypothesis has a lot going for it. [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/137357/Four-Moral-Issues-Sharply-Divide-Americans.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/137357/Four-Moral-Issues-Sharpl... [2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/Blacks-Conservative-Republicans-Some-Moral-Issues.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/Blacks-Conservative-Repu...
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  - magicalist 5y ago
    > having kids outside of marriage is "morally acceptable" > divorce is acceptable is not evidence for > views the "traditional family" with extreme suspicion 68% of democrats find embryonic stem cell research morally acceptable...clearly they view "traditional procreation" with extreme suspicion!