The American Family Is Making a Comeback
This column orginally appeared in The Atlantic.
On April 24, 2012, President Obama went on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to make his case for student-loan forgiveness and college affordability. After slow-jamming the news, Obama pointed to a surprisingly traditional justification for helping young people reduce their student loan debt: It was causing them to delay marriage.
This moment encapsulates the overlooked underpinning of President Obama's economic message: his focus on family. It is an approach fit for our times, as families in America face extraordinary pressures, obstacles and burdens. Both parties would be wise to emulate this in the upcoming midterm elections.
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It is true that marriage is on the decline, birthrates are down, and divorce rates are high. Some are even suggesting we need to move "beyond marriage." But people's aspirations, rather than just their status, suggest family is still important in American life. This was affirmed in a New York Times feature on "the changing American family" last year which observed that "the old-fashioned family plan of stably married parents residing with their children remains a source of considerable power in America—but one that is increasingly seen as out of reach to all but the educated elite." While this perception may result in part from a set of assumptions that need revision—for instance, the view of marriage as a "capstone," rather than a "cornerstone"—the decline of marriage is not simply a matter of culture. The strains on families and family formation are real, rational, and profound.
A commitment to building a stable family is not the deal it used to be in America. The average American family is poorer than it was 10 years ago. As Stephanie Coontz has pointed out, over the last 40 years changes in the workforce and growing socioeconomic inequality have conspired to stoke familial instability. Our policies have failed to address this new landscape, and because of it we are inhibiting one of our nation's greatest contributors to the public good, and Americans' most personal aspirations: family.
It can be easy to miss the value of family to our nation because its contributions are so ingrained into our lives. Perhaps the best way to assess the value of a stable family is to examine the social costs of broken families. When Americans don't have family to care for them, government must step in to provide those services. For instance, Matthew Zill at the Brookings Institution points out that state and federal governments spend billions of dollars each year to care for children in foster care—$9 billion through Title IV-E of the Social Security Act alone. There are longer-term costs for children who grow up outside of safe, permanent families as well, including the $5.1 billion the government spends incarcerating former foster-care youth each year.
Similarly, familial bonds help defray the costs of caring for the elderly. Filial responsibility—foundationally a moral responsibility, but also a legal responsibility in the United States and in nations around the world—has been central to social cohesion and distribution of social costs and responsibility. However, as family breakdown becomes more common, Medicaid (i.e., taxpayers) will have to bear more of the burden for care of adults. How much of a burden? In 2009, 61.6 million Americans gave uncompensated care to an adult "with limitations in daily activities" at some point during the year—an economic value of $450 billion in unpaid services. From cradle to grave, the social and personal benefits of a healthy family, and the costs of its absence, are evident.
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These benefits of family are certainly evident to the president. Obama's experiences as a father and a husband are essential to understanding Obama the politician. His first book, Dreams from My Father, is driven by his search for identity not just through the prism of race, but as a man who hardly knew his father. He has addressed some of the most important moments and causes of his political life through his perspective as a father and husband: his speech on race in April 2008 and his remarks about Trayvon Martin, his case for the Affordable Care Act, and his advocacy for women. He has made promoting fatherhood a signature issue of his presidency. As someone who personally knows the "hole in the heart" that a child has when a father is absent, Obama has withstood criticism from some on the left for focusing on the role of fathers in children's lives. In private prayers I've shared with the president, and public moments where he leads through his perspective as a son, husband, and father, Obama's value of family has always been clear and moving to me.
The case for Obamacare was not just about the benefits an individual would receive directly, but the indirect benefits received through family members. It's not just college students who appreciate being able to stay on their parents' plan until they were 26 but also the parents who no longer have to worry about their child going without care. Men benefit when their wives and daughters can no longer be denied health-care coverage because they are pregnant. Children don't want to see the money their parents saved up to help them with college costs evaporate, because their sick parent or sibling hit the cap on their health-insurance plan.
As he closed his speech to a Joint Session of Congress on the Affordable Care Act in September 2009, Obama spoke about why the late Senator Ted Kennedy was so passionate about health reform:
Ted Kennedy's passion was born not of some rigid ideology, but of his own experience. It was the experience of having two children stricken with cancer. He never forgot the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is badly sick. And he was able to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance, what it would be like to have to say to a wife or a child or an aging parent, there is something that could make you better, but I just can't afford it.
Obama described this as Kennedy's "large-heartedness." In our personal lives and in our politics, familial relationships provide a pathway to greater empathy. People naturally disbelieve or do not wish to consider a future misfortune of their own, and when they do they would like to think they could manage it. However, everyone can imagine their parent, sibling, or child hitting hard times and how desperately they would search for help.
The White House continues to appreciate the value of approaching economic and social issues through the lens of family. The president hosted a Summit on Working Families in late June that packaged a mixture of tax reforms, women's rights, and workplace policies under the banner of supporting working families. Obama told attendees that these issues are "personal" to him: As the husband of a "brilliant woman who struggled" with work-life balance issues, as the son of a "single mother" who "had to take some food stamps" to feed her family, and as a father of "two unbelievable young ladies ... I want them to be able to have families."
The summit promoted a slate of policies that progressives put forward as supporting working families, including equal pay, raising the minimum wage, paid leave, child and elder care, and fighting workplace discrimination. Some of these are less about family than they are about supporting individuals who may happen to have families of their own. None of them explicitly value stable, two-parent families over other family types, and Democrats continue to show no interest in meeting Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's call to "stigmatize illegitimacy indirectly" through tax benefits available only to married parents. As the costs of family breakdown become even more apparent, Democrats' no-judgment approach may seem insufficient in the face of a demographic and sociological tidal wave.
Still, Democrats are no longer just playing defense on "family values." The summit, and much of the president's political record, reflects Obama's convictions about where American families are hurting the most, and the policies that will serve America's families best. Hillary Clinton recently called for "family-centered economics." In fact, it is the Democrats that have dominated the policy conversation around families since 2008 as the GOP has retreated to a radical individualism in rejection of the Democrats' more communitarian politics.
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That is beginning to change. An emerging group of reform-conservative leaders is pushing a more family-focused economic agenda is emerging from top conservative leaders and thinkers. As Ross Douthat explained: "The immediate reformist priority, the raison d'etre of the movement, is serving the interests and winning the votes of those 'middle class parents with kids' (and people who might want to be middle class parents with kids) on economic issues." These conservatives understand that people neither live, nor want to live, in isolation from one another—and certainly not members of their own family.
"Room to Grow," the "reformicon" manifesto, features a chapter on pro-family policies by W. Bradford Wilcox, which includes reforms to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, eliminating the "marriage penalty," and looking at job training and vocational education through the lens of the family. National Affairs has advanced family-friendly tax reform. Senator Marco Rubio tied the strength of the family to the strength of the American economy in remarks at Catholic University in late July.
This pro-working family approach did have something of a standard-bearer on the Republican side in 2012: former Senator Rick Santorum. During the 2012 Republican primary, Santorum—who wrote a book called It Takes a Family—was often a voice to address our obligations to one another, and he has continued to focus on this message since dropping out of the race.
He even spoke about family to a group of college students at the Heritage Foundation last summer. Of course, this group is not representative of college students in general (they were select politically active, primarily religious conservatives), or even the average young Republican activist, but Santorum is testing a message about families to audiences that do not have families of their own yet. Speaking after a presenter whose entire message was about applying the leadership lessons and ideology of Ronald Reagan to today's problems (one audience member asked what Reagan would think about Common Core), Santorum argued bluntly that a Reagan-era message of cutting taxes and shrinking government is no longer adequate. When asked what Republicans should focus on in 2016, he answered energy policy, manufacturing, and the family.
"We need to focus on marriage, not the definition of marriage, but reclaiming marriage as a public good," Santorum said. "Marriage and family is central. Every family in America is a little business … in fact, the word economy comes from the Greek word 'oikos,' which means home. Every home is a little economy. And when those little economies struggle and suffer … then America fails."
In a widely read article in May, E.J. Dionne previewed the two central progressive critiques of the reformicon vision should it take hold in the GOP:
