Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
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Democratic platforms of the 1960s, where they asserted the ongoing necessity of federal programs in order “to assure that every American, of every race, in every region, truly shares in the benefits of economic progress.”69 The party thus opposed state eligibility restrictions, which denied assistance to children of unemployed parents or those that prohibited all assistance when the father was in the home; sought repeal of the “arbitrary limit” on the number of children who could receive assistance; and opposed the provision requiring mothers of young children to work in order for children to be eligible for aid.70 The party also pledged a revamping of federal taxes “to make them more equitable as between rich and poor and as among people with the same income and family responsibilities.”71
Thus, in the 1960s, both Republicans and Democrats began to increasingly invoke values in their pledges to American families. Democrats stressed secular-humanist values such as “inclusion” or “equal protection”/“equal access” and “personal dignity or fulfillment” in their promises for enhanced Hearth family policies. They did not formulate a valuational Soul family ideal distinct from material security but instead asserted the valuational structure underlying their economic approach. Republicans, on the other hand, were beginning to formulate a wholly noneconomic Soul family ideal: the “traditional family” as a fundamentally moral and valuational unit, assembling a valuational policy agenda that began to combine ideational elements of both a neoliberal and a social traditional cast. This approach would soon come to permeate and challenge the very essence of the longdominant economic family approach, championed by New Deal Liberal-Labor Democrats.
Late Century to the Present, 1968–2012: Invigorated Soul Family Ideal and Enhanced Polarization
The year 1968 marked a decisive turn in partisan politics, with far-reaching effects on family political development. In the midst of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, the tight grasp of the postwar Democratic Coalition over national politics began to loosen, making way for a shift in policy—away from economic security toward values and cultural battles.
Following riots at their National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Democrats adopted a series of changes to their nomination and convention rules, accommodating cultural progressives into their ranks and ensuring significant change to the party’s ideology. In 1972, the Democratic platform avowed an agenda that was more attentive to values and postmaterial concerns than merely economic redistribution. The party described three things that “people want” as an interplay between secular-humanist values and material needs: “They want a personal life that makes us all feel that life is worth living,” “a social environment whose institutions promote the good of all,” and “an opportunity to achieve their aspirations and their dreams for themselves and their children.”72 This was a far cry from the agenda contained in the Economic Bill of Rights to which Democrats had long pledged, in which they had asserted hard economic rights, concerned only with a family’s material life, such as “the right to earn a minimum wage,” “the right of every famer … to earn a decent living,” and the “right to a decent home.”73
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Democratic platforms, however, continued to emphasize the postwar Hearth focus on family economics, attributing family change and “disintegrating families” not to changing cultural values or family norms but to disadvantageous economic conditions, such as poverty and unemployment. In their family pledges, they promised to hold families together by “provid[ing] the help a family needs to survive a crisis together.”74 Still concerned that “prosperity will not be evenly distributed among regions and communities,” they pledged “special efforts to help families in economic transition who are faced with loss of homes, health benefits, and pensions.”75 In their family pledges, Democratic platforms expanded and made explicit their postwar commitment to values of equality, fairness, and inclusion underpinning their economic Hearth policy approach rather than develop anew their own valuational Soul family one.
Starting in 1976, the Republican Party on its part thoroughly revised its platform ideology and welded Judeo-Christian constructions of family values more centrally onto its neoliberal approach of free markets and private initiative.76 In a large plank entitled “American Family,” the Republican Party in that year asserted that “families must continue to be the foundation of our nation” and emphasized its role in preserving a traditional (social and economic) valuational order: “Families—not government programs—are the best way to make sure … our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved.”77 As part of the pledge to create a “hospitable environment for family life,” the Republican platform committed to several policy positions regarding taxation, economic policies, education, employment, reproductive rights, and welfare. The preservation of the nuclear (heterosexual) family emerged as a central organizing feature for many Republican social and economic policies.78
In 1980, the Republican platform used the rejuvenated Soul family ideal to launch its strongest repudiation yet of the postwar Democratic agenda. Family and its (independent social and economic) values were declared as “fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic.”79 The platform asserted that “all domestic policies, from child care and schooling to social security and the tax code, must be formulated with the family in mind.”80 In the immediate postwar period, free market–based Republican family values such as self-reliance, found in pledges on the family farm, were directed at opposing the liberal administrative state. However, starting in 1976, Republican platforms thereafter made the preservation of “the traditional family” and “traditional family values” a positive goal of public policy requiring not only the dismantling of existing Democratic programs but also the creation of new programs, to enhance and support traditional families in perpetuating traditional social-moral values.
Regardless of substantive differences in partisan family values, the difference over the relative role and extent of values (as major or minor) in defining the parties’ late twentieth-century approach to families is evident from the extent to which both addressed values in their family pledges. Starting in 1976, Republicans far outpaced Democrats in their references to values in their platforms (Figure 7). Democratic platforms embraced values less and with greater inconsistency in their family pledges. Although Democrats invoked values more in family planks in 1972, under the influence of the New Left during the McGovern election, this did not result in a durable shift toward a Democratic (secular) valuational family approach. Instead, Democratic family pledges in the 1980s were much less preoccupied with values than their Republican counterparts. Values then began to feature more prominently in Democratic family pledges in the 1990s, falling in 2004, only to rebound during the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
In terms of substantive differences, each party turned to family to highlight its own social vision. Republican family pledges sought to restore a conservative social order, consistently invoking neoliberal-traditional values of strong family life, faith/traditional moral values, family self-determination, and self-reliance (Figure 8). On the other hand, the Democratic Party in its family pledges engendered a more progressive social order by repeatedly making reference to secular-humanist values of diversity, equal protection, fairness, the pursuit of personal fulfillment, and individual self-determination.81
Figure 7. Sum of values invoked in family paragraphs, Democratic and Republican platforms, 1968–2012. Data compiled by author.
Figure 8. Values in Democratic and Republican family paragraphs, 1968–2012.
There were commonalties too, evidencing greater cross-party appeal of certain (Republican) values. First, the value of hard work was highlighted initially only in Republican planks on welfare reform but has since been embraced by the Democratic Party.