"It’s another example of how if you want to see conservative values in practice, you’ll often find them among people who vote Democrat and align on the cultural left."
Is it though? It's hard to think of what subset of Democrat voters that would involve a greater selection bias for conservative values in practice.
Also, note how extremely low the bar is to be considered "trad." It is laughable, frankly, that income hypergamy is considered trad, as if what is found sexually attractive by females is somehow the function of political ideology. It seems to me all the propaganda trying to shape what's found attractive targeted at men, to get them to go after overweight, older girlbosses. I don't know of any progressive cause attempting to convince women they should consider lower income men (who aren't high status in some other way).
I feel like vast distinction in the amount of self improvement advice between men and women is because evangelical culture is fine telling men they need to improve, but not women for some reason. Tons of people out there staying men need to step up, provide, protect, lead (see Aaron's article on servant leadership to see what they often mean by that), but who is telling women they need to be able to cook, clean, be an asset (i.e. a helpmeet) to men if they want those men to make them wives. Far as I can tell no one but the manosphere, which is why Tate and his ilk still have a following despite being shown to be terrible over and over again.
Is it just evangelical culture that can't tell women they need to improve? I suspect that women are not being told that in mainline Protestant, black Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or even Jewish culture. I think it is because we have a feminist culture.
Aaron: You are more in touch with mainline Protestant churches. Do you ever hear women being told they need to improve?
In my limited experience, you don't hear a lot about marriage in general from the mainline churches, maybe because the median age of their congregants is so high.
I agree in general we have a feminist culture. I can only speak to Evangelicals but I doubt the others are fairing better. As an Evangelical I honestly think the help meet dynamic as been turned on its head in many of our churches. Instead of the woman being the help meet for the man on whatever mission God has given him, the man is now the help meet there to just enable the woman to stay home, home school and be as "trad" as possible.
These evangelical "leaders" who talk about making an idol out of marriage need to be very specific. What is the difference between feeling a calling to be a spouse and parent on the one hand, and making an idol out of marriage or the family on the other hand?
It sounds like "cope" talk that rationalizes the lack of family formation.
Cope and a refusal to take any responsibility. If singles are idolizing marriage it makes singlehood and the frustrations with it a them problem. If one dare suggests we have a culture that struggles how to teach young people how to be desirable to the opposite sex (we do) and doesn't have any good practices for getting young people to meet and date (we don't), that would put the responsibility for changing that cultural and creating those meeting hubs, and they can't have that.
I live in one of the bluest bubbles in the US. Couples like Aaron describes are the norm, not the exception here. There's a small playground next to my apartment building which is filled with children playing and parents supervising (or playing with them) just about every day the weather is half decent. The phenomenon is real, but I think it reflects socioeconomic class and not just red versus blue values.
On the right side of the political spectrum, you have a large number of the rural poor and working class. These groups are rife with social pathology. Likewise on the left, the equivalent is the urban poor with their own pathologies (eg southeast DC like a prior poster identified). Moving up the scale to the middle classes, you have exurban and suburban whites (red coded often in menial corporate, "business," sales roles) and salaried, non-elite but credentialed whites (blue coded often social workers, teachers, healthcare workers, state government roles, etc). These people can and do sustain intact family units, but they're struggling across the board these days economically. Aaron's subtype as described here is the UMC, which these days is very disproportionately left leaning. I suspect the main reason for this is that political inclinations correlate strongly with education, especially post graduate education, and the kinds of people who get and maintain UMC jobs are disproportionately more highly educated and credentialed. These types of jobs are also concentrated in urban areas specifically, another factor correlating with left-leaning political perspectives. Among the truly wealthy, you again have both blue coded and red coded versions of each, but these people are pretty uncommon by definition (outlier wealth) so don't really have the numbers to fill up a neighborhood or recognize as a whole population. The truly wealthy have no problem supporting families economically of course, but also have unique dynamics at play vis a vis inheritance, reduced behavioral guardrails given their lavish personal safety net, etc.
The same traits that make someone good at higher education (future time orientation, conscientiousness, avoidance of obvious social pathology) map pretty well onto things that help successfully rear a family. Unfortunately, they don't necessarily map well to fertility, specifically, but once those children are born it tends to work out pretty well for them on average.
A few weeks back, you had an article about demoralized men. The article referenced an IFS study about the topic. In the report from IFS, there was an interesting data point. Among young men under the age of 30, a majority of liberal fathers were married and a majority of conservative fathers were not married. Moderate fathers were even more majority not married.
Of the group of my friends that lives close by, the one that contacts us the most and extends invitations for socializing the most is the one who matches this Blue America values example the most. I’m thankful he’s a friend.
This even extends to religious matters. Anglicans of the liberal/progressive bent go worship in beautiful stone/brick churches with stained glass, stunning choirs and classically trained organists, with priests wearing chausible and plenty of incense.
Meanwhile the conservative ACNA Anglican priests wear at best a stole (if they’re feeling fancy) and meet in a nondescript beige church with a modern worship band playing the latest hits of the late 2000s.
The WSJ: Making Sense of America’s Low Fertility Rate article was disappointing. The idea that women are going to increase Completed Cohort Fertility such that Total Fertility Rate (TFR) as currently calculated is an underestimate is a huge assumption not backed up by science. In the solutions category, they listed a ton of social policy goals that have negative TFR benefit as having positive benefit. Relying on freezing eggs, etc. is how we got to where we are. It changes women's priorities, so they put off having kids in favor of career with mythical thinking about fertility declines not being important (something the article doesn't mention). Also how does men taking long paternity leave help families? He can help with the wife around the house and take care of her so she can focus on taking care of the baby, but there is a real professional and salary cost to losing out on work experience, and men being able to support the family while the wife is taking time off to raise kids *is* associated with higher fertility. If we really wanted to increase fertility, we'd get women help from their mothers, grandmothers and female friends while the man continues working. All in all, it was an article replete with wishful thinking and short on data to support it. It is the MSM equivalent of Evangelical relationship advice: it backs up their priors but doesn't really help people have kids/get married.
I find it interesting that the IFS article ignores the other part of blue DC: The southeastern part of DC (wards 7 and 8). Those wards vote overwhelmingly Democratic, yet those areas have widespread single motherhood, very few marriages, high unemployment, and incredibly high gun violence rates.
Yet this article ignores those wards as being part of "blue DC"... perhaps there's another variable we have to consider here.
A pastor once gave a sermon entitled, "When doing good leads to doing well." A characteristic of elite blues is that they know how to manage their affairs well in the sense of leading organized, stable lives and using their talents to achieve their goals. And indeed many of their civic engagements are a good thing. The ultimate test, however, is whether their commitment is to serving the Judeo-Christian God in their various callings. Unfortunately most of today's liberals hold views that are incompatible with Christianity. The churches they attend may putatively worship god, but he isn't the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible.
I would also be careful about making statements like the following, which appeared in the article above and mentioned "... the inability of evangelicals to articulate a compelling role for women other than wife and mother. This is unappealing to those who have talents and inclinations beyond that, or who are single. " Statements like that imply that in order to be fulfilled a woman must use her talents outside the home. The world today would be an entirely different place if everyone were committed to married women being good wives and mothers. My mother, my wife, and my younger son's wife were and are devoted mothers, and it has led to great joy in our families. All of these women, by the way, are very intelligent and talented. We need intelligent, capable, virtuous Christian women to raise our children. Instead the model today seems to be for everyone, men and women alike, to frantically scramble for worldly fool's gold in the quest for fulfillment.
But the evangelical world doesn’t seem to offer its single women who desire marriage much beyond admonitions not to be too unhappy about their condition. Their hoped-for futures are being sold out, and by a class of leaders who are overwhelmingly married with children themselves - people who wouldn’t trade their own families for all the gold in Ft. Knox. We have to do better than this.
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Aaron, thanks for continuing to beat this drum, even as the broader evangelical world still doesn't seem to want to listen. I try to make this point with young people at my church whenever I can: it's OK to admit to yourself that you REALLY want a spouse. This is a God-given and fundamentally good desire.
I might have mentioned before in this space that my wife was very much in this category. Maybe most of our wives were, not sure. On the one hand, she was a catch. But she was doing effectively nothing about her single status at the time I met her except trying to ignore her unhappiness with it, AS INSTRUCTED. She might easily have aged out of marriageability without anything happening, as I have seen happen to a number of eligible single girls at church. As it was, I had to go out of my way to identify and pursue her.
I can't plug this guy enough - this is just confirmation of what Darel Paul described in From Tolerance to Acceptance. Elite Blue-culture, including their sexual-marriage culture, is not the same thing as the rank-and-file of left-wing voters. The kind of high-conscientiousness people who exist in the top-10% of incomes are not going to participate in self-sabotaging behaviors. This is *why* they're trusted to hold the positions and receive government payouts. The kind of people who would do something stupid like getting divorced, going to a violent protest, or using drugs wouldn't be allowed to be the caretakers of government-funded NGO patronage machines. Likewise, if the money-spigot turned off, it's very likely that these people wouldn't be "blue" anymore. Bureau Voting Model works under the assumption that these people identify as Democrats because they rightly perceive Republicans as hostile to their employment and a personal threat to their job security.
This is the problem of reductive "red v. blue" false dichotomies. The guys running a government-funded NGO think-tank and the white-shoe lobbyists are of an entirely different class from an adjunct-professor in a high-COL city, who is entirely different from a generational welfare recipient.
I get what you're saying, and think political patronage explains a lot, but I don't think it is at all a given that competency in life is necessary to be the caretakers of NGO patronage machines. It seems like total idiots who do stupid things like go to violent protests (such as BLM) are able to secure the bag.
I'll be honest, I haven't known many people roughly my age (early 40s) or younger who have divorced. Those I HAVE known were mostly downwardly-mobile MAGA sorts who attended church seldom or never, even if many identified as Christian or even evangelical. I could make the same point here: that we shouldn't confuse our marriage habits, as highly conscientious upper-middle-class well-catechized weekly+ attenders, with those of this group.
Of course, I don't know many ever-married white lower-middle or working class Democrats; poorish white Democrats are overwhelmingly single women, even more so in the South.
I'd like to believe that doing crazy stupid things like "opening up" your marriage is more common among middle class members of the Reddit left than the MAGA right. But the only two couples I know to have personally "opened up" their marriages were both lower-middle class and MAGA. In both cases this preceded their divorce by around a year. The leftist pseudo-intellectual and downscale MAGA voter arrive at this idea by different paths: the leftist because he believes he is too smart and evolved for archaic patriarchal ideas like sexual jealousy; the downscale MAGA because he lacks the capacity for introspection to even have THAT fully-formed of a justification for his bad idea.
Divorce also seems common among trashier Republican politicians, especially the women. Sarah Palin, MTG. Among celebrities, could point to Taylor Frankie Paul, of "Mormon Wives", who engaged in spouse-swapping and initially signaled Trump support (later scrubbed for, presumably, business reasons).
Yes. It seems that the association of "Republican" with "socially conservative" is less and less the accurate. And maybe another dimension is needed on the political spectrum for practicing and non-practicing social conservatism, as well as lip service social conservatism.
Imo, one of the big confounders that confuses people is the way that standards for post-graduate education have bottomed out over the last 35 years and especially in the last 15. Now we have this huge class of highly credentialled lower-middle class people and it confuses people when they see a Ph.D. with classic lower-middle-class markers like facial piercings. These people LARP as "elite democrats" on social media when they're actually an adjunct at a downscale diploma mill who would have been lucky to be a high school teacher in the 80's, and they're the ones modelling the kind of dyscivic and self-destructive behaviors that are associated with the New Left.
Grad PLUS loans have been a disaster for public discourse since the Cold War.
Blue family values wouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the folks described here. In my extended family we have several examples. Rob Henderson and his luxury beliefs assumes this reality. Some of the kids are messed up though. My wife's uncle was academic dean of the University of Miami. His wife is also an academic. They're predictably blue. Their kids were the flower girl and ring bearer for our wedding. Both are in their 40s now. Neither are married. The daughter (a Brown graduate) is a lesbian. I've seen this story too many times.
"It’s another example of how if you want to see conservative values in practice, you’ll often find them among people who vote Democrat and align on the cultural left."
Is it though? It's hard to think of what subset of Democrat voters that would involve a greater selection bias for conservative values in practice.
Also, note how extremely low the bar is to be considered "trad." It is laughable, frankly, that income hypergamy is considered trad, as if what is found sexually attractive by females is somehow the function of political ideology. It seems to me all the propaganda trying to shape what's found attractive targeted at men, to get them to go after overweight, older girlbosses. I don't know of any progressive cause attempting to convince women they should consider lower income men (who aren't high status in some other way).
I feel like vast distinction in the amount of self improvement advice between men and women is because evangelical culture is fine telling men they need to improve, but not women for some reason. Tons of people out there staying men need to step up, provide, protect, lead (see Aaron's article on servant leadership to see what they often mean by that), but who is telling women they need to be able to cook, clean, be an asset (i.e. a helpmeet) to men if they want those men to make them wives. Far as I can tell no one but the manosphere, which is why Tate and his ilk still have a following despite being shown to be terrible over and over again.
Is it just evangelical culture that can't tell women they need to improve? I suspect that women are not being told that in mainline Protestant, black Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or even Jewish culture. I think it is because we have a feminist culture.
Aaron: You are more in touch with mainline Protestant churches. Do you ever hear women being told they need to improve?
In my limited experience, you don't hear a lot about marriage in general from the mainline churches, maybe because the median age of their congregants is so high.
I agree in general we have a feminist culture. I can only speak to Evangelicals but I doubt the others are fairing better. As an Evangelical I honestly think the help meet dynamic as been turned on its head in many of our churches. Instead of the woman being the help meet for the man on whatever mission God has given him, the man is now the help meet there to just enable the woman to stay home, home school and be as "trad" as possible.
These evangelical "leaders" who talk about making an idol out of marriage need to be very specific. What is the difference between feeling a calling to be a spouse and parent on the one hand, and making an idol out of marriage or the family on the other hand?
It sounds like "cope" talk that rationalizes the lack of family formation.
Cope and a refusal to take any responsibility. If singles are idolizing marriage it makes singlehood and the frustrations with it a them problem. If one dare suggests we have a culture that struggles how to teach young people how to be desirable to the opposite sex (we do) and doesn't have any good practices for getting young people to meet and date (we don't), that would put the responsibility for changing that cultural and creating those meeting hubs, and they can't have that.
I live in one of the bluest bubbles in the US. Couples like Aaron describes are the norm, not the exception here. There's a small playground next to my apartment building which is filled with children playing and parents supervising (or playing with them) just about every day the weather is half decent. The phenomenon is real, but I think it reflects socioeconomic class and not just red versus blue values.
On the right side of the political spectrum, you have a large number of the rural poor and working class. These groups are rife with social pathology. Likewise on the left, the equivalent is the urban poor with their own pathologies (eg southeast DC like a prior poster identified). Moving up the scale to the middle classes, you have exurban and suburban whites (red coded often in menial corporate, "business," sales roles) and salaried, non-elite but credentialed whites (blue coded often social workers, teachers, healthcare workers, state government roles, etc). These people can and do sustain intact family units, but they're struggling across the board these days economically. Aaron's subtype as described here is the UMC, which these days is very disproportionately left leaning. I suspect the main reason for this is that political inclinations correlate strongly with education, especially post graduate education, and the kinds of people who get and maintain UMC jobs are disproportionately more highly educated and credentialed. These types of jobs are also concentrated in urban areas specifically, another factor correlating with left-leaning political perspectives. Among the truly wealthy, you again have both blue coded and red coded versions of each, but these people are pretty uncommon by definition (outlier wealth) so don't really have the numbers to fill up a neighborhood or recognize as a whole population. The truly wealthy have no problem supporting families economically of course, but also have unique dynamics at play vis a vis inheritance, reduced behavioral guardrails given their lavish personal safety net, etc.
The same traits that make someone good at higher education (future time orientation, conscientiousness, avoidance of obvious social pathology) map pretty well onto things that help successfully rear a family. Unfortunately, they don't necessarily map well to fertility, specifically, but once those children are born it tends to work out pretty well for them on average.
A few weeks back, you had an article about demoralized men. The article referenced an IFS study about the topic. In the report from IFS, there was an interesting data point. Among young men under the age of 30, a majority of liberal fathers were married and a majority of conservative fathers were not married. Moderate fathers were even more majority not married.
Of the group of my friends that lives close by, the one that contacts us the most and extends invitations for socializing the most is the one who matches this Blue America values example the most. I’m thankful he’s a friend.
This even extends to religious matters. Anglicans of the liberal/progressive bent go worship in beautiful stone/brick churches with stained glass, stunning choirs and classically trained organists, with priests wearing chausible and plenty of incense.
Meanwhile the conservative ACNA Anglican priests wear at best a stole (if they’re feeling fancy) and meet in a nondescript beige church with a modern worship band playing the latest hits of the late 2000s.
The WSJ: Making Sense of America’s Low Fertility Rate article was disappointing. The idea that women are going to increase Completed Cohort Fertility such that Total Fertility Rate (TFR) as currently calculated is an underestimate is a huge assumption not backed up by science. In the solutions category, they listed a ton of social policy goals that have negative TFR benefit as having positive benefit. Relying on freezing eggs, etc. is how we got to where we are. It changes women's priorities, so they put off having kids in favor of career with mythical thinking about fertility declines not being important (something the article doesn't mention). Also how does men taking long paternity leave help families? He can help with the wife around the house and take care of her so she can focus on taking care of the baby, but there is a real professional and salary cost to losing out on work experience, and men being able to support the family while the wife is taking time off to raise kids *is* associated with higher fertility. If we really wanted to increase fertility, we'd get women help from their mothers, grandmothers and female friends while the man continues working. All in all, it was an article replete with wishful thinking and short on data to support it. It is the MSM equivalent of Evangelical relationship advice: it backs up their priors but doesn't really help people have kids/get married.
I find it interesting that the IFS article ignores the other part of blue DC: The southeastern part of DC (wards 7 and 8). Those wards vote overwhelmingly Democratic, yet those areas have widespread single motherhood, very few marriages, high unemployment, and incredibly high gun violence rates.
Yet this article ignores those wards as being part of "blue DC"... perhaps there's another variable we have to consider here.
A pastor once gave a sermon entitled, "When doing good leads to doing well." A characteristic of elite blues is that they know how to manage their affairs well in the sense of leading organized, stable lives and using their talents to achieve their goals. And indeed many of their civic engagements are a good thing. The ultimate test, however, is whether their commitment is to serving the Judeo-Christian God in their various callings. Unfortunately most of today's liberals hold views that are incompatible with Christianity. The churches they attend may putatively worship god, but he isn't the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible.
I would also be careful about making statements like the following, which appeared in the article above and mentioned "... the inability of evangelicals to articulate a compelling role for women other than wife and mother. This is unappealing to those who have talents and inclinations beyond that, or who are single. " Statements like that imply that in order to be fulfilled a woman must use her talents outside the home. The world today would be an entirely different place if everyone were committed to married women being good wives and mothers. My mother, my wife, and my younger son's wife were and are devoted mothers, and it has led to great joy in our families. All of these women, by the way, are very intelligent and talented. We need intelligent, capable, virtuous Christian women to raise our children. Instead the model today seems to be for everyone, men and women alike, to frantically scramble for worldly fool's gold in the quest for fulfillment.
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But the evangelical world doesn’t seem to offer its single women who desire marriage much beyond admonitions not to be too unhappy about their condition. Their hoped-for futures are being sold out, and by a class of leaders who are overwhelmingly married with children themselves - people who wouldn’t trade their own families for all the gold in Ft. Knox. We have to do better than this.
>
Aaron, thanks for continuing to beat this drum, even as the broader evangelical world still doesn't seem to want to listen. I try to make this point with young people at my church whenever I can: it's OK to admit to yourself that you REALLY want a spouse. This is a God-given and fundamentally good desire.
I might have mentioned before in this space that my wife was very much in this category. Maybe most of our wives were, not sure. On the one hand, she was a catch. But she was doing effectively nothing about her single status at the time I met her except trying to ignore her unhappiness with it, AS INSTRUCTED. She might easily have aged out of marriageability without anything happening, as I have seen happen to a number of eligible single girls at church. As it was, I had to go out of my way to identify and pursue her.
I can't plug this guy enough - this is just confirmation of what Darel Paul described in From Tolerance to Acceptance. Elite Blue-culture, including their sexual-marriage culture, is not the same thing as the rank-and-file of left-wing voters. The kind of high-conscientiousness people who exist in the top-10% of incomes are not going to participate in self-sabotaging behaviors. This is *why* they're trusted to hold the positions and receive government payouts. The kind of people who would do something stupid like getting divorced, going to a violent protest, or using drugs wouldn't be allowed to be the caretakers of government-funded NGO patronage machines. Likewise, if the money-spigot turned off, it's very likely that these people wouldn't be "blue" anymore. Bureau Voting Model works under the assumption that these people identify as Democrats because they rightly perceive Republicans as hostile to their employment and a personal threat to their job security.
This is the problem of reductive "red v. blue" false dichotomies. The guys running a government-funded NGO think-tank and the white-shoe lobbyists are of an entirely different class from an adjunct-professor in a high-COL city, who is entirely different from a generational welfare recipient.
I get what you're saying, and think political patronage explains a lot, but I don't think it is at all a given that competency in life is necessary to be the caretakers of NGO patronage machines. It seems like total idiots who do stupid things like go to violent protests (such as BLM) are able to secure the bag.
This is fair, but I think true on both sides.
I'll be honest, I haven't known many people roughly my age (early 40s) or younger who have divorced. Those I HAVE known were mostly downwardly-mobile MAGA sorts who attended church seldom or never, even if many identified as Christian or even evangelical. I could make the same point here: that we shouldn't confuse our marriage habits, as highly conscientious upper-middle-class well-catechized weekly+ attenders, with those of this group.
Of course, I don't know many ever-married white lower-middle or working class Democrats; poorish white Democrats are overwhelmingly single women, even more so in the South.
I'd like to believe that doing crazy stupid things like "opening up" your marriage is more common among middle class members of the Reddit left than the MAGA right. But the only two couples I know to have personally "opened up" their marriages were both lower-middle class and MAGA. In both cases this preceded their divorce by around a year. The leftist pseudo-intellectual and downscale MAGA voter arrive at this idea by different paths: the leftist because he believes he is too smart and evolved for archaic patriarchal ideas like sexual jealousy; the downscale MAGA because he lacks the capacity for introspection to even have THAT fully-formed of a justification for his bad idea.
Divorce also seems common among trashier Republican politicians, especially the women. Sarah Palin, MTG. Among celebrities, could point to Taylor Frankie Paul, of "Mormon Wives", who engaged in spouse-swapping and initially signaled Trump support (later scrubbed for, presumably, business reasons).
Yes. It seems that the association of "Republican" with "socially conservative" is less and less the accurate. And maybe another dimension is needed on the political spectrum for practicing and non-practicing social conservatism, as well as lip service social conservatism.
Imo, one of the big confounders that confuses people is the way that standards for post-graduate education have bottomed out over the last 35 years and especially in the last 15. Now we have this huge class of highly credentialled lower-middle class people and it confuses people when they see a Ph.D. with classic lower-middle-class markers like facial piercings. These people LARP as "elite democrats" on social media when they're actually an adjunct at a downscale diploma mill who would have been lucky to be a high school teacher in the 80's, and they're the ones modelling the kind of dyscivic and self-destructive behaviors that are associated with the New Left.
Grad PLUS loans have been a disaster for public discourse since the Cold War.
Blue family values wouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the folks described here. In my extended family we have several examples. Rob Henderson and his luxury beliefs assumes this reality. Some of the kids are messed up though. My wife's uncle was academic dean of the University of Miami. His wife is also an academic. They're predictably blue. Their kids were the flower girl and ring bearer for our wedding. Both are in their 40s now. Neither are married. The daughter (a Brown graduate) is a lesbian. I've seen this story too many times.