Red Families, Blue Families, One Crisis

Economic stratification, social atomization, and moral drift are breaking families on both sides of the culture war

This is a guest essay by Dr. Benjamin Mabry.

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Conservatives post pictures of Mitt Romney, his wife, and many children and grandchildren to show the superiority of their family values. Liberals may well tout the marriage of Barack and Michelle Obama to do the same.

On the other side, conservatives will criticize liberal divorce memoirs, or cases like that of Adele, who divorced a husband she admitted was a good man who’d done nothing wrong, in an openly stated pursuit of her own happiness she knew would hurt her son. Liberals in turn will mock red American families like that of Sarah Palin, whose teen daughter had an out-of-wedlock birth, and who herself ended up divorced from her husband of 31 years.

Each side likes to point to the other’s failures as proof that their own approach is superior. But what they really show is changes in our society – economic changes, moral changes, and social atomization – that show up in different ways in Blue and Red families because of their distinct failure modes. We have to distinguish these changes and their consequences from the family models themselves.

A good definition of the Blue Model and Red Model families comes from Williams College professor Darel Paul in his book From Tolerance to Equality. (Paul also includes a third model he calls Creole that I will not discuss here).

The Blue Model marriage sees family as a partnership between two individuals for the sake of shared life-long projects that may include developing a common domestic life, having children, saving for retirement, advancing one or both careers, or pursuing shared lifestyle preferences. The critical relationship is that between the two partners. I use non-gendered language here because the Blue Model of marriage does not see biological sex as relevant to the fundamental structure of the relationship. As mentioned, this does not mean that individuals in this kind of relationship may not also desire biological children with an opposite-sex spouse or that Blue Model marriage negates sexual preference. What it means is that the meaning of the relationship is not grounded in those things. Critics of Blue Model marriages misconstrue this as hedonistic, but Blue Model relationships have aspirational meaning. Marriage is understood as a serious, long-term relationship meant to provide security and sustain life-long projects, especially those which allow personal self-actualization and creative expression. In such marriages, the spousal relationship forms an explicitly equal pairing of individuals seeking to be their best selves together. Blue Model family structure requires a high socio-economic status to function effectively and may fail when resources are strained between competing projects.

The Red Model marriage sees family as the primary social unit in a wider community which is primarily biological in character. A man takes a wife in order to have children within a context of related families in an extended community. This is the model that Aristotle describes in The Politics when he states that the family is the basic unit of the tribe and the tribe is the basic unit of the political community. The fundamental structure of this relationship is the household, a community of a husband, wife, and children. Its primary form of expansion is reproductive, as children leave the household to form new households that are networked to the original through bonds of kinship. The Red Model, unlike the others, includes grandparents in its structure as part of the extended kinship network. Even when households are not related by blood, kinship is the defining symbol of community. The Evangelical metaphor of “church family” illustrates this principle. In Red Model marriages, the Patriarch has a central symbolic position as the unifying principle of household order and provider of stability, even if he does not in fact practice that role, with the rest of the family “belonging” to the father. Red Model families are the most diverse in terms of socioeconomic status. Personality characteristics contribute more to Red Model failure than socioeconomic status; failed Red Model marriages are common even among the upper-middle class while they can frequently be successful among the working class.

Two caveats. First, a model is an image of something that doesn’t exist, but which clarifies an essential structure found in many observations. Real families exemplify behaviors and characteristics in common with others, reflecting these archetypes. However, a couple who predominantly expresses blue qualities may still have a thick relationship with extended family and a couple expressing red qualities may still be interested in building shared assets. Second, the notion of which model is “best” is irrelevant. The “best” model presumes a set of values which is inherent to the system of models itself. The act of having a marriage or family that manifests characteristics of these models is itself a valuing-act giving priority to the principles expressed therein.

I wish to point to three major insights which we can derive from Paul’s models. First, they help us distinguish the consequences of a family model from the effects of socioeconomic status. Social and economic stratification places enormous strain on Blue Model marriages, whose downwardly mobile practitioners find themselves unable to successfully achieve the projects which define their partnership. As projects compete with one another for a shrinking pool of resources, the partnership becomes strained and breaks because this competition becomes not merely a conflict of preferred outcomes but of the identities of the partners. The result is the failed Blue Model: divorced, middle-aged, middle-class professionals with highly constrained budgets in high-cost localities who go on to form long-term, yet ultimately finite, relationships. Or financially squeezed people in those places who must marry late or never at all. Blue Model marriages also fail when the couple’s desired projects change or no longer cohere, as those shared projects were the basis of their life together.

While socio-economic stratification does contribute to Red Model failure by reducing the income, and therefore social status, of the Patriarch, I’d argue that the breakdown of traditional social relationships is far more significant. The archetypal failed Red Model marriage, blended families and serial divorce, is the result of the lost purpose of family life as a household community among others. The common narrative today, that Red Model wives feel undervalued as mere wives and mothers, glosses over the fact that a career is the only source of socialization available to a woman who lacks extended family and friendships due to worker mobility and the rise of “bedroom community” suburbs. Loneliness is a known source of self-destructive and antisocial behavior. Likewise, intuiting the meaninglessness of atomized family without an intergenerational purpose, Red Culture husbands retreat into worlds of entertainment, consumerism, or pornography, becoming contemptible and failing to serve as the unifying symbol of a reproductive household community. It is the meaninglessness of family life, in both cases, which destroys Red Culture families.

Second, by emphasizing the phenomenon of failure rather than the models themselves, we can disambiguate the pathologies of modern society from culture-war preferences. The argument over whether Blue or Red Models are “better” is useless. They are seeking to achieve two different things. On the other hand, socioeconomic status or modern moral decay explain more about social problems than which of these two social models is preferred. Poverty obviously harms both styles of family, though is more destructive to the Blue Model. Not only does it strike at the heart of a marriage grounded on mutual self-expression, but poverty is highly correlated with low impulse control and inability to actualize long-term objectives.

On the other hand, personal vice is far more damaging to the Red Model, whose authority is grounded on the charismatic legitimacy of the Patriarch. A Blue Model husband can be forgiven his vices, so long as they don’t disrupt the larger projects of the marriage, because the purpose of the marriage is the actualization of a set of goals. Bill Clinton’s womanizing didn’t destroy his marriage to Hillary, for example. Blue Models can compartmentalize vice within a certain threshold because the relationship model is based on a certain amount of individualistic self-determination. However, a Red Model husband’s vices violate the communal characteristic of a family whose resources should be used for the good of all the members. For him to waste resources on gambling, alcoholism, or consuming pornography is a violation of the moral order of the family. The normalization and mainstreaming of vice today is thus particularly harmful to the Red Model family.

Both Blue and Red Model family structures rest upon a certain moral baseline involving self-control and low time preference. While the Blue Model emphasizes certain shared explicit and implicit projects, and the Red Model emphasizes a generalized good of the whole, both become destabilized by adults who are incapable of controlling their appetites or planning for the future. Even in a Red Model family, the parents must organize family resources towards securing retirement and promoting one or both careers. Even in a Blue Model family, a child cannot be reduced to a project but quickly begins to create new needs and goals of his own within the context of the family unit. Failure in these things drives the lumpenization of the lower-middle class, the regression of lower-middle-class people into self-destructive and criminal behavior patterns, regardless of family formation culture.

Lastly, articulating the models permits us to see the way that the family formation crisis contributes to cascading failures across the whole of society. The pressure that the modern economy puts on young and middle-aged workers to become mobile generates disruptions in family formation, driving failure modes like delayed marriage, divorce, and social atomization while putting pressure even on successful families to adopt certain cultural norms even when maladaptive to one’s own situation.

One group particularly vulnerable to this tendency is elders. The Blue Model has no structural purpose for grandparents. They are presumed to continue their own projects after their children leave, but are reliant on high incomes to sustain their lifestyles. This might have been sustainable when the Blue Model signified wealth, but today’s growing cohort of middle-class elders has become a potent political force behind the wealth transfers to the retired and the gerontocracy of American politics.

On the other hand, middle-class Red Model grandparents may find themselves pushed into Blue Model roles when their children move away for jobs. These elders may be unprepared or unable to support themselves in retirement, or willing but unable to assist their children with the burden of raising their grandchildren. Disconnected from families, elders require more expensive care, cling to high-paying positions long past retirement age, inflate the cost of real estate, and exacerbate downward mobility for all generations. Family formation is a systemic phenomenon, and the effects on one generation roll into all the others.

To summarize, by examining family formation and marriage cultures as sociological phenomena instead of tribal markers, we see that many of the problems with modern American marriage culture are cross-cutting across Blue and Red. While the pathologies may manifest in different expressions, there is a common root in debased moral cultures, social stratification, and economic globalization. This is not to say that there aren’t consequences to choosing one or the other in one’s personal life or even to societal outcomes as a whole. However, the tribal bickering over which is “best” ultimately fails to reveal why all seem to be failing at this time and what can be addressed in the short term to put everyone on a better footing moving forward.

Cover image: Adele by Kristopher Harris, CC BY 2.0