This new book sounds fascinating: Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. From the review by Jonathan Rauch:
Rauch points out that traditional family life was built on early marriages, and the ability of low-skilled men to get jobs with little education. But the global economy changed the game, by demanding high levels of skill and education, and the sexual revolution decoupled sex from children. Women entered the workforce and could postpone child bearing; liberalization of divorce laws made it easier to break up a marriage and gave women options and independence.
Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate......
Red America still prefers the traditional model. In 2008, when news emerged that the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential nominee was pregnant, traditionalists were reassured rather than outraged, because Bristol Palin followed the time-honored rules by announcing she would marry the father. They were kids, to be sure, but they would form a family and grow up together, as so many before them had done. Blue America, by contrast, was censorious. Bristol had committed the unforgivable sin of starting a family too young. If red and blue America seemed to be talking past one another about family values, it's because they were.This really rings true, as we look at the faces of the angry TeaBaggers protesting change. When we hear the Palinistas, they are not speaking in the measured mature voices of educated people considering evidence and argument and complexity. They are emotional voices of protest, trying to return to a simple tradition that probably never really was. They are being left behind.
.... Blue norms are well adapted to the Information Age. They encourage late family formation and advanced education. They produce prosperous parents with graduate degrees, low divorce rates, and one or two over-protected children.
Red norms, on the other hand, create a quandary. They shun abortion (which is blue America's ultimate weapon against premature parenthood) and emphasize abstinence over contraception. But deferring sex in today's cultural environment, with its wide acceptance of premarital sex, is hard. ....Moral traditionalism fails to prevent premarital sex and early childbirth. Births precipitate more early marriages and unwed parenthood. That, in turn, increases family breakdown while reducing education and earnings.....
I was talking to J., a 20ish friend of my stepdaughter's. She grew up in a poor, rural community and was glad to escape to move to the city and study for her cosmetology license. (Another of Stepdaughter's friends, F., escaped a similar home town by joining the Navy. ) J's home town was scenically beautiful, but economically depressed after the lumber mills closed. Not for them the information superhighway, challenging jobs, travel and books and reading that most of us enjoy. No expectation of college, no office jobs, no nice car. No big city, edgy bands, dance clubs or new people to meet either. People who can leave, do--like J., and F., who don't plan to return. But J's high school classmates who stayed have few options. THey work dead-end jobs with little money, if they work at all, smoking pot and having sex, and having babies. And fulminating against socialism and that black man in the White House as they wait for their checks or food stamps in a world where progress has literally passed them by.
When J told me about her home town, I wondered: how do we bring them along? There are no jobs there; like many depressed communities that have lost mills, mines, and plants, there's no place for them to go. The modern world has cut out the traditional blue collar worker, who made a solid living in manufacturing or resource extraction. A family structure dependent on traditional views of women, sex, and divorce cracks asunder as those views change, but trying to turn the clock back to the sexual mores of the 50s isn't going to work as a remedy. People can't make a life or a family flipping burgers for minimum wage at MacDonald's. High tech companies and high tech jobs aren't going to relocate into these communities. As Rauch points out, the gap between Them and Us is self-enforcing, and growing . And they aren't going away or getting better. No wonder they are so angry.
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When girls are given a good education and a sense of their own future -- along with sex education and birth control - this cycle can be broken. Most early pregnancies are not with kids of the same age but older men (in their 20s) and girls (in their teens). The patriarchal structures of what this author calls "red families" also contributes. I live in a small town. I see this stuff.
But, Ann, educating women is precisely the problem. That's where all the "rot" in the world started. It gives them freedom and choices and that has led to the downfall of the society at large. At least that's how the ultra "right" see the world.
High tech companies and high tech jobs aren't going to relocate into these communities.
Shouldn't they? I thought one of THE goals of high tech, is to become user-friendly. If they can dumb themselves down to have the ill-educated WORK for them, think how easily the ill-educated will be able to use (i.e., BUY) their products! [Remember how Mr Ford created the automobile market, by paying people enough to buy a Ford? (And also training those who NOTHING about cars, to build them)]
If those high tech companies would just think like Ford, and treat "J's home town" like an under-developed country... [But it would take the Federal Government to make this happen . . . because "J's home town" (et al) don't have the political clout to do this themselves.]
Their work force is not people who squeaked out of high school and went no further. High tech firms don't solder resistors. They write code and chase bugs. The biotech equivalent wield pipetmen and keep meticulous notes. The people who don't have an advanced skill set do not get jobs in that kind of industry.
At the risk of sounding like the Clinton Administration which always said that education is THE solution to the class conflict, perhaps what is needed is greater access to education.
There's plenty of good education out there, it's just that so much of it is prohibitively expensive. The dirty secret of the Ivy Leagues is that they are full of deadwood, legacy admissions who are there only because Mummy and Daddy can pay the tuition bill and have ties to the college going back to the last Ice Age (think of a certain recent President of the USA from a powerful dynasty who sailed through the Ivy Leagues with a C average). I've heard stories that Columbia is filled with legacies up to a third of the student population. All that privileged deadwood takes up space that could be used by people who really are talented.
Trade schools and so-called colleges-for-profit are an unregulated wild west with some very good schools mixed in with some real scams that leave students with little education and deep in debt.
Community colleges try to straddle that divide between the need to learn a trade and the need for general education, both of which are necessary to function in the world, both of which are frequently put in conflict.
All of these things cost money, and even community college is beyond a lot of people's means. The end of the old student loan program should help, but financial aid is getting more restrictive, not less, and scholarships are getting fewer and less adequate to meeting ever climbing tuition costs, materials costs, textbook costs, etc.
Educators frequently complain about being assigned the role of gate-keepers in the American class hierarchy, deciding who enters the the competition to join the professional class and who doesn't. The sad reality is that the talented are not always admitted and the lucky lottery winners too frequently are. The playing field is not and never was level or fair. Ability to pay the bills and talent do not always match up, and the former frequently trumps the latter.
If it was up to me, the solution to the widening and hardening gaps between social classes would be greater access to life-long education, and a renewed, reformed, and strengthened labor movement (contra the Clinton Administration).
Education is not a catch all. It's not just about access to and expectation for college. Not everyone has the ability for it, and not everyone wants to. I don't think education is going to solve the loss of manual labor and good blue color jobs in this country.
I mean education in a broader sense than College. It is pretty well documented that when girls have hope for their lives - things change for the better.
What Ann said...
I'm not just talking about college either, nor did I say it was a panacea (Bill Clinton did that).
Education is no substitute for a strong labor movement.
But, I do think it makes a big difference.
Well, I wonder about the girls in J's hometown. They don't give a damn about much of anything. In part, to have much of anything, they have to leave home.
I live in one of those small towns -- there are ways to do it.
We can't help people who don't want to be helped, but we can help people like J.
Most of Texas is like that, at least it used to be that way when I was there. The world ended at the Rio Grande, Red, and Sabine rivers. Beyond was Terra Incognita inhabited by monsters.
You can't but you can organize older women who have been through what it means to be "stuck" and support them to work with girls. ECWs, AAUW, and others who can organize this.
Fortunately, J helped herself. She's a nice girl, got her cosmetology license, and is working her way up. But How do we take Ann's knowledge, and others, and make it accessible to those red state communities and people hwo need help getting into the way it is now?
They are emotional voices of protest, trying to return to a simple tradition that probably never really was.
No "probably" about it. This teabagger thing is most definitely the Revolt of the Haves :P
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