In my piece a few weeks ago about leaving New York, I made the claim that the city is no longer a place to raise a family. Sadly, this is true of all communities dominated by progressives, which of course is pretty much all of America’s cities. I want to write briefly about why it is that progressives have turned against families, and what this means for our system of two-party politics.
For much of the 20th century, the Democratic party was the party of the poor and working class, while the Republican party was the party of the wealthy, upwardly mobile middle class and business. Over the past decade or two, the parties have essentially swapped membership. Democrats now possess a near monopoly on college-educated cultural elites (the so-called laptop class) and big business. Republicans have become the party of “deplorables.”
This split between left and right is often stereotyped by the mainstream media. The left is urban and suburban, the right is rural. The left is secular, the right is religious. The left is college educated, the right is less educated (or uneducated). There are indeed grains of truth to these conventional ideas. However, they have, in the last several years, become much less true.
There is a better way to catalog our nation’s polarization. The left, having been taken over by the woke progressive wing, has become the anti-family, anti-child faction. The right, as a reaction to the left’s culture war, is becoming the coalition of pro-family, pro-child interests. To understand what is happening in American politics, you need to first recognize who exactly are the progressives that now speak for the Democratic party.
Progressives are now dominated by two constituencies: young ideologues, trained in universities in the ways of social justice, and loudest members of the LGBTQ community (most notably, the ‘T’ and ‘Q’). What these two constituencies have in common, most importantly, is an aversion to having children. Or even worse, an aversion to children.
Social justice ideology has conditioned young people to view society as hostile and unredeemable. Men, they are told, are toxic. Climate change will inevitably sink us. Oppression is always and everywhere.
How could any self respecting human being bring kids into such a world? The young, girls especially, have been radicalized to not want kids. I spoke about this phenomenon to the talented journalist, Suzy Weiss, in an early episode of Take Back Our Schools.
Part and parcel with social justice education is the culture of narcissism brought on by social-emotional learning. Children are obsessively being told to focus on their mental health and on self care, a supercharged update to the “me” generation. The sacrifice and compromise required of having a real-life partner and a family is, they are told, not worth it. Instead of encouraging young people to go out in the real world, form relationships, marry and have kids, we are telling them to sit home in their “safe spaces”, watch Netflix and porn.
We see these trends play out in the data. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. marriage rate fell to its lowest rate since the federal government began keeping data in 1867. In 2020, births diminished in every single state. In fact, more people died than were born in 25 states in 2020, far exceeding the 2019 record of 5 states. A recent study in the Journal of Marriage and Family showed a striking decrease in the desire for men to become fathers over the past two decades. And millennials aren’t having sex.
“The number of young men (ages 18 to 30) who admit they have had no sex in the past year tripled between 2008 and 2018. Cities like New York, where young, secular Americans flock to to build their lives, are increasingly childless. In San Francisco, there are more dogs than children.”
The second group that dominates today’s progressive discourse are the trans rights activists. They claim to speak for the entire LGBTQ population and they proclaim that they are merely fighting for society’s acceptance of trans children. Both are lies.
Underpinning the trans movement is queer theory, which asserts that sex and gender are social, rather than biological constructions, and denies the normalcy of both heterosexuality and the nuclear family.
What the trans movement is actually doing to children is twofold. First, they are encouraging young (likely lesbian) girls to take irreversible puberty blockers and have double mastectomies (“top surgery”). In other words, they are advocating for the permanent sterilization of girls to ensure that they never have children and can never leave the trans cult.
In one of the best episodes of Take Back Our Schools that we’ve done, I talked about the exploding number of teenage girls experiencing gender dysphoria with psychotherapist and activist, Stella O’Malley. Stella, now a happy and proud mother, shares her own story of growing up wishing she was a boy and reflects on if she had been a child today, she probably would have been seduced by trans ideology.
The trans rights activists play the same game as the race ideologues. In CRT-land, if you’re not an antiracist you’re racist. Here, it’s even worse. If you’re not in favor of hormone treatments and radical surgeries for teenagers, you’re not only a homophobe, but you are responsible for the potential suicides of children born in the wrong bodies.
The second focus of the trans movement, which gets much less press, is to recruit heterosexual girls as “allies” to the clan of the trans and queer, or what has rightly been called “grooming.” Not grooming for sex, per se, but grooming for the cause. Trans activists have been successful by attaching themselves to the “intersectional” social justice movement. White girls (the most vulnerable demographic for this ideology) can escape the oppressor class by “coming out” as queer and rejecting a heterosexual lifestyle.
The queer and trans lobby has also heavily influenced widely used sex-ed curricula, which now promotes both gay sex and masturbation to children starting in kindergarten. The blatant message to impressionable kids is that having babies (i.e. traditional families) should be considered no more normal than any other lifestyle choice.
In a nutshell, queer theory, like all offshoots of neo-Marxist critical theory is about burning down society. However, queer theory is probably critical theory’s most dangerous strain. It directly attacks objectivity with its denial of the most basic fundamentals of science. Moreover, it advocates for the extinction of the human race by grooming children to not want their own kids.
Before moving on, I want to suggest an idea that may or not be obvious. It was not always the case that most gays did not have children.
Throughout most of history, to be gay or lesbian was to be an outcast, or even a criminal. Consequently, most gays hid their sexual orientation, and one way to do this was to marry and have children. I would surmise that until relatively recently, there were a large number of marriages of gay/lesbian couples who went on to have children. With the norming of gay rights and gay marriage, things have changed. In many ways for the better, obviously, but perhaps also with some unintended consequences. One of those consequences being fewer families, and fewer families with children.
The left’s animosity towards children became abundantly clear during the pandemic, as I wrote about in my previous piece. Progressive public health officials, politicians and the media encouraged us to see and treat kids as walking germs, as grandma’s killer, and not society’s future. And so, most of us went along with such things as extended school closures, toddler mask mandates and forced unnecessary vaccines. We cancelled children’s lives, so we could feel better about not cancelling our own.
If I am correct that the split between left and right is becoming best categorized by one’s attitude towards children, then there is both good and bad news. The good news is that there is the potential to make a post-Trump Republican party a much broader coalition, and one that could actually have the means to win the culture war.
We are seeing signs of this now, with increasing numbers of Latinos, blacks and even white women voting Republican, all fed up with anti-child covid policies, woke schools, accelerating levels of crime, and soaring grocery bills. The midterm elections in a few short weeks should further demonstrate these trends.
I do point out, though, that for Republicans to take full advantage of the left’s any-family stance, the party will have to become more - to use that dreaded word - inclusive. That is to say, it will have to moderate its positions on hyper-divisive issues like abortion. If not, we’ll see increasing number of independents and disaffected Democrats either ping pong between parties from election to election, or just sit them out.
That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is quite scary. The split between pro-family and anti-family factions in our country is irreconcilable and will result in even greater political polarization. Worse, the left, being against children, will become increasingly more dangerous to humanity.
Having children does two things beyond just perpetuating the human species. It forces you to be responsible and it changes your outlook to favor long-term thinking over short-term gratification, or what the kids today call “adulting.”
When too many of us ignore our long-term interests, society winds up implementing very bad ideas, as we are witnessing today. We overspend causing ruinous inflation. We favor green virtue signaling over sensible energy policies. We allow our military to degrade despite the growing threat of Chinese revanchism. We wreck our schools and shatter our cities as an apology for slavery.
The message should be clear. Allow the childless to run the world, and they will inevitably destroy it.
As always, I want to share with you the latest episode of the podcast I co-host with Beth Feeley, Take Back Our Schools, available on all major podcast outlets, including Apple, Google, Spotify and Stitcher.
Equity, Excellence and Choice
On this episode of Take Back Our Schools, Beth and I speak with education policy analyst, author and former teacher Robert Pondiscio. Robert talks about what led him to make a midcareer switch to teaching and opines on the proper role of schools America. We discuss whether equity and excellence in schools can be reconciled or should be considered opposing ideals. Robert shares his views on why some charter school networks have embraced social justice and why others have not, and talks about why the charter school movement lost its bipartisan support. He also discusses why Americans who value education must focus both on school choice and on reforming public schools. Finally, Robert and I reminiscence about our former experiences as fellow Brearley Dads.
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on K–12 education, curriculum, teaching, school choice, and charter schooling. He is the author of many books, including the acclaimed “How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle over School Choice” (Avery, 2019), about Success Academy Charter Schools.
I hope you enjoy these episodes of Take Back Our Schools. As always, please share any ideas or suggestions, including for podcast guests. You can contact me through the website: speakupforeducation.org or email me at andrew@speakupforeducation.org. I am also on Twitter @AndrewGutmann.
Will Republicans become the party of families?
Excellent article, as always, Andrew Gutman. It is tragic that the Progressives have hijacked the Democratic Party. They actually should be called the Regressives. The fact is that the Democratic Party has significant Marxist tendencies, and George Soros is pouring mega millions in the help America confirm Khrushchev’s v prediction: that America would destroy itself from within. The Democrats have done this in a very methodical way. They have taken prayer out of school, and they promote hating America calling it racist, divisive, etc. They are destroying the structure of the family, corrupting the kids with drugs and misinformation about the history of the school (1619 Project). They criticize the notion of achievement in the name of equity, and they hate American exceptionalism. Higher education has been dumbed down, and public education is at its lowest point in decades. Climate change and their alarmists has overtaken all rational thought about the environment. I need not go on. But, being an optimist, I firmly believe that Americans have had enough of the negativity and destruction of the Left. Therefore, vote the bums out on November 8, and take back our amazing country.
Great piece. Non-woke / non-Progressives (let alone Republicans) have a huge hill to climb, though, given basically complete 'elite' capture by the woke, especially education, where this all starts and feeds anew with every university graduation.