A social conservative credo - Thirtieth Anniversary Issue

Public Interest, Fall, 1995 by Charles Krauthammer

It is an axiom of the conservative revolution sweeping Washington that the growth in size and power of the welfare state is a primary cause of the decline of society,' mediating institutions-voluntary associations, local government, church, and, above all, the family, the single most important instrument of social cohesion and values transmission. Whether by design or inadvertence, the nanny state has taken over the house.

Welfare policy, for example, creates social chaos by means of governmental incentives that are almost comically perverse. Every teenage girl in the country is told.. Have a child, make sure it is out of wedlock, make sure you have no job or prospects, and Washington will then guarantee you a monthly check, free medical care, and years of job training and child care, also free. After 35 years of this, the illegitimacy rate goes from 5 percent to 30 percent. Surprise.

Liberals are confounded by the fact that the great expansion of their social programs coincides with the dramatic rise of most every index of social breakdown-divorce, illegitimacy, violence, crime, drug abuse, suicide, untreated mental illness (disguised as homelessness). Lacking any new theory to explain this unfortunate association, they prescribe the only therapy their worldview allows. more social programs.

President Clinton, in his 1995 State of the Union Address, for example, embraced a Charles Murray premise when he declared that the epidemic of teen pregnancies and births where there is no marriage" is our most serious social problem." His conclusion, however, is distinctly un-Murray-like: yet another federal program. After drivers ed. and drug ed., we shall now have preg ed. - a few minutes of classroom time to urge young girls and boys not to do precisely what the entire welfare system allows, indeed encourages, them to do. indulge in irresponsible childbearing.

The limits of structural reform

The conservative response is equally clear. not a new government intervention to mitigate the catastrophic consequences of the old intervention but withdrawal of government intervention in the first place. The contraction of the welfare state is the single most important theme of the current conservative revolution. It imbues practically item on the Republicans, political agenda. And it promises a rosy future. Pare back the welfare state and the mediating institutions will once again have the space to flower, reclaiming their rightful place at the center of a revitalized civil society.

It is a rosy scenario. It is unlikely to materialize. Social disintegration is not a reversible chemical reaction. It is far easier to reduce a complex, cohesive social structure to its barest elements of atomized individuals and fractured families than to reassemble these atoms and fractions into a new whole. Institutions so displaced and broken, particularly the family, may not be capable of spontaneous reintegration.

This is not to say that one should flinch from trying. But in, say, abolishing the current welfare entitlement, one should not assume that this in and of itself will solve the conundrum of intergenerational illegitimacy. Abolition is the first step, because without it there is no way back from where we are. But it is only a first step. And, if it is the., only step, the current conservative revolution will surely fail.

That is the case because looking at the effect of government on society is too limited an analysis. The intrusions and expropriations of the welfare state have, generally speaking, created the sustaining conditions that allow the breakdown of families and other mediating institutions. They establish a structure that underwrites self-destructive and antisocial behavior. But they do not create the wants and the values that find their expression in such behavior. The epidemic of teen pregnancy, for example, is fueled by the desire of boys for predatory and casual sex, the acquiescence (often encouragement) of girls, and the contempt of both for the bourgeois norm of settled, married parenthood. Where do these attitudes come from? The AFDC check permits their realization. But it hardly creates them. What does?

Cultural causes of decay

The single greatest shaper of these wants and values is not government but culture. Mass culture is a very recent phenomenon. As an engine of social breakdown, it is vastly underappreciated by those who might be called structural conservatives. Those who believe, for example, that changing the tax structure of the inner city (through enterprise zones) will effect a radical transformation of its social dynamics are missing the larger reality. Never in history have the purveyors of a degraded, almost totally uncensored, culture had direct, unmediated access to the minds of a society's young. An adolescent plugged into a Walkman playing "gangsta rap" represents a revolutionary social phenomenon. youthful consciousness almost literally hardwired to the most extreme and corrupting cultural influences.

Two hundred years ago these influences might reach a thin layer of the upper classes, classes well insulated by education, social code, and sheer wealth from the more baleful consequences of cultural decay. Today these influences reach everyone. Particularly vulnerable are those in communities where the authority structure has disintegrated because of absent or incompetent parents and where there is no power or money or codes to mediate the culture's influence or cushion its effects. In such a milieu in particular-everywhere to some extent - mass culture rules. The results are plain to see.