The New New Thing

Kimberly Morgan is guest-posting this week at Crooked Timber and she's going to be writing about her work on work/family-type issues. Here's a brief post on parental leave. Hopefully, we'll get more soon. This is an issue that's been hovering for a while now just beneath the radar screen of the political mainstream. Lots of topics (the Larry Summers fracas most recently) that do pop unto the radar are intimately connected to it, and it's become a real preoccupation (often in an under-informed and not-especially-thoughtful way) in the non-political media and non-fiction book publishing world.

Back during her guest-blogging days at The Washington Monthly, Garance observed:

I’m regularly surprised by the number of young, progressive women I know who tell me that the thing they dislike most about the Democratic Party is its obsessive focus on abortion instead of the question of how to combine work and family and not go crazy. They want to be approached as mothers and potential mothers, as well as people with jobs and aspirations, not as atomized rights-bearing individuals given to crisis pregnancies. But those who raise such issues often cannot get any traction because there are simply not enough voices in high enough positions in the press or the party to create buzz. And so the topic remains a cultural issue on the left, rather than a matter for political consideration and action.

In my experience, this isn't the thing any men I know "dislike most about the Democratic Party" but the general phenomenon is something of a preoccupation of many young men as well. Most of the people I know starting out in life are budding members of the meritocratic elite, whose thinking has been highly influenced by feminism over the years even if they wouldn't quite putting that way. They want to have successful careers, but they don't want to be the sort of crappy dads who never have time for their kids. They want to fall and love and marry the sort of women they went to school with and work with -- smart, ambitious people who are unlikely to want to put everything aside to run the household. But they would like to have kids. And they don't want to "go crazy." And like everyone else they're a bit confused about how to cope with the realities of an economy that demands people who want to be successful spend large portions of their early adulthood in school or in apprenticeship-type jobs and be willing to bounce around for years between various university towns and major cities.

Many women and many more men don't quite recognize their discontentment of apprehension about this and related states of affairs as "political" issues per se and for the moment, the politicians seem to agree with them. But almost everyone nowadays recognizes them as issues and I think a politician able to speak about them in a compelling way and put some reasonable ideas on the table would be able to pretty easily get people to start their discontents and nervousness as, in fact, political problems.

For the Democratic Party, I think this is absolutely crucial, even more so in many ways than Garance made it out to be. There's a lot of talk out there nowadays about the idea of somehow downplaying the "cultural" elements of liberalism and refocusing on the economic ones. People associated with the centrist wing of the party tend to phrase this in terms of getting more moderate on the cultural front, while people associated with the left talk more about getting more populist on the economic front, but basically they're working from within the same picture. As a tactical concept, I even think this picture is right. But as a strategic concept, it's missing the ballgame.

The previous high-water marks of liberalism blended the economic and the cultural. The New Deal was about economics, but also about the incorporation of Jews and Catholics into the mainstream of American life. The Great Society linked economic issues with issues related to racial justice. The work/family suite is the early 21st century way to transcend the economic/cultural dichotomy and show, simultaneously, that cultural liberalism is part of the solution to people's economic concerns while big government liberalism is part of the solution to people's concerns about the culture. In an ironic way, the feminist belief that women get a raw deal from the currently-structured economy and the traditionalist concern about erosion of family norms are largely driven by the same set of underlying phenomena. If Democrats can get a grip on this, they'll dominate for a while. Not just (or even particularly) in the "winning lots of elections" sense but in the sense that there are these periodic spurts of liberal hegemony (see, e.g., New Deal and Great Society) in which a whole bunch of stuff changes and the terms of debate shift (less plausibly, but also true, Republicans could do it and dominate).