What Helps, and What Hinders, the American Dream What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by everyholy feeling, than a man’s own home? —Cicero America’s founding fathers inherited from English common law the doctrine that “a man’s house is his castle.”[1] Property ownership and political autonomy are two sides of the same coin. John Locke […]
Read MoreReclaiming Family-Wage Jobs in an Age of Globalization In his 2010 examination of the welfare state, Never Enough, William Voegeli spilled a lot of ink exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism. But the Claremont scholar also chided his fellow conservatives for failing to see the beam in their own eyes: an obsession with tax cuts […]
Read MoreThe Cultural Dry Rot that Doomed the Postwar Era “The Fifties”—broadly defined to cover the years 1946 to 1964—were on the surface “the best of times,” a golden age of religious renewal, strong families, and a vital and growing middle class. Beneath this façade, however, lurked the theological, moral, and social dry rot that would […]
Read MoreRediscovering the Virtues of a Maligned Decade Within what cultural historian James Billington has aptly labeled “the academic-media-foundation complex,” aversion to the 1950s is now de rigueur. The decade of the Fifties is an era that must trigger—at its very mention—shudders of revulsion at its “social regressiveness,” a regressiveness manifest by a “rush to marry […]
Read MoreAmong members of the Baby Boom generation, any reference to the 1950s provokes wild mood swings, including reactions and responses than can break stereotypes. The self-avowed democratic socialist Harold Meyerson (born in 1950) regularly uses his Washington Post column to gush effusive praise on the United States at mid-twentieth century, pointing to a national industrial […]
Read MoreHow Republicans and Democrats Send Mixed Messages about Marriage and Family Twenty-first century scholars often turn to economics to explain the dramatic changes in American family life since 1970—changes evident in markedly higher rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and non-marital cohabitation and markedly lower rates of marriage and marital childbearing. Legal scholars Naomi Cahn and […]
Read MoreChecking the New Pressure Points on the Middle Class When President Obama delivered an address at Osawatomie, Kansas, in December 2011, he credited the values of hard work and responsibility with helping America overcome the Great Depression at home in the 1930s and fascism abroad in the 1940s. After those triumphs, he contended the same […]
Read MoreAs Goes the Middle-Class Family, So Goes the Nation The middle-class family—as both a cultural ideal and a social reality—has contributed significantly to American prosperity. From the yeoman farmers of Jefferson’s republic to the white-collar workers of today, the middle-class family has passed the torch of liberty to the rising generation. The heterogeneity of America’s […]
Read MoreThe Great-Society Welfare State and the Fiscal Crisis Ever since Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, released his daring deficit-reduction plan in April, policymakers and policy experts have been touting “entitlement reform” as the key to controlling run-away federal spending. Even before the Republicans took control of the House of […]
Read MoreWhy Medicaid Reform Requires a Revival of Marriage That Medicaid is in crisis, few will dispute. Total Medicaid expenditures reached $373.9 billion in 2009 (15 percent of all national health expenditures), up dramatically from $200.5 billion in 2000, from $73.7 billion in 1990, and from just $26.0 billion in 1980.[1] Even appropriate adjustments for inflation […]
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