“Republicans Want to Change the Culture. Can They?”

Sociologist Claude Fischer writes:

Americans are about to undergo a dramatic social experiment. For generations, our values and ways of life have shifted leftward—that is, toward a more individualized, permissive, secular, do-your-own-thing direction. Now, members of Donald Trump’s coalition have signaled their intent to use the levers of national government to reverse the cultural momentum. How likely are they to succeed?

Fischer continues:

Over about three generations, more and more Americans departed from the supposedly traditional ways of life typically associated with the 1950s. Family changed as, for example, Americans married later, if at all, and had fewer children. Women’s roles changed as girls obtained advanced education and mothers went out to work. Sexual license expanded, with more Americans seeing premarital sex and homosexuality as normal. Christian hegemony declined, as did religious affiliation generally. The historical hierarchy of race was shaken, most vividly evident in the rise of black-white marriages. . . . So widespread and persistent has this progressive shift been that it has fueled a counter-revolutionary culture war, a vigorous defense of “the traditional American way of life” by the political right . . .

Will what looks like a campaign to restore the 1950s work? Who knows? There’s a long-running debate in the commentariat over to what extent culture is downstream of politics. History suggests, however, that explicit governmental efforts to undo the social changes of the late 20th century are unlikely to succeed.

He then goes through a series of issues: the decline in marriages and number of children, the role of women in society and the economy, premarital sex, gay rights, masculinity, and religion. In each, he argues that government action in these areas over the past half century has generally followed rather than pushed the social trends away from stereotypical 1950s-style lifestyles.

We’ve discussed some of these issues here. Regarding family size, I think a lot of confusion arises because, for almost all of human history, a large percentage of the population has been kids and young families, so we’ve developed the intuition that this is the natural order of things. At the level of math, it’s clear that a long-lived stable population will have a lower percentage of kids and young families, but that we’ve found it hard to internalize this fact.

Regarding some of the other issues, Fischer talks about the political polarization on abortion (for more on that, see here), but arguably all these social issues get polarized. One challenge is that polarization looks different to different people. For example, “Anti-Sex League” attitudes can be considered as a right-wing attempt to reinforce traditional status hierarchies or a left-wing attempt to deny biological reality, and, depending on your political perspective, premarital sex can be taken as a healthy sign of rebellion (against religion or the nanny state, take your pick) or as a destructive behavior. This sorts of vibes-based reasoning quickly ties itself into contradictions of the sort that, as Orwell noted, are helpful for authoritarians.

The other thing this all made me think of is the observation, made by many pundits in the post-1980 period, that America has generally moved to the left on social policies and to the right on economic policies. Fischer presents the leftward shift in “values and way of life” as a perhaps unstoppable tide; it seems that the same is true with the rightward shift on issues relating to business regulation, taxes on large fortunes, etc. This can be understood in terms of different sources of economic and political power in the country, as a response to the economic realities of the past fifty years, and as a shift in ideology connected to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I’m not trying to wrap all this into a single story. I found Fischer’s reasoning regarding social trends to be persuasive, and it made me wonder how this all connects to other trends in public opinion, policy, and behavior.