Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso

      Introduction

      We must first discuss household management, for every city-state is constituted from households.

      —Aristotle

      Struggles to define the soul of America roil through American politics. Reproductive rights and abortion, immigration, and gay, lesbian, and transgender equality are some of the controversies that serve as rallying points for significant electoral groups. Undoubtedly, the American family lies at the core of these strident cultural battles. However, the alignment of family with social or cultural issues is only a partial picture, a manifestation of the New Right’s late twentieth-century success in elevating “family values” as the focus of family policy. This portrayal obscures divisions over family economics, which intertwine with and shape the so-called culture wars over family.¹

      Polarized Families, Polarized Parties documents and analyzes the extraordinary rise of family in twentieth-century party politics in the United States, revealing the political parties’ rightward turn in the later decades toward family values and its enduring tussle with family economics, two frames that have long organized policy debates. By situating late twentieth-century family wars within a broad historical arc that extends back to the start of the past century, the book suggests that the political salience of family values beginning in the 1970s is part of a long-term dynamic of competition in American politics between sectional family ideals, termed Hearth and Soul. Hearth and Soul are two central ideational frameworks through which political actors have viewed family; its normative relationship to the state, economy, and society; and its policy significance. The Soul family approach is southern and champions values, morality, and religiosity in policy, and the Hearth family approach is demonstrated as northern and more materialist, targeting economic conditions facing families. Both are also shown to contain distinct ideologies of state, society, and economy, including ideals of race and gender relations.

      The chapters tell the story of politicized Hearth and Soul family ideals and attendant policy approaches, their intertwining developmental trajectories, and their evolving impact on the substantive policy agendas of the Republican and Democratic Parties through the twentieth century. The central argument is that the shifting allegiance of parties to these family ideals and their policy frameworks reflects changes in the family lives of their constituent bases as well as manipulation by political elites, as the parties court and respond to changing cores of supporters.

      The book demonstrates that the late twentieth-century ascendance of family values onto the national political stage is neither a new nor unprecedented political development; it is an old song but sung more loudly and with modified lyrics. In particular, it reflects the growing southern influence in American politics in the century’s last three decades and the Republican Party’s successful revival of a Soul family values approach to appeal to a southern electorate, facilitating both parties’ turn to family values since. Family economic assistance, once the salient fault line between the two parties, came to be articulated in valuational terms, such that family values emerged as a crucial axis of partisan divisions, obscuring (but not replacing) policy differences over economic assistance to families. This complex empirical story is told in the context of two previous periods in American history: the Progressive Era and the post–World War II period, in which similar political contestations over family ideals occurred in conjunction with widespread demographic family changes, decisively shaping partisan policy debates then and their legacies thereafter.

      In telling this story, the book makes a larger theoretical claim regarding family and the history of party competition. It suggests that family is a valuable thematic tapestry on which to study American political development.² Much like race, gender, or constitutional orders, family is a major organizing feature of American experience through time, whose evolving political relevance hinges on its recurrent capacity to serve as a vital site on which political actors assemble and combine ideologies of state, economy, and society, often in response to large-scale social and demographic changes.

      In the narrative, although Hearth and Soul family frameworks each pivot on a unique family political ideal (i.e., family as instilling values or family as providing material/economic resources), each trades off politically against multiple values/ideals that Americans widely share, thus leaving substantial room for exchange and manipulation of their components by the two parties. Thus, for instance, the chapters reveal how the parties have differentially deployed the Soul family values approach at different periods of time to invoke a positive and negative state, to deploy more or less of a market-based rationality, or to emphasize family values that are at times more moralistic or