Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
Depicted in this way, family political development simultaneously illustrates the durability and dynamism of politics, best perceived in terms of the valuable insight of Adam Sheingate as differences in “speed” and “scale” of political developments, such that slower change at the macro level coexists with change occurring at a quicker tempo at the mesa and micro levels of analysis.40
Shifting the spotlight on ideas and discursive narrative formation continues to see important roles played by political actors. In the present account, although legislators (and party elite) operate within prevailing pre-structured (sectional) material and cultural contexts (northern and southern family conceptual frameworks, for instance), they can and sometimes do display significant agency in the imaginative ways they reformulate, revise, and modify these inherited conceptions from one time period to the next, applying them anew to altered policy positions.41
In sum, while Hearth and Soul family ideologies revise and switch between the two parties in the twentieth century and align with different kinds of policies in different eras, these partisan changes occur alongside a more enduring reliance on family economics (Hearth) or family values (Soul) as durable family political ideals. The two ideational frameworks continue to frame how legislators imagine and conceive of family and generate parties’ policy agendas while simultaneously serving as opportunities and constraints on successive political actors looking to formulate new approaches to changing realities.
Overview of Chapters
The first chapter provides an overview of the shifting significance of family within party policy agendas. It uses party platforms from 1900 to 2012 and periodic bill sponsorship/cosponsorship data to demonstrate the growing salience of family in the two parties’ political and policy ideologies, as well as the parties’ increasing attention to family values starting in the 1970s. It assembles the two organizing family ideals, family economics (Hearth) and family values (Soul), demonstrating how they have reversed in the agendas of the Republican and Democratic Parties and periodically supported alternative visions of the state. The chapter identifies three critical periods in the family party development. These three periods (Progressive, post–World War II, and late century) are subsequently examined as in-depth case studies in the following chapters.
The first of three case studies, Chapter 2 focuses on the Progressive Era and assembles the ideational, partisan, and sectional roots of the Hearth and Soul family ideals, demonstrating their deeply gendered and racial character in that early period. It discusses the emergence into national attention of women and child-related family issues in the wake of massive industrialization in the early twentieth century and widespread family demographic changes, and it uses women’s suffrage and intermarriage policy debates to reveal the emerging, ascriptive roots of party competition over Hearth and Soul family ideals.
Chapter 3 picks up after the constitutional reordering of the New Deal and highlights family party development in the postwar period. It describes the anxiety over family behavior in the decade following World War II, demonstrating the wartime origin of the parties’ initial recognition of family as the keystone to national social order. The chapter examines shorter policy case studies of debates over housing policies and the extension of the May Act (to suppress prostitution and the spread of venereal disease), revealing the centrality of the parties’ alternative state visions (for and against the welfare state) as guiding family policy development at this time. It also finds three, not two, partisan ideational coalitions, with southern Democrats displaying mixed allegiances to Hearth and Soul family ideals.
The final case study, in Chapter 4, links the demographic demise of the nuclear family and the coincident southern realignment under way in the late twentieth century, examining policy debates over poverty/welfare reform and education policy to highlight the southern-conservative and northern-liberal family ideals of the New Right and Left, respectively. It situates these policy battles in the distinct southern and northern differences in families’ lives, following the social and economic reconstruction of the late twentieth century, and the New Right’s increasing turn to southern family values to craft anew the Republican Party agenda.
The final chapter ties together the threads of family political development as suggested by the three period case studies to examine the future direction of family in American politics. It suggests that while the story of Hearth and Soul is ongoing, it is now being played out in new ways, with regional electoral conditions now institutionalizing this ideational battle and embedding it even more deeply in American party politics than ever before.
Chapter 1
The Partisan Turn to Family Values: An Overview
During a news conference in December 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was asked a question on birth control, to which he responded, “I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility.”1 More than fifty years later, in 2011, Rick Santorum, a presidential candidate also from the GOP, avowed to “defend America” from those who “say we need a truce on social issues.” Said Santorum, “At the heart of this country … America is a moral enterprise and we are sick at the heart of our country—when we see millions of children aborted and marriage not being defended.” A “truce,” Santorum thus asserted, would amount to “surrender.”2
Eisenhower and Santorum illustrate the transformed role of family in American party politics over the twentieth century. Until the late 1960s, most Republicans and Democrats considered family—its sexuality, poverty, health, formation, and childrearing—a state or local issue, firmly within the purview of the internal police and economy of the respective states or else wholly private, under the domain of the (male) head of household. Historically, of course, contestations over family episodically roiled national party politics. The issue of polygamous marriage, for instance, engrossed national debate in the nineteenth century; miscegenation embroiled the two parties during the Reconstruction and Progressive Eras, invoking doomsday predictions of “race suicide” and declining national greatness,3 and with the onset of industrialization, child labor, mothers’ working conditions, infant and maternal health, and hygiene aroused national attention and enlisted partisan consideration. However, the late twentieth century stands apart in the fact that family came to play an unprecedentedly large and more durable role in structuring party polarization, with Republicans and Democrats assigning it greater than ever political value. Even when viewed narrowly, merely as part of a larger constellation of “cultural” or “social” concerns, family issues began to decisively shape nationwide and statewide electoral outcomes, also playing a steady, durable role in legislative politics.
The year 1980 was decisive to the increased prominence of family to party competition. In that year, the Republican Party launched a new ideology, a repudiation of the Democratic-led progressive agenda that had long dominated since the New Deal.4 The revised Republican ideology, which continues to prevail today, pivoted on two central themes: first, “antistatism,” through which the party highlighted local institutions and emphasized their “private-ness” in opposing the liberal state, and, second, “traditional values,” by which the party began to stress what political scientist Byron Shafer has termed “valuational” concerns, highlighting proper behavioral norms within which social life should proceed.5 Family emerged as the primary issue through which Republicans combined their longer-term antistatism, on one hand, with their newfound emphasis on traditional values, on the other.6
Democrats responded to the late twentieth-century Republican focus on families by similarly elevating family within their own policy discourse but rejecting Republicans’ antistatism and traditional values emphasis. For Democrats, “putting families first” meant more effective material/distributional benefits to encourage family strength regardless of diverse family forms and an enhanced, not reduced, state-family partnership. They claimed that families now came “in all different shapes and sizes,” yet “they all face[d] similar challenges,”7