Polarized Families, Polarized Parties. Gwendoline M. Alphonso
masking state inaction and neglect. In this way, the late twentieth-century Democratic conception of family retained its New Deal and post–World War II focus, continuing to stress the material circumstances of families, as well as their economic stagnation or mobility, while also explicating the values underlying their economics-centered approach.
For Democrats, the family values they thus came to claim were progressive, secular-humanist values, not traditional or moral ones; these included values such as equality and equal protection, fairness, and individual self-determination. At the 2012 National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama, for example, told a classic Democratic tale of family values when she recounted the “unflinching sacrifice,” “unconditional love,” and hard work of her father, a pump operator at a city water plant, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and often “struggle[d] to make it out of bed” but never missed a day of work. Mrs. Obama described how her father steadfastly pursued the dream of giving his children the “chance to go places they had never imagined for themselves.” “Dignity, decency, gratitude, humility, fairness and compassion,” she said, are “who we are”; they are the “values Barack and I are trying to pass on to our children.”8 On the face of it, the content of these values is not dissimilar from values often claimed and championed by Republicans, yet for Democrats alone, these values remained firmly imbricated within family economic conditions and state-regulated markets, and familiar arguments for state programmatic assistance based on family economic need were recast as programs that ensured fairness, inclusivity, and equality.
The two partisan approaches to family and their disparate alignments of values and economics align alternatively with a burgeoning “vulnerability” scholarship, most notably developed by feminist legal scholar Martha Fineman. Fineman points to five types of resources or assets that could mitigate human (including family) vulnerability and enhance resilience; these assets are identified as physical, human, social, ecological or environmental, and existential.9 These posited resiliency resources, resources by which families may successfully resist hardships that come their way, can be broadly categorized into external/material assets, on one hand, and internal/valuational or psychological assets, on the other. The two political parties have similarly largely divided over family in policy, diverging over which of the two kinds of assets are central to policy and thus to projected family success. They either focus on the external, economic resources of families, such as their income, wages, jobs, and taxes, promising to improve them in some way, or highlight the internal—valuational or behavioral—assets of a family, such as a family’s discipline, self-reliance, and responsibility. Family policy agendas thus either primarily aim at supporting the material character of families, bolstering their material resources (their Hearth), or have a more internal focus, directed at a family’s Soul, purporting instead to enhance its values resources—its self-reliance, personal responsibility, commitment to marriage, and so on.
At the core of Hearth policies is thus a Hearth family ideal that assumes that a family’s economics, its income, wages, material access to housing, health care, and such, is central to its flourishing and its values secondary, even if very important. And Soul policies assume a Soul family ideal that imagines family as essentially a valuational unit, loosely connected—if at all—to its economic circumstances. The two are poles, or central tendencies, within partisan policy framing of family, overlapping but also certainly distinctive.
This chapter analyzes party platforms and bill sponsorships to present an overview of family political development from 1900 to 2012, revealing the twists and turns of Hearth and Soul family ideals within party dialectics and demonstrating how, since the late twentieth century, there is a stronger than ever political assertion of a distinctive Soul family ideal.10 In so doing, three significant periods of family partisan development are identified: (a) the Progressive Era (1900–1920), (b) the post–World War II period (1945–1955), and (c) the late twentieth-century period to the present (1980–2012). The current chapter demonstrates that through the three periods, family steadily grew in political importance while the parties reversed their family ideologies and began to increasingly polarize over Hearth and Soul, in contrast to earlier periods such as the postwar era, when the two family ideals were more overlapping and shared across the two parties. The three identified periods are then analyzed separately, as case studies, in the chapters to follow that unpack the precise interaction of family and party in each historical phase and analyze the historically contingent conditions that shaped how the parties treated family as they did, simultaneously revealing how family, in turn, shaped party developments in each of the three eras.
The Family in Party Platforms, 1900–2012
The parties have increasingly addressed the family in their platforms. Controlling for the total number of paragraphs in each platform, three distinct periods stand out in the parties’ address of family (Figure 3): an initial period of low salience in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when both parties made reference to family in only 2 percent of their platforms on average; a second period following the Depression through post–World War II (1930s–1964), when the parties occasionally increased their attention to family, with family paragraphs forming 3 to 8 percent of their platforms; and a final period of a durable, sharp increase, starting from 1968 and extending into the twenty-first century, when the parties tripled their attention to family.
Later platforms are also distinctive insofar as more pledges were directed at family as a unit rather than targeting individuals or other collective groups. For example, the parties’ pledges on taxes moved away from solely addressing individual citizens or corporations to also focusing on families; tax pledges shifted from their previous focus on “low-income Americans” and “workers,” for example, to address “low-income families” and “working families.” Since the start of the twentieth century, the percentage of tax pledges that invoked family first doubled and then tripled, from about 6 percent between the 1940s and 1960s to 15 percent in the 1970s, further increasing to upward of 20 percent in the twenty-first century (Figure 4).
Figure 3. Family paragraphs in party platforms, as a percentage of total paragraphs, 1900–2012. N = 17,489 paragraphs. Data compiled by author.
Similarly, welfare and antipoverty promises, long directed only at children, the disabled, and the elderly with no reference to their families, have focused sharply on family units since the 1970s, invoking families as critical to the success or failure of antipoverty measures. From about 15 percent of all welfare paragraphs that invoked family from the 1940s to 1950s, this rose first to 25 percent in the 1970s and then to 43 percent of all welfare paragraphs in the twenty-first century (Figure 4).
Another central feature of family politics since the 1970s has been the increased prominence of the valuational, Soul family ideal. Whereas the parties increased both types of family references (economic and valuational) significantly from the late 1960s to 1970s, the upward trend is much more pronounced in the case of the Soul family approach, with pledges aimed at family values and character bursting onto the political stage, overtaking economic-based Hearth pledges, then falling but maintaining a heightened presence since (Figure 5). Compared to the 1950s and 1960s, party platforms of the 1970s doubled all references to economic family aspects, but they quadrupled the number of their references to family values and its nonmaterial character.
Figure 4. Percentage of tax and antipoverty pledges that cite the family in party platforms, 1900–2012.
Figure 5 also reminds us that despite the current ubiquity of family values in party rhetoric, it was largely a subterranean feature of partisan policy discourse in earlier decades. The two parties previously invoked family more consistently