Chapter review: Introduction to the 2016 edition

According to many commentators, “the root cause” of the problems Americans face as the twentieth century draws to a close  is an “epidemic of family breakdown.” [One education expert] blames the decline of American education on a “parenting deficit.” “It’s not better teachers, texts or curricula that our children need most . . . . we will never see lasting school reform until we see parent reform.” Divorce and unwed motherhood are said to be the major causes of poverty and inequality in contemporary America. In his state of the Union Address for 1992, President Bush claimed that the crisis of the cities results from “the dissolution of the family.” Kate O'Brien of the Heritage Foundation asserts that people of all political persuasions are coming to understand that America's troubles stem from the collapse of “family stability and the work ethic.” -- Stephanie Koontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, chapter 11, The Crisis Reconsidered, original 1992 edition

Introduction & some context

As one might guess, Introduction to the 2016 edition is the introduction to the 2016 edition of a book. The book in this case is The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz. She is a college professor and an expert on the history of families and family structures and the actual, not spun, reality and forces they operate in.

In revealing and attacking myths, lies and crackpottery, this book is a lot like James Lowen’s 2018 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (chapter review here). Koontz focuses on and debunks an endless stream of lies and myths about families. She describes how political partisans and special interests use the myths to glorify and/or justify both their political beliefs and ideology, and their political, economic and social agendas. The political mythology around American families is staggering. Crackpot thinking and a combination of lies and ignorance is routine in the faux world of families and their effects on parents, children and society.

One point that jumps right out from Introduction is how well the myths from America’s radical right dovetail perfectly with the non-existent world that fundamentalist Christian nationalist dogma and mythology has created. Millions of American conservatives fully buy into the radical family mythology that Christian zealots have created at least since the 1960s. The idealized time was the 1950s, when prosperity was widespread and wealth inequality was relatively low. Myths about how families were and should be popped up and proliferated.

It is also apparent that radical right family mythology fits nicely with radical right mythology about the dominant, authoritarian role of men in government, society and the economy. That is core Christian nationalist dogma. Thus, on this point the fit between radical right religion and politics is as close to perfect as complicated human things like this can get. 

Review: Introduction to the 2016 edition

Koontz wrote the 34 page Introduction to describe what she revised or updated in her original 1992 book. She asserts that most of the 1992 edition has been left unchanged and that the facts and/or mythology she saw then has not changed much. The Introduction is thus a nice summary of the rest of the book, with some or most of the core myths mentioned and the debunking data summarized.

Regarding nostalgia as a trap, Koontz correctly points out that nostalgia is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it leads children to forget bad or unpleasant things in their past while having better recall of good things. But in the minds adults it can be a different thing:

“As time passes, the actual complexity of our history--even of our own personal experience--gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.

Selective memory is not a bad thing when it leads children to forget [parents’] arguments in the back seat of a car and to look forward to the next vacation. But it’s a serious problem when it leads grown-ups to try to re-create a past that either never existed at all or whose seemingly attractive features were inextricably linked to injustices and restrictions on liberty that few Americans would tolerate today.”

Koontz exemplifies the mythology of family using the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision that made same-sex marriage a nationwide right. Judges on both sides of that 5-4 decision got the structure or role of family wrong:

“In his dissent from the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, ‘For all . . . . millennia, across all . . . . civilizations ‘marriage’ referred to only one relationship: the union of a man and a woman.’ Its primordial purpose, Roberts asserted, was to make sure that all children would be raised ‘in the stable conditions of a lifelong relationship.’

These assertions are simply not true. The most culturally preferred form of marriage in the historical record--indeed, the type of marriage referred to most often in the five books of the Old Testament--was actually of one man to several women. Some societies also practiced polyandry, where one woman married several men, and some even sanctioned ghost marriages, where parents married off a son or daughter the the deceased child of another family with whom they wished to establish closer connections.

The most common purpose of marriage in history was not to ensure children had access to both their mother and father but to acquire advantageous in-laws and expand the family labor force. The wishes of the young people being matched up and the well-being of their offspring were frequently subordinated to those goals. That subordination was enforce through the institution of illegitimacy, which functioned to deny parental support to children born of a relationship not approved by the kin of one or both parents or by society’s rulers. In Anglo-American common law, a child born out of wedlock was a filius nullius, a child of nobody, entitled to nothing.”

So much for how the American radical right sees marriage. It is a mirage. How did the majority five justices in Obergefell see  marriage?

“Justice Anthony Kennedy, meanwhile, wrote an eloquent majority opinion in support of marriage equality. Labeling marriage a ‘union unlike any other in its importance’ to two committed persons, Kennedy argued that gays and lesbians deserved to marry because lifelong unions have ‘always promised nobility and dignity to all persons’ and ‘marriage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations.’

These claims are also at odds with historical reality. For thousands of years, marriage conferred nobility and dignity almost exclusively on the husband, who had a legal right to appropriate the property and earnings of his wife and children and forcibly impose his will upon them. As late as the 1970s, most states had ‘head and master’ laws, giving special decision-making rights to husbands, while the law explicitly defined rape as a man’s forcible intercourse with a woman other than his wife.”

More mirage. 

Koontz points out that such mythologizing about the historical benefits marriage has the downside of its tendency to to blame social ills on divorce and unwed motherhood. She points out that in the marriage-centric illusory good old days of the 1950s, poverty and material hardship were more common than now. Women and children bore the brunt of poverty in both traditional marriages and in households headed by women. Current worldwide research indicates that men in marriages are often economically advantaged at the expense of wives and/or children. Koontz writes:

 “In chapter 11 I discuss what’s wrong with the claim that unwed childbearing is the primary cause of poverty, economic insecurity, and inequality. Recent research bears out my argument. A 2015 study concluded that overall, between 1979 and 2013, income inequality was four times more important as family structure in explaining the growth of poverty. Another recent study concludes that since 1995, the role of single parenthood in contributing to economic instability has diminished even more.

Yet, politicians and pundits continue to recycle the myth that poverty and inequality are the result of marital arrangements rather than larger socioeconomic forces. A 2012 report for the Heritage Foundation by Robert Rector, ‘Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty,’ insists, even after the Great Recession plunged so many married families into poverty, that ‘the principal cause [of child poverty] is the absence of married fathers in the home.’ .... And a 2014 publication of the U.S. House Budget Committee, ‘The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later,’ totally misrepresents the accomplishments of the war on poverty ...., before joining the chorus with the claim that ‘the single most important determinant of poverty is family structure.’”

In 2014, Republicans controlled the House and this narrative fits with Christian nationalist and authoritarian radical right propaganda. One can only wonder if House Democrats agreed with this nonsense. Maybe they did.

Other family myths and lies that Koontz skewers in Introduction with actual empirical data include (i) criticism of parents for not spending as much time on child rearing as in cherry picked earlier times, (ii) complaints that marriage is a dying institution (it is not), and (iii) belief in family self-reliance without help from outside the family, including from government domestic spending programs, e.g., the home mortgage interest deduction is worth tens of billions annually to the top 20% of income earners. There is a cornucopia of lies, myths and BS to be revealed and skewered with data. Maybe that is why the book is 409 pages long, 443 pages if one includes Introduction.

Questions: 

1. Is it too much of a stretch to see a close connection between American family mythology and current (i) radical right Christian nationalist fundamentalism, and/or (ii) the rise of fascism as the dominant ideology or mindset in the Republican Party? 

2. Is Koontz a propagandist or is it believable that she is right in arguing there is a great deal of mythology and lies surrounding the American family and the institution of marriage, e.g., was Supreme Court reasoning based mostly on falsehoods in the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage?