Abstract
In an incisive analysis that spans centuries of U.S. policy, Melinda Cooper traces the historical roots of the ongoing collaboration between social conservatives and neoliberals in Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Central to the internal workings of modern capitalism, she argues, is a powerfully consistent alliance between political conservatism and economic liberalism. Throughout the twentieth century, a discourse of family values emerged at the nexus of free-market liberals’ efforts to enforce familial obligation and social conservatives’ commitment to dismantle a welfare state they believed undermined family and sexual morality. An idea that initially emerged from the poor law tradition of public relief—family responsibility—became the rallying point around which neoliberals and neoconservatives fused this puzzling alliance.
In clear prose and engaging case studies that draw on historical and policy documents, Cooper convincingly shows how this meeting of strange political bedfellows explains policy struggles around issues as wide-ranging as welfare reform, the student debt crisis, and same-sex marriage. All were in part the results of joint efforts by neoliberals and social conservatives to promote the private family as an alternative to the welfare state. Family values has become the shared ideology around which these otherwise divergent groups experience a surprising affinity, one that has had profound consequences for U.S. efforts to create and maintain a social safety net. The book illustrates how these two camps successfully codified family bonds as a moral order to police sexual normativity and as an instrument for distributing and consolidating wealth.
Cooper focuses on how we have seen policymakers wave the flag of familial responsibility especially high during periods of social revolution that challenged the married, two-parent family. Rising rates of divorce and non-marital parenthood during the twentieth century met efforts to transfer the costs of inequality from the state to the family. The welfare rights movement, which overturned many of the moral regulations of welfare that stigmatized and discriminated against unmarried parents in public assistance programs—including man-in-the-house rules and illegitimacy restrictions—met a fierce backlash. While social conservatives worried about the moral breakdown of the family as the foundation of a good society, neoliberals expressed concern about the public costs of subsidizing irresponsible choices. Their convergence resulted in a stingy welfare state that polices the poor while ensuring the intergenerational transmission of wealth and poverty.
Perhaps the clearest example, one that Cooper devotes significant attention to in the book, is the overhaul of welfare cash aid policies for families with dependent children that culminated in the passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Conservatives critiqued what they saw as a welfare state that undermined the married family dependent on a male family wage. Neoliberals joined their forces by cautioning against an impersonal system of social insurance that overturned the natural obligations of kinship and disincentivized mutual familial dependence. Welfare reform under Clinton brought these two ideologies into sharp relief through the explicit promotion of work, heterosexual married families, abstinence until marriage, and responsible fatherhood, including mandatory paternity establishment and child support provisions. Cooper reveals how personal responsibility within the context of sexual normativity has given way to family responsibility as the defining political philosophy of our time. In a return to the older poor law tradition, the family, not the state, became responsible for ensuring children’s welfare. With the ascent of faith-based welfare under George W. Bush, the government outsourced poverty management while making instruction in family values a cornerstone of social service provision.
The major strength of Cooper’s analysis is how she draws this connection between conservative calls for family fortification and neoliberal appeals to market solutions in disparate case studies. She effectively shows how the presumed obligations of kinship under the guise of family morality became the cornerstone of political efforts to suppress the redistributive potential of New Deal and Great Society policies. Cooper addresses how, for example, this political alliance also shaped higher education funding. Worried about the countercultural student protests of the 1960s and, especially, how free public education for minorities would inflame them, neoconservatives and neoliberals both called for the expansion of consumer credit markets to displace the costs of higher education back on to families in the form of consumer credit and student loan debt. Reagan-era policy reforms, including deeper cuts to healthcare, education, and welfare, forced American families to take on even more private debt, shifting responsibility for deficit spending from the state to families.
Family Values is an important book for students of family policy, the welfare state, and inequality, one most appropriate for graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate courses. Cooper deftly shows how deliberate policy choices prioritizing sexual normativity and family responsibility born of the neoliberal-social conservative alliance have exacerbated inequality in the United States. The case studies in each chapter are valuable alone for understandings of inflation, welfare policy, the student debt crisis, the AIDS epidemic, same-sex marriage, and faith-based welfare. Put together, they make a new and critical intervention in the policy literature.
At the end, I wondered what might be done to chip away at this alliance and challenge its legitimating ideologies. Cooper’s analysis holds great insight for the current political climate and how we might fortify the social safety net in a neoliberal era. It can help us better understand the rise of political figures, such as Donald Trump, who personify the power of the intergenerational transmission of wealth. Even more importantly, it helps explain why we struggle to address issues such as national childcare and universal paid family leave. If it is taken for granted by both social conservatives and neoliberals that children’s well-being is solely a family responsibility, how are we to make progress on policies that assume social responsibility for these seemingly private obligations of care? Family Values does not provide an answer, but it is a very good place to start.