There are several underlying problems for each side in attempting to command and influence the nation under their own guiding principles. The first problem is in their contrasting views on the role of family in America.
American families and the dilemma for the liberal vision
In his 2012 campaign for re-election as President, Barack Obama launched an online ad called "Julia" that described the role government could play for a hypothetical woman named Julia in every step of her life.First the government provides her with health coverage and pays for her college education, a duty that normally falls to a young girl's parents, particularly her father.
She's looked after in the work force by laws to protect women and provide access to equal pay where she uses birth control to protect her career from pregnancy. Normally this is one of the most important functions women play in society. While women aren't "only good for having children" they are "the only ones good at having children." The blase way in which modern society looks down on this feminine role is certainly curious.
Eventually Julia decides on her own to have a child and is protected in that process with health insurance by the government, not a husband. Guess who looks after her children in Obama's vision? The father? Nope, the government. It's not clear who impregnates her...
It's worth noting that many of today's backlashes amongst progressive people against the traditional family unit are rooted in hurt and pain in the past. Many of them were let down by their fathers or other traditional power structures and either emotionally neglected or allowed to come to harm. Now? They rage against "patriarchy" and insist that the government do what their fathers didn't.
Fundamentally what's happening is that liberals are looking to solve problems of inequality, brokenness, and violence in our culture by replacing the family unit with the government.
The problem, of course, is that the government can't possibly fill that void.
First of all, one of the primary needs for children beyond basic care like food, health, and protection is emotional support. The government can't possibly be a father to different children yet they are incentivizing and promoting visions of the family in which the father is viewed as a non-essential figure.
Secondly, offering protection and care for individual children is a nearly impossible task for the government. There are currently about 24 million children in single-parent homes, approximately 1/4 of all the children in the US. That's an enormous number and in terms of both expense and practicality, too large a group for Washington to reasonably care for.
Meanwhile, sex abuse of children is also on the rise. While liberals eager to attack traditional "patriarchal" targets frequently decry the Catholic Church, their own institution, the public school system, has been a far more prevalent offender.
There is no better counter point to the vision of the government replacing the father in the home then the simple statistical fact that Washington's primary replacement, the school system, is an enormous part of the problem.
The liberal vision is essentially an oversteer, attempting to redress wrongs and inequalities in American society with a wild, unwieldy vision with little chance for success. Natural law affirms the mother and father as the principal actors in a child's upbringing, followed by other members of the family unit, the local community, and so on.
Attempting to look after our nation's children who have been failed by their families from Washington is a hopeless measure. The attempt to triumph that vision as being equal to or superior than the father and the family unit is an evil lie.
American families and the dilemma for the conservative vision
Conservatives ultimately are defined by an emphasis on the family unit. They want to rely on traditional structures like the family unit to get by in life and they want government to support them, or at least not hinder them, in that journey.Consequently, they are not overly fond of attempts by liberals to redefine the family and promote the new vision. For one, it cuts against their deepest values and tells them that their basic principles in life are narrow, wrong, or somehow repressive. Conservatives find that offensive and ludicrious.
Much more importantly though, conservatives know that using the government to fill in the gaps where American families have failed is an effort that they will have to subsidize. Why? Because they already are subsidizing such efforts.
Who's paying for the health care, education, and opportunities for the single mom and her kid? The needed funds are either going to be taxed from the dual-parents and their children or they are going to be subsidized by rising costs.
For instance, in the world of health-care there is repeatedly new measures to provide care for the poor with the intention to pull that money from the hands of the elites and the wealthy. But generally what actually happens is that the rich and powerful simply raise prices and increase the burden on the middle class. Notice that corporations offering health care are pulling in obscene profits, meanwhile real wages are down in the US and breaking into the middle class is an increasingly expensive climb.
But here's the problem for conservatives. They live with these children who are neglected, fatherless, and/or abused. They exist in the same communities, there's no escaping the consequences of broken families. The ideal 2-parent family doesn't live in a bubble, they live in a town with everyone else. It's going to be increasingly difficult to run away from America's problems and insist on being left alone to thrive.
So while conservatives may rightly believe that the family unit is the ultimate answer for how to build a healthy society, there still need to be solutions enacted that deal with the reality that occurs when the family unit is broken. They are going to have to subsidize the costs of family brokenness one way or the other so it's time that conservatives became more active in contributing effective solutions that will help raise up our nation's youth.
Solutions might include "affordable family" measures by the government to make family formation an incentivized act but ultimately and in the meantime people are going to have to work together in community. Much like the African proverb quoted by Hilary Clinton, "it takes a village to raise a child." While that may not mean that subsidized birth control or other Clintonian ideas make sense it's still essentially true. The preference by many conservatives to live in isolation apart from their neighbors simply won't work.
Of all the dilemmas facing America today, the breakdown of the family unit is the primary problem from which many other problems flow. We'll get to some of those other issues in part 2.
