Marriage For Me, Not For Thee – HotAir

The irony is thick with this one. 

Generally speaking, we encounter the  “Do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy when people feel they are too weak to do the right thing, but they are passing along advice they think is good. 

“I never should have started smoking, and I have found breaking the habit impossible. My advice to you is to never take it up.”

We see the same thing with drug use, bad habits, infidelity, and other things weak human beings do but know are bad. They advise others to stay away from the path they are still on. 

In this case, though, Elites are mainly doing the right thing, but advising others that doing the opposite is just fine or even a good thing. 

That is the theme of Brad Wilcox’s book “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.”

Get Married, out today, can be ordered here from @HarperCollins: https://t.co/9acIHXyIcK

— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) February 13, 2024

Wilcox’s book has just come out, so I won’t pretend I have read it. But I have read the next best thing: his article in The Atlantic in which he takes Elites to task for denying the fact that their lifestyle–get married, get a job, have kids, and stay married are the path to success and happiness. 

It’s a point I have seen made before–the vast majority of people in the upper-middle classes follow these simple rules (people at either end of the social spectrum less so)–and most of them got there by following this advice from their parents who did the same. 

Still, most of these people refuse to say out loud what they know to be the case: alternative lifestyles generally don’t work to produce a successful and happy life. 

s it morally wrong to have a baby outside of marriage?”

“No” is the answer I received from about two-thirds of my sociology-of-family class at the University of Virginia last spring, when I put that question to them in an anonymous online poll. The class of approximately 200 students was diverse geographically, racially, and ethnically. But on questions like this one—asking whether society should promote or value one type of family structure over another—the students I teach at UVA generally say it shouldn’t.

Yet when I asked these same students—who are almost all unmarried—“Do you personally plan to finish your education, work full-time, marry, and then have children?,” 97 percent said yes.

And when I asked, “If you came home at Thanksgiving and told your parents you (or your girlfriend) were having a baby, would your parents freak out?,” 99 percent said yes.

In one sense, these answers are unsurprising. The great majority of my students, about 80 percent, report hailing from an intact family with married parents. (My class at UVA is not exceptional in this regard: 73 percent of students at elite colleges and universities nationally were born to married parents who have since stayed married, versus 51 percent of high-school seniors across the country.) At the same time, a majority of my students are liberal or progressive on many social issues—they are, at a minimum, nonjudgmental about lifestyles unlike their own.

But there’s a problem with this disjunction between my students’ public family ethic and their own private family orientation, a disjunction I see regularly in elite circles. Voluminous research shows that being born into a married, stable household confers enormous benefits on children, whether the parents are rich or poor. The question I put to my students about their life plans involves a variant of what social scientists call the “success sequence.” Research clearly shows that taking three steps—(1) getting at least a high-school degree, (2) working full-time in your 20s, and (3) marrying before you have children—dramatically increases your odds of reaching the middle class or higher and minimizes the chances of your children growing up in poverty.

People at or near the top of the social and economic scale tend to behave in ways that lead to success. I call these bourgeois values. And yet the dominance of Left-wing cultural values has led them to deny that the behaviors that have gotten them there are somehow praiseworthy or downright superior to those of people who don’t behave this way. 

It’s not like there isn’t ample evidence that, statistically speaking, living as the bourgeois do leads to the comfortable life that the bourgeois have. 

It’s true that these behaviors are not guarantees of success, nor is it true that people who don’t behave this way can’t succeed–Elon Musk is the richest man in the world and an odd duck–but the correlation is undeniable. 

No country has ever been more bourgeois than the United States from World War II until the late 1960’s, and that happens to have been the period in which the United States made its leap from a power to THE power, along with the explosion in the Middle Class. 

The phenomenon of people in society’s upper strata talking left but walking right is especially easy to spot at elite universities, but it extends well beyond university culture. A survey I helped lead of California adults in 2019 for the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that seeks to strengthen marriage and family life, manifested a similar sociological pattern. Eighty-five percent of Californians with a college or graduate degree, ages 18 to 50, agreed that family diversity, “where kids grow up in different kinds of families today,” should be publicly celebrated (compared with 69 percent of Californians without a college education). But a clear majority of college-educated Californians, 68 percent, reported that it was personally important to them to have their own kids in marriage. Among those who were already parents, 80 percent were in intact marriages, compared with just 61 percent of their peers in the state who did not have a college degree.

Likewise, the 2022 American Family Survey, a national survey, found that among college-educated liberals, ages 18 to 55, only 30 percent agreed that “children are better off if they have married parents.” Yet 69 percent of the parents within this same group were themselves stably married.