When it comes to the American family, the day is late, and the damage done has been great. In urging men and women to forge strong families, author Brad Wilcox is fighting what amounts to a rear-guard action, but he believes that this is the only way to save civilization.
Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, by Brad Wilcox (293 pages, Broadside Books, 2024)
This is an ambitious book with an ambitious task, maybe even an impossible one. After all, the goal of its author, Brad Wilcox, is not just to save America, but to “save civilization.” His presumption seems to be that saving the former offers at least a chance at ultimately saving the latter. To be sure, rescuing civilization itself is a much larger and much more daunting task, but this is the undisguised message of his subtitle. And yet Wilcox may well have a point—or at least a powerful reason to undertake this task.
Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Professor Wilcox is an ivory-tower oxymoron. Among the many caps that he wears is that of a conservative sociologist. As such, he must be a virtual loner among his colleagues. And yet, as that loner, Wilcox seems determined to do his part to demonstrate that the late Harry Jaffa also had a point.
Jaffa believed that the world would be a better place if the United States was the world’s premier power. He was also of a mind to think that the USA would be a better and stronger country if the Republican party was the dominant political organization within it. And to complete his trifecta, the GOP would be better able to handle its Jaffa-assigned task if conservatives dominated that party.
But first things first. Wilcox’s stories and evidence in this book are American stories and evidence. And his marching orders to “get married” (and, yes, have children) are marching orders that are being directed at Americans only. Not that Wilcox would be likely to object to others following the American lead, especially others who currently populate the stagnant populations of the developed world.
And not that Wilcox is making a martial case. Not at all. His goal is simply to revive marriage, not to put the country on a war footing. That step alone, he believes, would revive families, thereby reviving the birth rate and ultimately reviving the country and maybe even the civilized world.
And who could possibly object to any of that? Plenty of people, especially those numbered among the American elite, he is forced to concede. Nonetheless, Wilcox trudges on, convinced as he is that family-first marriages are also just plain happier marriages in all sorts of ways. And he has the graphs and the stories to clinch his case, as well as an admirable sense of optimism to buttress it.
But let’s put the first thing first. Of course, that would seem to be marriage—except that it isn’t. Wilcox does trumpet the success sequence, which means that marriage should precede children, even if all too often it doesn’t. But the first thing to put first is finding someone compatible to love and to marry, let alone someone who is equally interested in—and committed to—putting family first instead of “me” first.
Wilcox almost inadvertently introduces a major stumbling block right off the bat. He opens with the brief stories of Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer, and Ashley Marrero, a “forty-three-year-old, single, childless professional.”
They are not an item. They are not even a potential item. They are simply stand-ins for two types: a male suspicious of marriage as nothing more than a ball and chain, and a female who prefers a career to marriage.
Wilcox tells us that Tate “exemplifies” an ever-growing host of men on the “far right”; Marrero’s politics go unmentioned, but we can guess. And therein lies a problem that Wilcox only accidentally introduces and never really pursues: Young men in America are moving steadily to the right, while young women are heading just as steadily to the left.
Remember that infamous “Julia” commercial from the Obama re-election campaign of 2012? Women don’t need a husband; they can simply marry the state. Near the end of the book Wilcox takes a stab at even-handedness by criticizing both the “blind faith” in the market on the part of those on the right and the “blind faith” in the state possessed by those on the left.
But the problem remains, and the divide is real. And it is a widening divide at that. Marriages between left and right and not marriages made in heaven, James Carville and Mary Matalin notwithstanding. Just ask Kellyanne Fitzpatrick Conway, who was once Mrs. George Conway.
Wilcox wants to focus on the possibilities and importance of a good marriage, which by his definition is a family-first marriage. And he has much to offer in this book that is important and good. Nonetheless, one comes away from reading it with a sense that he is fighting a losing battle and doesn’t quite realize it. Or at least he doesn’t want to realize it.
There is, after all, an upbeat tone throughout. The evidence is there that family-first marriages can and do work. He dwells on four groups of Americans who have built stable and “largely satisfying” marriages. Called the “masters of marriage” by Wilcox, they are categorized as the Strivers, the Faithful, Asian-Americans, and Conservatives.
While there is little doubt that there is some overlap among them, there is also little doubt that Wilcox has uncovered and promoted sterling stories of significant numbers of good Americans, who are in turn raising very good children.
It’s also true that the “me decade” of the 1970s, a decade far worse in many ways than the much-maligned sixties, is long gone. The divorce rate, which then exploded, has long since leveled off. The birth rate has at least ceased to plummet, even if it seems to have skidded to a halt at a less than stable replacement. A birth rate of 2.1 per woman is barely acceptable; the current 1.6 is not.
Wilcox also neatly (which translates as politely, even breezily, and not at all snarkily or even remotely professorially) disposes of three myths, each of which is “antithetical to a good marriage,” and each of which has been rejected by his family-firsters. The first would be the “flying solo” myth, which hold that work is more important than marriage for today’s woman. The second is the “family diversity” myth, which asserts that family structure doesn’t really matter. And the third is the “soulmate” myth, the goal of which is to be happily married, but not necessarily stably married. Such partners would also prefer to be unaccompanied by those soulmate-crushing entities called children tagging along and thereby inevitably interfering with those spontaneous, “soulmatey” obligations and opportunities.
Here and there, Wilcox occasionally inserts his own story and travails, his joys and sorrows, his successes and difficulties, into his narrative. Born in 1970, or just at the onset of the “Me decade,” his father died when he was three. A convert to Catholicism, Wilcox and his wife adopted five children before having twins in their late thirties. While he doesn’t belabor his own story, it’s clear that he and his wife practice what he preaches.
What’s also quite clear is his firm and frequently repeated criticism of our elites, which he now and again refers to quite pointedly as our “ruling class.” The thrust of that criticism is that, by and large, they preach what they do not practice. Echoing Charles Murray, Brad Wilcox has little time and less respect for elitist/ruling class types who get married, have their requisite two children, stay married, share duties, and benefit more often than not from two incomes, while continuously preaching the virtues of the very myths that Wilcox thoroughly debunks.
In the end, Wilcox cannot resist debunking our elitist rulers for their “inverted hypocrisy.” Ordinary hypocrisy is the public display of virtue, coupled with the private practice of vice. Our elites reverse this. Privately, they are practicing “familists,” who live their own versions of family-first marriages. But publicly they promote family diversity, individual choice, the joys of work and “me”-ness—and, ultimately, chaos.
As Wilcox correctly sees it, they are “inverted hypocrites,” who refuse to preach what they practice. In other words, they talk left and walk right. As Wilcox then forebodingly concludes, this “dereliction of duty” on the part of elite Americans is nothing less than a “tragedy.”
It is also evidence that at this precarious point in our nation’s history the feminist gospel has won the day. That gospel has convinced all too many of the best and the brightest among us that work really is more important than family.
Has this victory been permanently won? Clearly, Wilcox doesn’t think so. Or at least he hopes not. If he did, he wouldn’t have bothered writing this book. But what’s just as clear at this moment in history is that he is fighting what amounts to a rear-guard action.
The day is late, and the damage is great. Near the end of the book Wilcox dwells specifically on the damage done to young men of marrying age, especially working-class and middle-class young men… the drugs, the sense of hopelessness, the joblessness, the abandonment of school and work, the acting out.
While Wilcox may well have begun this project with renewed hope for his country and, yes, for civilization to boot, the book begins and ends on notes of deep pessimism, even despair.
And while Brad Wilcox does try to steer with an even hand between left and right, between the market and the state, he surely knows what another Catholic convert, G.K. Chesterton, also knew not all that many decades ago: that without the family we are helpless before the state.
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