The conservative rhetorical framing of inequality as born of bad culture is convenient in too many ways.
When darling of the online far-right, Ben Shapiro, was pushed in a recent debate with liberal commentator Destiny (Steven Bonnell) to answer for how to solve issues of structural inequality, the cool kid’s philosopher repeats that re-instilling the values of the traditional nuclear family will act as a panacea for all of society’s socio-economic disparities.
Here are a few important snippets from early in the debate:
Destiny: Here’s the conservative merry-go-round… I would say that like there is a minimum funding for schools that I think would help children. And then we go, ‘well, the thing that would help them the most is two-parent households.’ Then I go, okay, well two-parent households actually aren’t the problem. The issue is access to things like birth controls, [so] that people don’t have children early on.
And it’s like, but the issue isn’t actually birth control. The issue is you need a certain amount of money to move out early and get married and then to have a two-parent household. So it’s actually like economic opportunity.
Shapiro: No. No. Just two-parent households, that’s it. Don’t f*ck people before you’re married and have babies. Done.
…
Destiny: People don’t tend to wanna get married at 22 when they’ve just finished college, when they don’t have the money to move out and they can’t afford a house-
Shapiro: [interrupts] Because we have changed the moral status of marriage in the culture, meaning that everyone, poor, rich and in between used to get married.
Shapiro — who famously coined the slogan “facts don’t care about your feelings” — is caught in a contradiction on his last point based on, believe it or not: the facts.
According to data from 2011 by Canada’s Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, as Canadian families move from high to middle income, the percentage of Canadian families led by either a married or common-law partnership goes from 86.3 per cent at the high-earners end, to 48.8 per cent at the middle end. Then, from the middle end to the low end there’s a disparity of 36.7 points, with only 12.1 per cent of lower-earning families being led by a married or common-law couple.
Shapiro taking the culture-needing-change first stance, of course, would look at said data and say that the high-earning families are high earners because they are led by married or common-law couples. However, as Ben Burgis of Jacobin points out in his polemic against Shapiro’s confused cultural arguments:
“A survey published by the New York Times four years ago found that, among people who had or expected to have fewer kids than they wanted, by far the most common reason was ‘child care is too expensive.’ In fact, six of the top seven reasons — respondents were allowed to select multiple reasons — were straightforwardly economic.
- ‘Child care is too expensive’ (64 percent)
- ‘Want more time for the children I have’ (54 percent)
- ‘Worried about the economy’ (49 percent)
- ‘Can’t afford more children’ (44 percent)
- ‘Waited because of financial instability’ (43 percent)
- ‘Not enough paid family leave’ (39 percent)
- ‘No paid family leave’ (38 percent)
”
This data reveals that there is a desire for people to start families and have children, but economic constraints are what stops them.
But what about just getting married in general?
A survey from the Thriving Center of Psychology which looked at views of marriage among Millennials and Generation Z found that “the cost and current economy appears to be a barrier for young adults, with 73 percent stating they felt it’s too expensive to get married.”
What this suggests altogether, is that Shapiro overplays the Judeo-Christian ideal that married couples set for their communities. In his mind, this ideal leads to financial security in society. Likewise, he underplays the extent to which people can or want to start families, and desire and remain in successful marriages because of financial stability. In other words, he’s put the cart before the horse.
The question to be asked then is: Why do conservatives make this culture-first argument?
There’s a preliminary reason that seems fairly obvious. The more you believe Shapiro’s perspective on culture, the more you feel superior to people who are in less fortunate situations than you are. Whatever someone’s situation, whether they’re in a broken family or are unable to get married due to the unaffordability of housing, they are both products of their own choices. They just have bad values, which is their fault, or, more generously, their degenerate community’s fault.
Another reason why this is an enticing worldview is because it doesn’t require much research or empathy. Shapiro’s advice to “not f*ck people before you’re married and have babies” requires far less emotional and intellectual labour than understanding the complexities of the issues of poverty and family structure.
Shapiro also doesn’t contend with how policies that were crafted on the idea of restoring the nuclear family ideal to combat poverty-related issues in the past have failed. Take the famous Moynihan Report, drafted by an American scholar serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson, which made the same calculation mistake when it comes to ideals over material needs.
The Report’s misunderstanding of the driving force behind the dissolution of family structures in Black communities in the States became the impetus for later cuts and outright removals of single-parent assistance programs for paternal reinstatement policy, as was the story of Bill Clinton’s attack on welfare programs like the AFDC in the ‘90s.
Decades later, the issue of low-income single-parent households persists in Black communities in the States despite policies aimed at incentivising two-parent structures.
Ironically, the Moynihan Report lends some acknowledgement to more systemic-material issues, such as discriminatory policies like redlining, as contributing to the issue of low-income single-family Black households. But even still, the Report concludes that the prevalence of single-family homes in the Black community was due to a “tangle of pathology… capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the White world,” and that “at the heart of the deterioration of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.”
“Needless to say, there is a longstanding history on the right of deflecting arguments about material inequalities of wealth and power to the ‘idealist’ level of culture and values where they are less threatening. You’ve seen that since at least Burke’s insistence that the main causes of the French Revolution are agitation by nebbish radical intellectuals, rather than genuine dissatisfaction with the Ancien Régime on the part of the poor and dispossessed,” said author of The Political Right and Equality and Lecturer at the University of Michigan, Matt McManus.
If one were to try to pinpoint something of an origin to the conservative rhetorical framing of cultural-social over material-redistributive policy, Professor McManus is right to point to perhaps the father of conservative intellectualism, Edmund Burke.
Burke famously wrote a scathing critique of the French Revolution, Reflection On The Revolution In France, wherein he cites intellectuals, whom he sometimes referred to as “literary caballers,” as working with financial powers to sway the revolution. Little is mentioned or given explanatory power to the over taxation on the poor or the population boom which didn’t match the food supply at the time on the eve of the explosive civil unrest leading to the Third Estate.
Again, we see cultural ideas and important social actors having a force superior to urgent material pressures.
However, the Zizekian/Hegelian in me feels the need to reinforce an important caveat, which is that human beings still rely on a symbolic fiction to uphold notions of equality and fairness. Outside symbolic fiction is what Parisian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the meta-psychological register of the Real: that which can’t be symbolized. The Real, therefore, has no political direction then.
Sometimes Marxists claim the distinction between use-values (heterogeneous concrete needs) and exchange-values (abstract homogenous virtual entities) found in Capital Vol. 1 suggests that we can create a world of just use-values politically. Zizek’s reply, going back to his doctoral dissertation in the ‘80s, is that the cut of exchange-value, introduced by language and thereby symbolization, is undoable; it’s objectless just like human desires that are always moving from one object to another.
According to Zizek, it’s our unique ability to communicate myths which function as realities making social life navigable.
Therefore, leftists should stress the importance of weaving real material disparities into the symbolic register, offering a countervailing political imagination to achieve their goals of equality and redistribution. The symbolic-imaginary axis is the only way one can go beyond just meeting needs in a kind of white-flag Keynesian nostalgia.
Empowering the public and especially workers to desire economic democracy through structures like worker cooperatives will take more than an emphasis on material disparities.
The post-Depression era shows that capital is willing, on occasion, to supply material comfort so long as it staves off an actualization of counter-myths to those of the technocratic genius concentrated in a joint-stock company’s board room, or the risk-taking C-suite leaders deserving the main share of the value created by labour.
This strategy of the left might sound quite Machiavellian. Being steadfast in the need to upkeep symbolic-imaginary visions of material equality with the understanding that nothing naturally points to left politics — not math, common sense or use-value — beyond a rhetoric that regular people deserve more control over their political and working lives sounds like a kind of necessary trickery.
This was the opinion of the late socialist Michael Brooks. In fact, Brooks gave an excellent example of this approach at a speaking engagement at Lafayette College on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, where he suggested that if Bernie Sanders was elected in the 2020 general election, he should institute single-payer healthcare through martial law and then when the pandemic’s over put it to a referendum of: “Do you want to lose your healthcare or keep it?”
That’s the Machiavellian left we need in the face of a choice between conservative culture-first arguments and historical-materialist arguments: Both please!