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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

The Judge Judy Republicans

By The Daily Dish
Jul 8 2008, 8:46 AM ET

That's a slightly more accurate metaphor for R&R's preferred Republican base than Sam's Club. Ross summarizes a core worry behind Grand New Party here:

If you look at the marriage rates in the 1950s and 1960s across social classes, the upper-middle class, the working class and the poor all got married and divorced at about the same rate. The all had children in wedlock or out of wedlock at about the same rate. That's changed dramatically over the past 50 years. So upper-middle-class Americans are still behaving like bourgeois, 1950s surburbanites. They're getting married, they have low divorce rates, they're very unlike to have children out of wedlock. That's not true for the working class. What you see in the white working class, in fact, is a trajectory that parallels, in alarming ways, what the black working class went through in terms of collapsing marriage rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s. So we argue that that's one of the biggest challenges facing the American working class, and it's at the root of a lot of the inequality and a lot of the economic anxiety that are big factors in this election year.

And what on earth can government do about that? I'm going to re-read the book in the next few days, and give a proper response. But sadly I find few of their many creative government prescriptions for this malady plausible.



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