If Conservatives Want Stronger Marriages, They Should Look to Liberal Solutions

How to build stable, happy families is not some great enigma.

Photo by Alfonso Lorenzetto on Unsplash

There are a great many differences between blue America and red America, and between Democratic voters and Republican ones. The Democratic base has long been racially diverse, and is increasingly college-educated, secular, urban, and female. The Republican base is overwhelmingly white and largely male, although Trump has also made a bit of progress with Black and Hispanic men; the GOP base is also much more religious (mostly white Evangelical Christian), less educated, and more rural. And while married people (and especially married men) are more likely to vote Republican, the Americans with the most stable family set-ups tend to be members of the Democratic base, and live in blue states.

Conservative politicians are complaining about childless cat ladies, declining marriage rates, unstable families, and single-parent households. Their strategy so far has been to ban abortion, offer families no real support, do nothing to help struggling Americans find greater financial stability, promote a deeply misogynistic worldview to young men, and then yell at young women that they need to get married and have babies. Shockingly, this is not working very well.

On the other side, liberals have de-emphasized marriage and the nuclear family as the primary organizing unit for society, while offering women and men alike more choices about when, how, and if to start families, and more support if they do. And while marriage and childbearing rates are down generally, the prototypical Democratic voter — the college-educated woman working for pay in or near a large city in a blue state — is more likely to find herself in a happy, stable marriage than the prototypical Republican voter.

This isn’t a coincidence; it’s a product of real policy choices as much as social and cultural mores. And if Republicans want stability for children and healthier American families — not just patriarchal hierarchies from the family up to the presidency — they should take note. Because there are a few things that make the marriages of educated liberals so strong, and none of them are that college-educated liberals are somehow naturally more committed or stable or moral or fit for marriage. The reasons college-educated liberals tend to have more stable marriages involve could be more broadly on offer to everyone: Financial stability and opportunity; gender parity; and a culture of optional parenthood paired with deep obligation toward children who are brought into the world.

Financial Stability

In the United States, marriage is increasingly a middle- and upper-class institution, and having children within the confines of marriage is increasingly tied to money and education. It’s an undeniable fact that children raised in two-parent married households tend to do better than children raised in single-parent households. But a big part of that comes down to time and money: Two parents have double the time to spend with their kids, double the resources, and double the earning potential. Of course kids do better when there are two deeply-invested adults caring for them; of course they do better when their parents aren’t struggling to keep the lights on or keep food on the table, and can pay for things like tutors and summer camp and high-quality childcare.

But that’s not the only way that financial stability — which is strongly tied to education —works in favor of marriage and children. When a couple is not constantly stressed out about money, there’s less for them to fight about; when fundamental needs are met, couples are better able to focus on building their relationship and attending to their children’s many non-material (emotional, educational, psychological) needs. Financial stress, and poverty in particular, more or less short-circuit the brain, making it much more difficult to think long-term. That’s disastrous if part of what you’re trying to do is build a long-term partnership and maintain a functional family unit. Poverty doesn’t just mean an empty bank account; it often means an empty emotional well, and a diminished ability to manage conflict and weather other stressors.

Outside of fairly small very religious communities, marriage has also been overwhelmingly recast as a capstone of adult life rather than a cornerstone — something you do once you’re financially stable and adult enough. For those with college degrees, most also see marriage as something you do before you have children, and this is pretty rational: Delaying childbearing until after marriage, and delaying marriage until one feels fully launched as an adult, gives a person time to figure out who they are before attaching themselves to someone else, maximizes earning potential, and sets up parenthood (a difficult endeavor no matter what) to be minimally arduous given the presence of two stable mutually-invested adults. But if financial stability seems unlikely to ever come, and if the other adults you could pair up with bring more burden and chaos than usefulness and steadiness, then the incentives look very different. Why not, then, have a child, something that will bring a sense of purpose and adulthood that isn’t easily found elsewhere? Why not do it whenever one feels ready, and especially when one is still young enough that one’s parents can help out, rather than holding out for a decent, stable man who may never materialize?

Part of this is of course cultural: Sexism and entitlement are chief reasons so many men are such unsuitable partners (more on that below). But I suspect that part of why college-educated men tend to be slightly more egalitarian and feminist-minded in their marriages is that they have many sources of purpose and identity, and their ability to find dignified, respected, male-coded, decently-paid work (a cornerstone of masculine identity across class lines) doesn’t feel threatened. They can, in other words, afford to be magnanimous.