Tucker Carlson says unmentionable things about marriage

Larry Kummer, Editor

7 years ago

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Summary: Tucker Carlson made bold comments about the causes of America’s disintegrating families. Is he right? Does anyone on the Left agree? How might this affect our mad politics? These answers might change America in the next decade.

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On his January 2 show, Tucker Carlson went from conservative gadfly to populist rebel. See the video and transcript at Fox. Here is one of the more transgressive thoughts from his rant.

“Male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools and the hospitals, and both of them are traditional employers of women. In many areas, women suddenly made more than men.

“Now, before you applaud that as a victory for feminism, consider some of the effects. Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t. Over big populations this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow.

“More drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation. This is not speculation, it’s not propaganda from the evangelicals. It’s social science. We know it’s true. Rich people know it best of all, that’s why they get married before they have kids. …”

Dalrock gave a sharp analysis of this.

“John Zmirak is mostly right.“

By Dalrock at his website. Posted with his generous permission.

John Zmirak at The Stream writes in “Tucker Carlson is Half Right” that Carlson is right about the destruction of the family.

“Carlson’s central complaint is serious. The family is collapsing in America, except among the upper and upper middle class. Marriage rates, birth rates, you name it – they’re all trending badly. The crisis of single parenthood that Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified in 1965 among black Americans? {See “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.“} Working class white Americans now repeat the same pathology, and it’s far, far worse among blacks. Kudos to Carlson for speaking truth to power.

“As a rule, boys raised without fathers don’t do well. Many end up in prison. Neither do fatherless girls thrive, in fact. Much of the sexual abuse in America stems from stepfathers and transient boyfriends. Girls without stable father figures get pregnant much younger, and often end up trapped in the welfare system.

“The decline of marriage is real. And one of the factors is the decline in male income relative to female. Survey after survey shows that women don’t tend to marry men who earn less (or even the same) as they do. Why? Part of it’s surely grounded in that horror, mammalian biology. Women far more than men are willing to sacrifice career advancement to spend time raising their children. Imagine that, giving up valuable hours spent in a cubicle to ensure your children’s safety, happiness, and avoid the lifelong, IQ-dimming effects of dismal daycare.

“But if men can’t earn more to take up the slack, will women feel safe doing that? Since they can’t, lower-income men get locked out of the one institution that makes men healthier, happier, more virtuous and productive: marriage. …”

This conversation is a catastrophe for our conservative elites, who until Carlson upset the balance had clung to the liberal party line that nothing serious was wrong with our new family policy. Compare Zmirak’s assertion that we have a serious problem to the 2014 NY Times article complaining about misguided “hand wringing” regarding the state of marriage: “The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On.”

“Despite hand-wringing about the institution of marriage, marriages in this country are stronger today than they have been in a long time. The divorce rate peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s and has been declining for the three decades since.”

But it wasn’t just liberals at the NY Times trumpeting the “all is well” message. Conservative Christians were in lock step. The Christian Post declared in “Author Debunks Myths About Divorce Rates, Including of Churchgoers.”

“Many of the most demoralizing beliefs about marriage, especially when it comes to discouraging statistics commonly passed around, are just not true, says social researcher and best-selling author Shaunti Feldhahn.

“‘A subconscious sense of futility about marriage is everywhere, as everything we hear says marriage is “in trouble”,’ states Feldhahn. ‘And while some of the bad news is accurate (for example, 41% of children are born out of wedlock), many of the most demoralizing beliefs just aren’t true. For example, the notion that half of all marriages end in divorce or that the divorce rate is the same in the church …neither are anywhere close to true.’”

Moreover, Feldhan and the Christian Post were merely following in Glenn Stanton’s footsteps in this regard.

Carlson has dramatically changed the very nature of the discussion, from one of condescension for the “hand wringers” who are supposedly misinformed about the real state of the American family, to a conversation about the dire threat the destruction of marriage poses to our social fabric. Under the pre-Carlson regime, conservatives were free to focus on blaming men for not manning up and reaping the wondrous benefits of our new family model. Now we have conservatives openly speaking dangerous truths. …

Men’s wages vs. women’s wages

Something {many factors} clearly did change the balance between men’s and women’s earnings, {starting in} the early 1980s. Yet the destruction of the family started much earlier.

Divorce rates only show a partial picture. What we’ve seen is a combination of delayed marriage, a decline in the percentage of the population that ever marries {also see here), increased divorce rates, and a reduction in remarriage following divorce. Fortunately there is a single metric that captures the impact of all of these changes combined.

I’m convinced men’s falling relative wages is an important factor in the destruction of the American family. The most important thing that Tucker Carlson has let genie out of the bottle. Our conservative elites will have a very difficult time getting back to the good old days when they could ignore the destruction of the family and pretend that if men would merely put a ring on it everything would be just fine. …

—————- End of Dalrock’s post —————-

Dalrock pointed out that some on the Left also have seen this problem and come to roughly similar conclusions. In 2003 the Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, and her daughter published The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke. Then she was a Professor of Law at Harvard; now she is the senior senator for Massachusetts. She reissued it in 2016. The publisher gave a lurid description.

“In this revolutionary exposé, {the authors} show that today’s middle-class parents are increasingly trapped by financial meltdowns. Astonishingly, sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable to financial disaster than ever before. Today’s two-income family earns 75% more money than its single-income counterpart of a generation ago, but has 25% less discretionary income to cover living costs. This is “the rare financial book that sidesteps accusations of individual wastefulness to focus on institutional changes,” raved the Boston Globe.

“{They} reveal how the ferocious bidding war for housing and education has silently engulfed America’s suburbs, driving up the cost of keeping families in the middle class. The authors show why the usual remedies – child-support enforcement, subsidized daycare, and higher salaries for women – won’t solve the problem. …”

Somewhere in here there is the possibility of Left and Right finding some common ground. Separately they have little power (less if they expend most of their energy fighting each other). Only together, in a loose alliance like during the New Deal, do they have the power to rein in the 1%. Our future might depend on their ability to work together.

About Dalrock

He is a married man living with his wife and two kids in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He is very interested in how the post feminist world impacts himself and his family, and uses his blog to explore these issues. See his website. Especially these posts ….