Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works (11 page)

There are solutions to America’s problems. We will have to work both from the bottom up and from the top down. Above all, we must be daring. Let’s turn now to what we can do.

Marriage, family, community:
This is where it all starts. Family is the basis. As Iain Duncan Smith showed, the number one “path to poverty” is family breakup. What are the core causes of this, and how do we address them? Family breakup is the result of poverty and a cause of poverty—it’s a vicious circle with many victims. You won’t hear a word about it from President Obama or the Democrats, or from many Republican for that matter. This is up to us as Americans to take care of.

Healthcare:
President Obama’s massive healthcare plan—Obamacare—is perhaps the biggest domestic threat confronting the American Dream today. This disastrous legislation is going to destroy the greatest healthcare system in the world and make Americans more, not less, dependent on our federal government. It fundamentally restructures the relationship between our government and our citizens for the worse.

Education:
From early childhood education up through college and graduate education, we need to ensure that Americans have access to quality, affordable, and practical education. Our schools, riddled with apathy and clogged with bureaucracy, have fallen behind others in the world. It’s unacceptable, and before we can have jobs and industry, we need education.

Industry and energy:
It’s simple. We need to create more opportunities for American workers. A generation ago a hardworking college or trade school graduate would find opportunities to earn good wages in exchange for hard work. This usually meant making things—manufacturing. Our automobile, steel, and textile industries were the biggest, but they have suffered from global economic forces and bad leadership. It is not about reviving these industries and bringing these jobs back; it’s about getting the lion’s share of the manufacturing of tomorrow’s products. All of this will be fueled by what could be the biggest energy boom this country or any country has ever seen if President Obama isn’t allowed to destroy it.

Taxing and spending:
To preserve our safety net and create better jobs, our leaders need to reform the entitlement programs that are driving us into bankruptcy and reform the tax code to encourage hard work. We have to stop kidding ourselves about the weaknesses in the social safety net and stop kicking the can down the road for our kids to deal with. And we have to deal with a dysfunctional tax code that stymies growth and costs billions in compliance and enforcement.

Message:
Words matter. Leadership matters. We need our leaders to stand up and inspire us. They need to believe our best days are yet to come before we can believe that. It’s really important, and we are failing at it.

So let’s begin. Where do we go from here?

CHAPTER SIX

GOVERNMENT CANNOT READ YOU A BEDTIME STORY

B
ack in 1964, a time when the American Dream was much more vivid for middle- and low-income Americans, only 7 percent of children were born to unwed mothers.
¹
Today that figure is almost 40 percent.
²
And while the poverty rate today for married families is 5 percent, for single-mother families it’s over 40 percent.
³
Blue collar conservatives struggle to raise their kids with the right values, but because of economic and social circumstances, they are among the most at risk.

Let’s go back to the Harrison family. James’s older brother, Jeff, worked with him at the local aluminum plant. When Jeff was laid off, he briefly worked for an auto parts store—until the national chain closed it. He struggled to find a job that could support his family. Financial problems led to drinking problems and then marital problems. Jeff and his wife, Jackie, divorced. At the time, they had two preteen daughters.

With their parents separated and their mom working extra shifts at a call center thirty minutes away, the girls were left unsupervised for long periods and fell into a bad crowd from their high school. They began experimenting with alcohol and drugs. The older of the two daughters, Kathy, began failing in school and missing class frequently. The school barely noticed and never bothered to alert either parent. Jeff and Jackie had always tried to keep their kids away from drugs, alcohol, and sex, but they were drowned out by the internet, movies, TV, music, and peers, which all had a very different message. Last year, Kathy got pregnant. Now she’s eighteen years old and has a baby but not a high school degree. The father of her child is also without a degree and has offered little financial or other help, acting as though it is not his responsibility.

What are Kathy’s prospects, and what are her child’s? There’s no one else to take care of her baby, so Kathy won’t be able to hold a job until her child is a few years older. Her mother and her father love her and want to support her but don’t have much money. She recently went on food stamps and a program to help her with formula and diapers for the
baby. Kathy fell into the safety net, and there she lies. How long will it take her to climb out of it? What will motivate her to do so?

If Kathy had grown up in a wealthy town like Charles Murray’s Belmont, her father would never have lost his job—or he would have quickly found a new one. Her parents’ marriage would probably still be intact. They would have been able to keep her focused on her schoolwork and other healthy activities. She would have been playing field hockey, studying Spanish, and doing volunteer work, all with an eye to college. Could she have gotten into trouble? Of course. Some kids in Belmont do, but unlike the parents in Fishtown, Belmont moms and dads have the resources to help pick up the pieces. That doesn’t mean that kids in Belmont don’t ever fail, but they have a much more extensive network of support to help them through the tough times.

The situation is most dire in African American communities. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a young assistant secretary of labor, was one of the first to recognize the seriousness of this problem. In what became known as the “Moynihan Report,” he argued that there was a strong link between the rise in single-parent families in the African American community and poverty.
⁴
At the time, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks was 24 percent, and his argument was controversial. Today the rate is 73 percent, with 67 percent
living without a father in the home. The correlation between illegitimacy, fatherlessness, and poverty is indisputable. Another worrying sign is that the illegitimacy rate among Hispanics has risen dramatically in recent years to over 50 percent.
⁵

What is going on in these minority communities? The civil rights establishment and most liberals refuse to address this calamity. They blame racism. But no one can seriously argue that racism is more prevalent now than it was in the 1960s, and the correlation between poverty and high illegitimacy rates in black and Hispanic communities is as strong as any correlation you can find in social science. Breaking ranks with liberal orthodoxy, some prominent blacks today are willing to address the issue head-on. The film director Spike Lee recently had this to say in an interview with the
Washington Post
:

            
Three out of four African American families are headed by a single mom. That’s 75 percent. And I will put my left hand on 10 Bibles and my right hand to God and say that’s the main correlation to the highest drop-out rate and the highest prison rate, and it manifests itself ultimately with these young brothers killing each other with this insane pathological genocide that’s happening. . . . It all comes back to the fact that—and I’m not trying to demonize these single moms, they’re doing the best
they can, working two or three jobs to keep it together. But these young boys, and young women, with no father in their lives, how can that not affect their relationship with black men? It’s the domino effect.
⁶

President Obama has occasionally struck the right tone too, telling a graduating class at Morehouse College, “Sure, go get your MBA, or start that business, we need black businesses out there. But ask yourself what broader purpose your business might serve, in putting people to work, or transforming a neighborhood. . . . Everything else is unfulfilled if we fail at family.”
⁷

We need more from him on this subject. Promoting responsible fatherhood, particularly in the black community, could be his greatest legacy, if he cared enough to do it. There is also an opportunity for the president to call on his friends in Hollywood to promote this message at least as strongly as they promote other topics, like global warming and same-sex unions. What’s stopping them?

Talking about single motherhood and its effect on poverty is controversial because it hits so many people we know. Sometimes this is not a convenient argument for Republicans to make. Many of our leaders have been divorced too, including President Reagan. But the truth, as Al Gore might say, is not always convenient.

Children born into families with absent fathers are five times more likely to be poor. However heroic a particular single mother might be, children in homes without a father are up against heavy odds. They are more likely to be abused in the home, do poorly in school and drop out, commit a crime, use drugs and alcohol, have children out of wedlock, have lower incomes, and have more mental health problems than children raised with two parents. When I say they’re more likely to have these problems, I mean
much
more likely.

The party that supposedly cares about the poor and downtrodden seems content with the palliative of a government check while it concentrates on the fashionable causes that engage high-income urban professionals. Never mind that many of these causes—abortion; the deconstruction of marriage; and the extirpation of religion from schools, the culture, and public life, for example—have already had a devastating effect on lower-income America.
⁸

Single mothers aren’t the only ones to suffer from these developments. They have been a catastrophe for men as well. Research from organizations like the Third Way, a liberal think tank, shows that men, especially poorly educated men, have fallen behind women in many important areas. For example, college attendance for men has declined while it has increased for women, and women have surpassed men in earning both college and post-graduate degrees. The loss of low-skill, blue collar jobs once held mostly by men has driven down real wages
for men while wages have grown for women. A Third Way study titled
Wayward Sons
finds a strong correlation between a boy’s growing up in a single family and the chances of his finishing high school and going to college. Broken families hurt boys more than girls, making them less likely to become good earners and strong husbands and fathers—the vicious cycle again.
⁹

There’s another cause of broken families over which we have some control. Astonishingly, 2.7 million American children have a parent in prison, the vast majority of them fathers. The prison population has exploded in recent years because of mandatory sentencing guidelines and three-strike laws. We are putting too many people in jail, and it’s doing enormous damage at a time when we desperately need stronger families. Conservatives on the state level have been leading the way on reforming sentencing laws for certain nonviolent offenders with an eye to the larger picture.
¹⁰

If we don’t restore the family, the foundation of society, the superstructure will collapse. We have already seen this happen in communities where there are no marriages and no dads. One obvious cure to this illness is the healing medicine that comes from churches and other volunteer and charitable organizations. One of my favorite ministries helps families dealing with the trauma of an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy. Pregnancy care clinics around the country serve not just women in crisis, but their families, and increasingly the fathers of their unborn children.

On an early campaign swing through Spartanburg, South Carolina, I met a force of nature, Alexia Newman, who, twenty-four years ago, became director of Carolina Pregnancy Center. At that time, it was a tiny place that had gone through five directors in three years. The year before her arrival, the center had worked with 139 clients on an annual budget of just $36,000. Alexia immediately expanded the hours of the clinic and was able to help more than six times as many people in her first year as director.

Today, the eight-thousand-square-foot facility is still run on a shoestring budget, but it now serves more than 2,600 people a year. I can only imagine how many lives have been saved and families healed because of Alexia and her team’s commitment. The center provides pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, advice for pregnant women, counseling for those who have had abortions or miscarriages, a mentoring program, parenting classes for moms and dads, fatherhood classes, and even a loan closet for maternity and baby clothing. Want to know how you can help build a culture of life and help young, struggling families? Look to Alexia. It doesn’t take the millions of dollars in government funding that Planned Parenthood gets. It just takes love, commitment, and a desire to help.