Families and The American Dream

the Institute on national affairs before we don't have assessments talked I'd like to make a couple of announcements about upcoming events tonight we have take a pulse with American Pictures the multimedia presentation that's in the sunroom here in the Union and it's a seven o'clock mountain eight o'clock as its listed on the brochure makes please make that change tomorrow at noon here in the Pioneer room we'll have a panel discussion on the state of the American worker with Joe Henry Johnny Hammond and Tony Smith this afternoon speaker is a historian and a scholar on family systems and teaches at Evergreen State College in Washington last summer she testified in congressional hearings about federal aid to families and has a new book out called the way we never work American families and enough doubt to trap if you want to copy that book those books should be on their way I guess the truck is heading toward us as we speak they should be available after the lecture if not I guess go to the University Bookstore and bug them after today's lecture she's heading to Boston to do a filming of the NBC Nightly News interview that should be playing sometime the weekend of February 20th if you all want to catch fit would you please welcome Stephanie Coontz I I I know that your series this year is on the American Dreams so I want to talk about the connection between the American greens and the family for most people the connection is pretty obvious and it's always visualized in terms of 1950s TV series images you know it's a single-family home and a college education for the kids and a happy marriage a dad who teaches his kids life lessons as they wash the car together and a mother who's always emotionally available to her children and sexually available to her husband and cozy dinners Thanksgiving big Thanksgiving meals it's togetherness ranch houses cozy Christmas evenings at home putting your family first making home the center of your moral and emotional universe when I asked students of mine and found the history classes to describe the traditional family dream those are the images that that always come out now they all have different takes on it of course some are contemptuous of the whole idea some are slightly wistful for it some are very very clearly aware that the ideal was not reality that it was more like a nightmare for the third of American children who remained poor throughout the period that's a much higher percentage than today and a much much much higher percentage than the greatly maligned 1960s so the victims of racial violence redlining and exclusion for debating of McCarthyism for the women who couldn't escape abusive marriages or the girls who were sexually molested and have only found the courage to come forward about that it since the 1970s with the rise of a woman's movement or who if they did tell a Serapis that this had happened to them were confronted with the standard therapeutic line of the decade which is this is all in your head it's an unconscious edible fantasy so whatever people a lot of people are painfully aware that the dream did not work for the 55% of african-american families for example two-parent families who were poor throughout the decades but at the same time whatever people think of the dream either it's its lack of connection with reality or of the dream itself and just how valid that dream was most people would agree that that is the traditional American family dream in fact however putting the family at the center of one's dreams is not at all the American tradition not even in mainstream white society making it the primary source of personal satisfaction moral education social obligation this is not at all traditional in the Republican with a small on tradition and the evangelical tradition in American society for example political and religious obligations were placed above family ones the American Dream was about equality and public life now we don't want to romanticize it their definition of equality excluded African Americans Native Americans the Irish who were not even considered part of the white race until somewhat later it excluded women but and their definition of the public was it's extremely narrow nevertheless I think it's important to notice that at the beginning whatever its limitations the American Dream did not put private or family satisfactions ahead of public obligations if he's asked Jefferson about family values a phrase that incidentally was only invented in 1976 he would have not known what you were talking about his definition of morality was to love your neighbor as yourself in your community in your country more people like John Adams talked about the necessity of putting public passions ahead of private ones you know they weren't into thinking that cocooning with your family was the very height of moral achievement people like Thomas people like Hamilton I have a reputation well deserved in some ways as conservatives nevertheless talked about finding a happy media key in the distribution of wealth and power aiming for that not for putting your family and and having all of these dreams for the future of your family the word virtue used to be a political world referring to a person's willingness to take on civic obligations the word character in the Republican and evangelical tradition meant the ability the willingness to stand up for political and religious principles and it was something that could apply to women as well as men major holidays in American history used to not center around family issues the biggest holiday in America up until about the turn of the century was July 4th the civic holiday not Thanksgiving Thanksgiving this relatively minor until the 20th century Christmas was a big holiday but it was conceptualized in terms of visiting of neighborly interactions not in terms of staying together with your family around the fire so the ideal that the family should be the centerpiece of one's dreams and moral strivings actually initially did not emerge until the period of the 1870s to the 1890s the period I like to think of as the first Gilded Age in comparison to the second one that were in the throes of noun that started almost exactly a hundred years later was an interesting period because this view of the family dream was formulated as part of a backlash to the radicalism of the 1860s and I'll trust you to fill in all the parallels for the period a hundred years later to the involvement before the civil war where there were links forged between black abolitionists idealistic white middle-class and early even the early Union organizes the women's rights organizers but in the backlash to that and against radical reconstruction in its games this new ideal came back it was part of blah for the growing political and economic irresponsibility of mainstream society in the post-civil war era what happened was that despite the fact that in the 60s and 50s and 60s you have this kind of convergence in social activism in the 1870s conditions changed pay rates in a number of new expanding middle class occupations opened but and at the same time the spread of wage labor and the factory system made it possible for people who could move into these new professions to get luxuries and goods and a way of life that had hitherto been confined solely to the rich at the same time zone insecurity mounted for the working class the promises of freedom for blacks was considered to have been settled just because there was an Emancipation Proclamation finally and grudgingly I might add given the gains of radical reconstruction started to be rolled back the North acquiesced in the withdrawal of federal troops from the south the revival of terrorist organizations against both blacks and their white allies of radical reconstruction the same time the middle class found itself also under pressure for further reforms in the working class and from African Americans but at the same time very very insecure and it's new achievements because at the same time as there was if you couldn't make the move into these new occupations or really work at consolidating your old position downward mobility was on the increase the result was that the middle class was found itself wanting to hold the distance the pressure for further reforms at the same time it was uncomfortable with the sleaze and greed of the rich the robber barons the new rich who were throwing their extravagant parties presidents who like Hayes who spent fifteen thousand dollars on a china set for the White House at a time when the average wage of a worker was about five hundred dollars so I hope I presume you're filling in all of the parallel in the 20th century including the name right the solution of the middle class in the first Gilded Age as in the second was to try and find a way to absolve themselves of the responsibility to continue social activism and yet feel that their decisions to focus on their own needs was not an immoral repudiation of ideals that they at least in the abstract still believed in and they wanted to distinguish themselves from the immorality of the rich the sleaze and greed and yet at the same time find an excuse not to participate in the social activism to which their earlier an ideology had accustom them the result was to pull back to rework their notion of morality the Family Values people of the first Gilded Age then began the third the private morality and especially family morality represented a higher and more pure duty and obligation than political or social activism increasingly character came to be defined and virtues came to be defined as family traits not political and social traits character was separated from its initial evangelical definition and became a question of whether a man would provide for his wife and child so that here in the second Gilded Age you have people like Wall Street speculators whose robbed pension funds for women and orphans saying that they shouldn't get sentences because after all they have such good character they provide for their own wife and child virtue became redefined and essentially I would argue trivialize into an assessment of whether a woman is likely to be a virgin and marry the tremendous truncation of original definitions of morality but even after this new idea was developed of the centrality of the private family it was not immediately argued that the family should be the center of consumption of self-fulfillment of personal growth if you will it was the place where people were supposed to sacrifice to prove their altruism to subordinate themselves to duty and in this sense the middle-class was able to feel that they were not just pursuing selfish kinds of ideals that they had in fact an alternative morality unfortunately for those who believed then as now that a family dream could substitute for a social vision the notion of the private self-sufficient nuclear family was really kind of a halfway house on the road to to me first individualism the slippery slope because it's very it turns out it's very hard to sustain obligation and commitment and the family if they're not validated anywhere else in society the triumph of private family moralism discourages people from meeting social and emotional needs through mutual aid associations to political and social action or any of the other forms of public life that used to be a primary source of identity instead increasingly people dream of meeting their needs through love but if I oh no obligation outside the family then the family becomes the main barrier to my self actualization even as a grown man suffice love as my primary goal in other words the cultivation of the private family dream I'm arguing in the first Gilded Age as in this second representative repudiation of larger social and political dreams and had built into it internal contradictions that began to unravel it right from the very beginning it accelerated the social atomization that makes us simultaneously so desperate for love and so unable to achieve it so no sooner was this ideal acceptance in the late Gilded Age then if contradictions began to assert itself if the families to be the most central part of personal identity the center of all striving the source of all your happiness the highest end to which you can aspire so you better make sure you find the perfect mate if the family is not just to be a refuge a Waystation a base camp to use images that that summed up its earlier definition but impact your entire world then well better furnish it a fully and comfortably as possible so the new family ideal created very strong pressures toward a youth culture toward the sexual ization of youth relations toward the pursuit of the perfect mate toward a consumerist approach to defining what a family needed and had also a number of other an anticipated consequences once you believe that a marriage and love and family are the only source of your satisfaction then an unsolvable marriage lover family become an unhappy one becomes absolutely intolerable the u.s. has had the highest divorce rates in the world since 1889 and the that has been I think of very the other side of the coin of this new romanticization of the family dream that jumped tremendously in the 1920s as The Consumerist notion of this really hits full-fledged just as the first demands of the legitimation of gay and lesbian unions were right there because if all of your courses of satisfaction are through the family then you cannot tolerate something that does not make you perfectly happy it also led to a sexual revolution and a generation gap every bit shocking to contemporaries as that of the 1960's all these contradictions were built in that the family dream that began to a verge emerge at the end of the 19th century but those contradictions weren't played out first because large number of Americans didn't accept the new ideals there was not yet I mean it was an immigrant population new african-american migrants the city of vibrant working-class culture that did not buy into the privacy of this idea or couldn't afford you even if they wanted to and also because even for the middle class the years of the 1920s came to an end of course with the Great Depression and the Depression and World War two puts the ideal of the family on the back burner and increasingly tended in our memories to airbrush the contradictions of that ideal and to hold it up as an alternative that we had just caught sight of and now it lost with the hardships of war and depression became an ideal image the memories of the tensions associated with it began to fade and so by the time of the post-war boom when for the first time in American history there was there were real wages for a majority of the population and it seemed really possible for numbers of people at least to aspire to the prosperity of the new consumer idea and the warning signals of the 1920s were forgotten even the consumerism and the sexuality that had seemed a scary unanticipated dangerous consequence of the family dream in the 1920s now came to be integrated as a central part of the American family dream of the 50 but I want to argue as I said at the beginning that that dream was in fact qualitatively new not traditional and I'll go on to argue that it's played out its contradictions very quickly indeed once it was established under a very superficial revival of Victorian domesticity a major rearrangement of family ideals and male-female relations were launched the decades emphasis on producing satisfaction amusement inventiveness moral dreams achievement all of them within the family really was unprecedented 1950s defined the American Dream as consumer choice exercised through the family I don't know if any of you in this room will remember the famous Khrushchev debate with Nixon the scene in the 50s as the epitome of the confrontation of capitalism with communism and the benefits of the free world what was it over the suburban ranch house the model that was there at the exposition with Nixon arguing that that suburban ranch house and the division of labor within the family at representative will show the superiority of the American system because all male breadwinners he said could aspire to this home and furthermore American capitalism still back home with a panoply of appliances that were designed to make things easier for our women the 1950s ideal introduced new levels of consumerism materialism and hedonism into American culture but under the banner of family togetherness for women this involved a reduction in the older moral imperatives of womanhood an expansion of its orientation toward personal services toward waiting on the family something that had never been thought of as an imperative domesticity before formerly middle-class women had happily hired servants preferably very young ones because they'd learned that mothers were distracted by the demands their own children but now the new ideal was that you did the housework yourself it was an expression of your love and your creativity for the men the new American family dream created growing conflict between the public behaviors that earn them such services at home and the private behaviors that were supposed to be based not on Authority but and and your ability to exercise control but on love so in fact all the old contradictions that were foreshadowed in the 1920s were built into this new American family dream all the more explosively because the dream had been adopted by so many more people in the early 20th century but the contradictions were not immediately obvious even in poorer sections of the population because real wages were fall were rising in that period unlike the period since 1973 there were new opportunities job opportunities for example for blue-collar workers for people with a high school education or even less for the African Americans being displaced by agriculture or seeking a new life and their share of the American dream in the city although there was tremendous poverty the gap between rich and poor was narrowing it was possible to think that the main barriers were formal were legal that if we could get the civil rights movement if we could get the job if we played by the rules if we force American society to live up to its supposed own rules then things would be better there was a lot more confidence in the 1950s because of that and furthermore this privileged economic position of America internationally that allowed a country with six percent of the world's population to consume fifty percent of the energy resources furthermore that very privileged economic situation allowed the government to be very in generous with subsidies to young families this is something that people tend to forget you know when they romanticize the 1950s it turns out they only want women to go back to playing their role they have no intention of reinstituting the generous government subsidies that underwrote families 40 percent of young men were eligible for veterans benefits in the 50s that was a tremendous help to young families furthermore the government stepped in and reorganized federal spending and the private banking system to subsidize the construction of roads and sewers for suburban homeowners to provide them with low-cost loans that absolves an entire generation of worries about inflation there were job training programs that were more as it was education benefits housing loans all of these things were tremendous and the result was to create qualitatively new family patterns and dreams at the end of the 1940s all of the trends that characterized the rest of the 20th century were temporarily reverse the age of marriage spell the fertility Rite increased the age of divorce spell and something that's not usually mentioned by people who idealize it the educational gap between men and women which had been converging for a hundred years began to to diverge again so it was easy for people to dream that someday they too could live like Ozzie and Harriet which was consciously by the way put forward as a model as a carrot not as something that we expected people already to be living like now today most of us know that such dreams never came true for many nineteen fifties families but what is less well-known and I want to concentrate on this a little bit if that even people whose dreams did come true in the 1950s were only able to gain those through practices and values that eventually sowed the seeds of the destruction of that American dream for one thing the economic practices that financed the suburban family American green paved the way for our contemporary dilemmas yes suburban areas were tremendously financed but the government diverted people and resources and energy from the cities from working class and from black communities to do that financing in fact it strips the cities of their resources to send them out to suburbia and while our government paid 90% of the cost of building the new roads that opened up suburbia they gave not one dime to the public transport that served urban areas so paved the way for our current crisis of the city just as the attempt to absolve an entire generation of market forces in home loans paved the way for our savings and loan crisis for another of course the reunions traded off older demands and liberals too for full employment and for controls over production decisions and location decisions for simple economic packages those resulted in a tremendous expansion of real wages but at the constable weakening of Union control that we've begun to see in the 1970s the result of the ability of corporations to to export their jobs the substitution of an inadequate welfare system that divides the working class and Pips elements of it against each other for the full employment bills that were being pushed at the end of the war and internally as well the dynamics of the family dream assured that it would be unstable there was not only legal discrimination and repression of women who failed to live up to or down the drain depending on your point of view there were also mixed messages even for those who tried their best this was a period when psychologists and popular writers said that that women were unnatural if they didn't seek total fulfillment in motherhood and yet in two breaths later they said that all of the ills of American society could be traced to domineering mothers who expected too much of their children and got too many of their resources their needs mat-su it they would say that the most important thing you can be is motherhood that's let me give you a quote no other experience in life will provide the same sense of fulfillment happiness of complete pervading contentment and then ten minutes later into the same book they asked ah but which are you first wife or mother you must not be too much mother and two little wife let me talk about a program for schizophrenia there was a lot more discontent and repression than we see on the Nick at night rerun as one physician wrote in 1953 under a mask of placidity and an outwardly feminine appearance many women seized with hidden aggressiveness his response was to was to argue that we need to really validate their social roles his mother even more when the calls ran an article entitled the mother who ran away in 1956 that setting new records for readership when Redbook asked its readers to provide them examples of why young mothers feel trapped they received 24,000 replies twice as many as received to any other such question and of course women weren't the only ones to feel trapped by the American family dreams even as they accepted its values Playboy magazine founded in 1953 not in the 1960s adopted the new emphasis of the family green the pleasures of the home the cult of the mutual orgasm but reward the combination to suggest that men could enjoy domestic consumerism themselves without having to bear the burden of a wife they could go out and purchase the goods and services furnish the pad and seduce the wife the woman into giving them sex without having gathered having to take on the burdens of a wife so the American family dream created right away these kinds of pressures furthermore it's of course because of its pressure on romance gave rise to a youth culture that was again not a product of 60s radicals but of 1950s TV shows like Howdy Doody where advertisers first discovered the gains to be made by bypassing the parents and revealing directly to the to the youth and you know it's it's funny when people often when I debate issues of family values and thanks to Dan Quayle whom I'm really gonna miss I mean this is a guy who once said that Republicans understand the importance of bondage between mother and child with him god but thanks while he was around I was debating a lot of these Family Values people and what they inevitably said was when I hit them on the fact that 1950s TV shows were not documentaries you know they were they were you know TV romances they say yes but at least they put forward a different set of values a better set of values I just find this amazing those TV shows were the showcase for the new American consumerism and the sexualization and the youth culture that the Conservatives are now so upset about I'm a friend who used to work at People magazine as a copy editor and he tells me that what the advertising departments of magazines and TV shows normally refer to the editorial content the articles or the shelves as the wrapper that's what they call it the wrapper for the real product the real product is what they produce the ass right well those wholesome 1950 TV shows that people confuse with actual memories of fifties life were simply the wrapper for a new consumerism and extension of sex and commercialization to to family life and personal life that was totally new they were early attempts to harness mass entertainment to the sales of good President Reagan first he learned his persuasive style walking GE products on television Ozzie and Harriet used to have their most heartwarming schmoozing in front of the Hotpoint appliance that the show was supposed to sell but you know there are only so many family appliances you can sell and in fact the bulk of the increase in the gross national product in the 50s was through household appliances and furnishings what happens when the market saturated Hotpoint appliance for the family but a Stoney of my own e for the individual that in you know it's not that the that the math need has become anti-family since then it's that they saturated the family market and now they've become more sophisticated about pitching the American family dream two distinct audience segments to say that each little individual can buy a piece events themselves but of course it does have its contradiction and what the conservatives complain about today was built in to their original dream once you attach that dream did a search for consumer satisfaction you can't always count on brand loyalty you know the yearning to receive such a load of emotional fulfillment and satisfaction from love and family couples with the expectation of the 1950s that all I needs can be filled if we just select the right product to help us work it out or we get the right kind of families has tended to create the vicious circle that we have today where we oscillate between romanticizing families and labeling them as dysfunctional because they can't fulfill all of the self-esteem security and Happiness we dream of finding through the family and I'd like to say in passing that I think a lot of the talk show helps that I was on during this my little 15 minutes of fame that Warhol promised us all in the course of this family guys a lot of them would think they were agreeing with me and they would then proceed to say yes you know we have to look at all of this dysfunctional families and ninety-six percent of families are dysfunctional just the other side of the coin of the family dream you know think about it it is the inevitable disappointment of the false illusion that a family can provide all of your self esteem and personal satisfaction and in fact in earlier periods of American history and in many subcultures today in African American one stands out it is clear that social solidarity associations religious groups community institutions and in the working-class tradition union institutions when they were not just economic negotiating forces used to provide those kinds of things so mostly we mostly hope the dreams and the disappointment are built in to an unrealistic expectation of family life and it creates of course individuals who are simultaneously in love with love and yet unable to prevent themselves from outgrowing any particular love looking for a better one on the horizon I could go on I suppose with those kinds of contradictions but I think really what I would like to just emphasize in wrapping up today is to argue that we really though don't need to live in a dream world to envision a more satisfying family life you know but ironically the Eventide hate to put myself out of business but the evidence suggests that the best way to construct fulfilling families is to abandon the dreams of finding our fulfillment in family history demonstrates over and over what recent research now confirms about contemporary families the best predictor of people satisfaction with family life and their ability to raise children successfully is not the internal dreams values arrangements and form of their family but their access to social support networks beyond the fence their realistic understanding that no family is an island entire of itself but that we must all be part of a larger continent to put it in dunnsworth so long as we cling to the dream that that we can build our own separate family islands of personal happiness to the notion that we are doing something moral and socially responsibility by taking care of our own family and just having commitment to our own family time then we're on a disaster course you know such a dream leads inevitably to a rude awakening because really you're only one family fight one divorce one disagreement even one blood test corny recent news reports away from having absolutely nothing the challenge is to find dreams that we can share and construct together dreams that are not just fleeting images from our from our nightlife from our sleeping state but ones that we construct in combination and modify as we work with other people to the extent that we require some kind of traditional or mythic validation for such dreams I'm not opposed to that I think there are things that we can pull on but I would want to go back what much further than the offing hearing people would suggest and the one that I really like to think about is the Native American tradition that was summed up and I want to end by just telling you this story because I think it's really a lovely answer to the Family Values people as I as I as I tell you the story I want you to remember what the family how the family values people define family values David Blankenhorn the head of the Institute for American values defines it as how we feel and believe about sex parenting and divorce okay in other words Mafia families could like be our leading moral example strong strong family guys right but there are other alternatives in our traditions I'm particularly struck by the one that was written down by Europeans who first encountered the Miss capping Indians and the Jesuits the French Jesuits who first encountered them were very impressed by the society in the sense that there was no poverty there was no staff it was you know a very egalitarian society however one aspect of its egalitarian that's really bothered them and that was the role that women played in it because women were very equal and so they set out to bring civilization to the benighted natives and one Jesuit even spent a whole year in the lodge and recorded in his journal his attempt to convince the Indians of the correct way of organizing families and he had lots of incidents you know at one point for example he told one that after all you should not let women do these sort of things because women were not as strong as men and the Indian yes and when we move camp my wife ship carries her share not you this is very interesting the yes because it's a very important part of Native American culture not to of many traditional Native American cultures at any rate not to say no not to contradict I found this also when I was in Japan that I would say well which of these should I wear and they would say yes and so but the desert of course you can imagine Jesuit logic you know yeah and so then he would try again he'd say well if you do that you know women really do not have the wisdom that men have and the response was yes and we have a saying that old women do not swing their words about without me this is a rather nice answer to the old wise pants so there was then another point explained that the Great Spirit wouldn't like it and the response was something along the lines of yes and the game runs has been very good in other words you know she can't be too pissed off the best summing up I think came in one particular journal entry in which he then fell back on what was obviously to a European notion of family and Generals the absolutely defining argument got him here will break through this native logic and the lack of watching he said yes but if you if you allow your wife just kind of freedom how can you be sure that the child he bears will be your own now I paraphrase so far but I want to give you the exact quote of the miscopied because it was so significant first thing he said he didn't say yes in all this we've been pushed way beyond his cultural bounds of politeness he said thou hast no sense that's the coach the cultural equivalent of putting up your dukes that has no sense you French people love only the children of your body but we love all the children of the tribe well now that the tradition that thinks mean that unless we can get our dreams to encompass all the children of the tribe then they are indeed going to be lonely fleeting and absolutely unconstructed and so I would like to end by suggesting that the the family dreams should not be a family dream it needs to be a social dream or we're in deep trouble I tried that leave time for questions it's about a quarter to one I know some people need to leave at one and that's fine but we'll just I'll just go ahead and take questions or comments and we'll go on a little bit path one yes well it was in the 1950s that they took what had been foreshadowed in the first Gilded Age that I talked about the notion that the family was the center of morality and they attached it they broke with what had been the other side of that in the 19th century what that was that the family was a place where you put up with a lot of you know unpleasant things in order to keep the family going and to do you moral duty and they said no the families of center of morality and not only that it's the center of fun it's absolutely perfect and it's got all attached to the notion of consumerism of buying the single-family home of having the togetherness and having a division of labor whereby the men were the ones who earn that family at home and again there was a state that was a bit of reality because in 1950 the average is support it took 15 to 18 percent of the average man's income to cover the down payment for a home and the payments on a home today it makes 40 percent so they took that and they connected it with the fact that we could buy appliances you know you didn't you didn't talk about changing the gender roles but to make work easier for our women so that all a package deal and said not only is it the most moral place not only is at the center of your moral striving and your plan your responsibility and if you take care of your family you have shown yourself to be a virtuous responsible citizen but it's also good fun there are no sacrifices involved in that and my argument of course is that that's that's nonsense and pave the way for its own destruction oh no the new architecture no you could have the same ideal elsewhere but I think it's called kind of the epitome or symbol of the problem the the ranch house that provided no tremendous luxury in the master bedroom and yet at the same time everything else opened the if you look at the architecture it's almost like it it makes the woman whenever she's doing any of her work outside the bedroom totally accessible to every member of the family and then in the bedroom it's a little kind of retreat that was increasingly not just a place to sleep but a slice to watch television then and the whole house is put forward as this this elation in a world so that you can just you can make your own little home there it's very different from the 19th century conception of the family as a refuge but no I don't think the architecture causes it the architecture I think does symbolize the the value system their questions are coming I mentioned too 1920s yes you could argue yeah the railroad strike 1877 when they first first used federal troops they withdrew the troops is a wonderful year they would do the troops in South stop protecting reconstruction and then they sent him into the railroad strike and central general you know the more I study the issues of race class and gender in our society the more I am simultaneously convinced that these are systemic and yet not conspiratorial there isn't a group you know there isn't a white male group up there that just makes those decisions but because of the and this is what makes it harder to fight and yet also creates the possibility for fighting it with solidarity there are in a society that continually rewards just working for yourself that penalizes the kind what is a personal right and what is a social obligation and it's I think the right wing is absolutely correct to identify that as a major issue of our age we should not ignore it we should take it over but I have found resistance from many left-wing audience to you know because they're so afraid that that if you talk about morality it'll turn it back to the right wing and so somehow we've slid into being value neutral well I'm not value neutral I'm very valuable think we all need to be but those values have to come out of discussion and confrontation you know not just the knee-jerk so-called tradition that the right wing armies yes well yes except that they their definition of community is extraordinarily narrow it's racist it's homophobic it in it is attached to traditions about women that you simply cannot surgically wite-out yes I will quite frequently get right-wingers saying well it's absolutely true we don't romanticize the past women you know should not be oppressed in this way they should have some choices and you know yes we're opposed to child abuse but the fact is that they ignore how tremendously integral you can't surgically excise the oppression of women and children from their concept of the traditional family and the notion that the family can be taken as a basic unit which implies of course that there's one person who speaks for the family there are interests all the interests are the same and it ignores the power inequities within the family but you're right you know they are talking about a certain kind of community we need to struggle with them for a different kind of community not just say oh you're wrong how gross I don't want to do anything but you know but stand up from my personal rights we need to fight with them to recapture a community that means something yeah well to the extent that he he talks about the American dream in a multicultural way in a more tolerant way to the extent that when he talks about Family Values its associated with welcome reforms such as health insurance or parental leave that certainly step forward but I would say that that both the economic and the political and the moral crisis of late capitalism are not going to be solved without very very hard discussions and I'm very concerned about once you you this so-called new consensus you know we're now the right wing says oh yeah we think economics are important and the Liberals now say well and we think values are important too and then they they just smooth it over and go on there are major differences and to the extent that you adapt to the the notion that as Clinton put it in the campaign non traditional families can have traditional values you're setting yourself up for a new wave of scapegoating when you're halfway measures don't succeed I think for example about the plight of America's cities we you know we no longer have someone in power who says that if these people you know would you know lack people would get married there'd be no poverty there'd be no riots there's nothing you know they say well you know how can you have you know good values if if you don't have some help in the city and so we'll get more education programs and get more jobs the crisis of American cities is of historic unprecedented proportion won't be solved by just putting a few more a few more dollars in there in the past poverty coexisted with roots to entry into the stable working-class today the characteristic of American cities is the total deep proletarianization and marginalization of their members the worst ones are not even the most poverty stricken but the ones that are closest to the white suburbs so that the whites come in to buy the cocaine and and even it cause even major problems so the idea that you're just going to solve it by a little more integration is also and we have statistics on this it's not even the degree of poverty it's the combination of poverty with how close you are to a white suburban source of money to buy the drugs that is part of the problem so you're not going to solve this with just a few little band-aids you're going to have to really confront the issue of the American people of you know how you organize not just taxes but how you organize corporations whether you know they have whether the profit imperative is is the most important and if you don't then it seems to me that you've just paved the way for the right-wing to do what they did last time the last time we had a series of halfway measures at the end of which the right wing said you see we tried it it didn't work and we got the revival of racism just at the height at the end of the Great Society programs we got the revival of sociobiology against women when it became clear that the halfway measures were not enough that women were still oppressed despite the passing of laws and you'll get this again on on family issues unless we really confront these in very hard dialogues now I don't I don't have a total program for that you know twenty years ago I would have but I do think that at least one of the biggest contributions we can make is to shift the frame of the discussion and although I don't want to be a Pollyanna and suggest that American individualism and racism all those kinds of things are not very deep nevertheless I have an encouraging report from the trenches of the talkshow wars and that is that if you can get people past the pulse taking mentality what's your knee-jerk reaction to this what's your instant opinion on that you know and get them to actually confront the consequences of the opinion or you can bring an audience that was involved in a in just telling their I've had a couple of experiences sometimes when you'll be in an audience where they're just kind of interacting with the host who runs around since you're being here do it and you know it's just awful but then you could stay afterwards and you say well what would you say to sell himself you've just said something okay well what would you say to Sarah in response to that well Sarah how would you respond to that you get a totally different set of discussions right because then people have to confront the consequences of their opinions and I'm cautiously optimistic that that if we can shift the debate and look for opportunities to do that no we won't win over everybody but I think that we can begin to be a voice that can make much more important change oh thank you