Conservative Principles

Liberal elites' secret weapon is conservative family values

by Timothy P. Carney - January 14, 2020 04:19 PM

America’s elite — that is, the 30% of adults with at least a college degree — enjoy one very particular privilege that enhances their life and nearly guarantees their success. And too many of them refuse to share it.

The privilege isn’t a college education. That merely correlates with what really matters. And the greatest privilege isn’t material wealth. That sure makes life easier, but wealth mostly correlates with the real privilege I'm referring to.

America’s elite have a secret weapon that steers them and their children away from drugs, early death, violence, dropping out of high school, dropping out of the labor force, and so many other modern social ills. It’s called the traditional family: A married couple raising their children at home.....

....“When it comes to their own families,” the authors discovered, “California elites with kids overwhelmingly ‘live right’ in private, giving their children the benefit of growing up in a two-parent family.”

....So the elites are more "tolerant" than the working class ideologically, but they are much more conservative about how they plan to live.

It turns out that the question of personal values, unlike the broader ideological question, was a big predictor of personal behavior. Californians who didn't personally value family and marriage-before-babies were "less likely to have stable families,” Wilcox and Wang found.

Here’s the dagger: More laissez faire personal views seemed to have a greater destabilizing effect on the working class than they did on the elites.

This slice of the working class is where you see the negative effects of liberal cultural ideology. They buy into what elite culture, including Hollywood, is selling. And they suffer for it.

Working-class people are less likely to get married and more likely to get divorced if they do. And the gap is growing. Women who don't attend college are more likely to have babies outside of marriage, and those babies enjoy less success in life. Children raised by only one parent have more trouble with violence, alcohol, drugs, and unwed pregnancy themselves. They earn less money and are more likely to be unemployed.

Marriage and two-parent households are crucial to success in life. Marriage, in fact, is one of the best anti-poverty tools in existence. Those who personally hold the liberal attitudes preached (but not practiced) by the elites are more likely to veer from the traditional family model. And those people, disproportionately in the working class, are less likely to rise through the ranks.

Cultural liberalism is class warfare waged by the wealthy against the poor and working class. The privilege of the elite mostly comprises the norms, the models, and the community that support and guide people toward marriage and family. And that's one privilege too many elites would sooner keep to themselves.

www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/liberal-elites-secret-weapon-is-conservative-family-values