Bleeding Heart Conservatives Unite!

One of the institutions conservatives want to conserve is the family. They rightly observe that intact families are a necessary condition for any stable and healthy social order. So why do conservatives tend to support policies that undermine the stability of families? That’s what Rod Dreher wants to know:

I stand with the late Russell Kirk, the philosophical godfather of modern American conservatism, who said, “The family is the institution most necessary to conserve.” Which is why it’s hard to be a Texas Republican some days.



Last week, the front page of The Dallas Morning News told the story of the Kimbers, a working family that lost benefits under the radically scaled-back Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. Result: They have to decide between filling their children’s teeth or their stomachs. The Kimber children are doing without dental care so they can eat.

…

This is very basic, I know, but it’s startling to realize how much empathy one lacks, simply because one doesn’t see the suffering around us. I posted the Kimber story and my commentary to a conservative Catholic blog I frequent, and was startled to read the feedback. Some of my fellow Christian conservatives were appalled by the idea that children in a working family had any claim on society’s compassion or resources, even for basic health care.

…

Look, I’m a conservative, and I know money doesn’t come from a pot of gold under the Alamo. The state had a massive budget shortfall, and something had to give. Of all the programs to face hacking though, why this one? Is the principle of “no new taxes” so sacrosanct that my fellow Republicans have to grind the face of the poor to be faithful to it?

A society that pushes struggling families to the wall and that denies minimal health care to children who had nothing to do with the circumstances, is not a good society. It is a society that attacks the family and calls it conservative virtue.

“Communitarian” thinkers like Christopher Lasch and Charles Taylor would agree with Dreher and have pointed out that right-wing support for untrammeled capitalism and minimal government actually undermines the local communities and intact families that conservatives want to preserve. As Lasch has argued:

Conservatives assume that deregulation and a return to the free market will solve everything, promoting a revival of the work ethic and a resurgence of ‘traditional values.’ Not only do they provide an inadequate explanation of the destruction of those values but they unwittingly side with the social forces that have contributed to their destruction, for example in their advocacy of unlimited growth. The poverty of contemporary conservatism reveals itself most fully in this championship of economic growth the underlying premise of the consumer culture the by products of which conservatives deplore.

This kind of analysis questions whether “family values” and the invisible hand automatically go together. As Marx saw, capitalism is one of the most revolutionary forces in history. Anyone concerned with conservation – whether of the family, the environment, or the social fabric – should be wary of leaving it to the forces of the unregulated market.