The Attack on Parenting
Some time back, the left uncorked a nutty idea: parents weren’t essential cogs in society. Over the last couple of weeks, this ugly theme has reappeared as a talking point in several leftist articles with wide circulation, all arguing that child rearing is better left to government overlords. Indeed, we are again being told that thousands of generations of humans have been poorly served by parents, because the reality is that “it takes a village” to properly care for a child – if that child is even deemed viable in the womb by those overlords. This seems like yet another attempt at destruction of the most essential building block of society, the nuclear family.
Now, for a quick detour. Why, you may ask, would anyone want to destroy families? The answer is simple, if you understand history. The first thing to understand is the roots of modern liberalism are found in the ideals of socialism, and modern socialists (whether they understand it or not) are promoting a soft communism. They may be willing to swap out the dictator for some sort of proletarian government, but make no mistake: they believe all of society’s ills can be cured by government. Their contention is that no government, regardless how well intentioned, can survive so long as private, unregulated ownership of property and capital is allowed to exist.
The nuclear family has been seen as an existential threat to this ideal since the very first promulgation of their warped philosophy. It was Engels who wrote an entire book on the subject, in order to reinforce his and Marx’s idea that the family was a construct of capitalist societies that existed primarily to ensure the preservation of individual wealth. They then further fantasized that governments and western religions encouraged the nuclear family, as a way of ensuring that children were indoctrinated with the approved morals and views of government.
Taken in that light, it isn’t terribly surprising to the rest of us that the family is one of the left’s foremost targets. So long as the family unit exists, the possibility of a socialist utopia cannot. The two are mutually exclusive.
Over the past 50 years, the left has launched a legislative assault on the traditional family. Liberalized divorce and abortion laws have removed most legal impediments to dissolving a family. The expansion of child welfare agencies and redefinition of what constitutes abuse have left parents who want to discipline their children at the state’s mercy. Increased participation in school curricula and operations by federal and state legislatures have ended parental control over their children’s education. They have even redefined the family with the legalization of gay marriage and making gay adoptions permissible.
While this assault on the family has recorded casualties (we’ve gone from 87% of children being in a traditional family to 68% in the last 50 years), the fact is that the normative family remains the standard in American society. But if your goal is to further the socialist ideal, to focus on the dubitable positives of equality of outcome, the family remains as your greatest threat. Modern socialists realize they cannot emulate their Marxist heroes and end the family by decree, so they instead have instigated a propaganda campaign to persuade us that parenting is not the most important job a person can have.
This line of attack, while perhaps not coordinated, has seen a dramatic uptick in the last few weeks. The first of these “thought pieces” that came to my attention was by Daniel Enberg in Slate. In Parenting Doesn’t Matter, he writes:
…what does affect a child’s future? Twin studies say a large proportion of the differences between children’s cognitive abilities, personalities, and chances of ending up with mental illness (among other long-term outcomes) can be explained solely by their DNA. And most of the rest appears to come from random chance, quirks in their biology, and specific non-parent-related life experiences: the teachers they had, or the friends they made along the way.
The entire article is a screed about how, even though he’s the father of an infant, he doesn’t see how anything he does – including things such as helping his daughter choose her friends, selecting her classes, her extra curricular activities, even simply reading her a bedtime story – will make any difference in her life. As he puts it, nothing he does “means she’ll still be shitting her pants at her high school graduation.”
The second piece was Ruth Marcus’ well publicized op-ed in the Washington Post. It is one of the most reprehensible articles I have ever read. It is nothing less than a full throated endorsement of eugenics, solely for a prospective mother’s “convenience.” She wrote:
I’m going to be blunt here: That was not the child I wanted. That was not the choice I would have made. You can call me selfish, or worse, but I am in good company. The evidence is clear that most women confronted with the same unhappy alternative would make the same decision.
Indeed, further on in the piece, she acknowledges that she foresees abortion as being the key to allowing eugenics to become a new societal norm (not unlike Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution”):
Technological advances in prenatal testing pose difficult moral choices about what, if any, genetic anomaly or defect justifies an abortion. Nearsightedness? Being short? There are creepy, eugenic aspects of the new technology…
But hey, if the mother chooses to kill her family before it even begins, that’s not society’s concern, right? I would fully expect an avowed leftist like Marcus to pen such drivel and assume some sort of perverted moral high ground with it.
Then there’s “How to Raise a Boy” by Will Leitch. Now, I enjoy Will’s writing when he sticks to his bailiwick, which is sports. But for some reason, he felt it necessary to provide the rest of us his take on parenting. Many others have taken his piece to be a commentary on other leftist tropes: white male privilege, the need to end “gun culture,” the virtue of being a beta male and so forth. But in reality, he supports Enberg’s view that parenting really amounts to little more than providing food and shelter for his offspring, not moral guidance or education.
There are things that I think I’m supposed to show them…that I don’t necessarily agree with but don’t want to stand in the way of. What do I know, you know? Every parent is only pretending that he or she has any real answers…this lesson of self-reliance is only an illusion. I can tell myself that any “success” I’ve had has been because of “hard work” and “perseverance,” but I’m kidding myself.
So, even though Leitch acknowledges that his parent’s example and instruction, their constant admonishment to “work hard and study hard” may be the reason he is able to earn a comfortable living as writer, he is conflicted as to the reason. Why? Because the combination of a liberal education and liberal thought has told him that his success is solely dependant on his DNA.
And in the end, that is what liberalism wants us all to believe. Not what our history and experience tells us. They won’t be happy until something similar to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is society’s new normal – and they know that can’t exist so long as even one traditional family exists.
Political Baseballs 