LITTLE ROCK — Strange-while everyone is talking about gay marriage and its inevitability, no one seems to have noticed that marriage between men and women has been declining.
According to a recent cover story by Jonathan Last in The Weekly Standard with the title “A Nation of Singles,” the percentage of the adult population that is married is at an historic low, with the single population now comprising well over half of eligible voters.
Such a decline in matrimony can be attributed to several factors, the rise of the welfare state, scientific innovations (the pill) and legal decisions like Roe v. Wade perhaps most prominent among them.
The infamous “Julia” video that Democrats put together during the presidential campaign highlighted (apparently to good electoral effect) all the ways that the welfare state and government in general now provide for single women. The most conspicuous omission in Julia’s life history as presented in the video was a man-more precisely, a husband. The implication, probably correct, was that he wasn’t needed any longer.
For better or worse, the pill and the ready availability (Sandra Fluke’s claims to the contrary) of contraceptives and abortion since Roe v. Wade have made the “shotgun” wedding a thing of the distant past. The removal of much of the social stigma around illegitimacy has also worked to make marriage under such circumstances less necessary-what was shocking and disgraceful a couple of generations ago is now commonplace, with over 40 percent of all children in America now born out of wedlock.
The intriguing aspect of this shift away from married to “singleton” comes when considering the long term fiscal and political effects.
First, and ironically, is the way in which the welfare state promotes but is also ultimately undermined by the marriage decline. It is undermined because declining rates of marriage lead to reductions in fertility that make financing the welfare state more difficult.
Put differently, the very programs that discourage marriage can only survive if people marry and have lots of kids who eventually enter the work force and become taxpayers. A society with less marriage ultimately becomes one with a shrinking tax base.
The lack of marriage and hence child-rearing in post-industrial societies-European nations have seen this trend develop earlier and go much further, largely because their more expansive and generous welfare states were developed earlier-also carries with it electoral implications in the sense of shifting a society’s political focus from the future to the present, from providing for future generations to getting as much as one can for oneself in the here and now.
We don’t care as much about saddling our kids with debt if we don’t have any.
In a more immediate political sense, a nation of singletons is also bad for Republicans and, more broadly, conservatism as a political philosophy. Mitt Romney won among married women 55 percent to 44 percent, but lost so badly among single women (by 36 points!) that he lost the women’s vote overall by the same amount (55 percent to 44 percent).
The Republican base essentially boils down to married folks with kids; as their numbers decrease over time, so do the GOP’s electoral prospects.
Indeed, the single biggest increase (and one that clearly went Barack Obama’s way) in turnout in 2012 wasn’t among blacks or Hispanics, as many believe, but among single voters-whereas the Hispanic turnout increased by only a single percentage point compared with 2008, the singleton turnout went up by a remarkable six percentage points, and from a vastly larger demographic. As Last succinctly puts it in his Weekly Standard piece, “Far more significant than the gender gap is the marriage gap.”
But one senses something else lurking beneath these trends influencing marriage and child-rearing (or lack thereof), something with even greater long-term consequences, and that is the decline, associated with modernity, in religious belief.
In his new book, How Civilizations Die, the always interesting David P. Goldman emphasizes the importance of religious faith for sustaining fertility rates and hence civilizations. Last also picks up on this when noting the powerful correlation between marriage and fertility rates on one side and church-going on the other.
Put simply, and regardless of their other characteristics, the more people go to church, the more likely they are to be married and the more kids they are likely to have. Religion is somehow associated with family and the future; lack of belief is linked with the cult of the individual and short-term gratification.
In the end, then, a society with declining religious faith, marriage rates and fertility is a society in certain decline. Last also cites Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz to the effect that such trends become“self-reinforcing” over time-when you have fewer kids and those kids are less likely to get married and have kids, you end up with still-fewer grandkids as well. The most important institution in civil society-the family-will gradually disappear.
And when the family ceases to exist, all that is left are individuals and an all-powerful government, with little standing between them. The atomization of society is complete, and the state becomes everything.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 01/07/2013