Column one

Here's to the family!

Because wealth isn’t just the material kind

How did a country boy named Tom Cotton from Yell County here in Arkansas turn out to be Harvard material, a U.S. Army Ranger who distinguished himself in combat during two tours of duty in the Middle East, and a United States senator who's now being talked up as a presidential candidate four years from now? By then, Americans can hope, all the dust stirred up by both the Clinton and Trump presidential camps this disappointing year may have dissipated and perspective will have been restored.

So how did Tom Cotton become Tom Cotton even if he's from a family no one might consider wealthy when it comes to money? The short answer is that he does indeed come from a wealthy family. Only wealth isn't just the material sort. And Tom Cotton is wealthy indeed. For he comes from a loving family, and by now has started one of his own.

Once upon a Nixonian time, there was a presidential aide named Daniel Patrick Moynihan who wrote a controversial paper that focused on the increasing dissolution of the black family--The Moynihan Report--in which he warned that the very policies that were supposed to be helping American blacks were hurting them. The more the federal government expanded the welfare system, adding additional payments and programs, the more it exacerbated the problems of black America, for the more it sought to help black families, the more it hurt them.

The blowback from the Moynihan Report, which was officially titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, was immediate and dramatic. Pat Moynihan was denounced by a host of Negro professionals and their accomplices in academia, the press and all across the political spectrum from left to leftier. He was accused of every sin from racism to blaming the victim. Only those Americans who could see what was right under their noses--the generational poverty that the federal government was perpetuating--seemed to understand what Pat Moynihan was talking about.

As the Moynihan Report noted at the time: "At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community." In short, culture trumps cash.

Pat Moynihan pointed out, as Edmund Burke had done long before, that it is the little platoons of society, like its families, that serve as its fundamental basis. And when family is discarded as irrelevant or redefined as any group of people living together, society itself is degraded. And government soon enough has to step in as a (poor) substitute for family. That wouldn't be necessary if government would just leave American families alone. In a 1969 memo to Nixon, Pat Moynihan paraphrased a lecture delivered by a fellow sociologist named Paul Weaver:

"His central point--an immensely disturbing one--is that the social system of American and British democracy that grew up in the 18th and 19th centuries was able to be exceedingly permissive with regard to public matters precisely because it could depend on its citizens to be quite disciplined with respect to private ones. He speaks of 'private sub-systems of authority,' such as the family, church and local community, and political party, which regulated behavior, instilled motivation, etc., in such a way as to make it unnecessary for the State to intervene in order to protect 'the public interest.' "

By now, as deviancy continues to be defined downward, it's not just the black family whose integrity has been endangered, but that of all American families.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 08/21/2016

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