MARRIAGE LICENSE — Over the past 50 years the marriage rate in the United States has plummeted by 60 percent. This is due in part to a shift in personal priorities — more Americans believe satisfying work, a good education, attaining money and personal freedom are the keys to a happy life. Those can, of course, co-exist with marriage. But tying the knot just isn’t the priority it once was. On top of that, the right and the left have increasingly diverged in how they think about the declining marriage rate, not to mention related issues such as divorce. Polling shows that conservatives value marriage much more than liberals. University of Virginia professor and American Enterprise Institute fellow Brad Wilcox argues in his new book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, that Americans, regardless of their partisan lean, should be more interested in getting married. Wilcox uses data to argue that marriage is actually one of the greatest generators of wealth, social mobility and happiness in American life, and that policy and messaging emanating from Washington often acts as a hindrance to getting hitched. Wilcox also argues that more interest in marriage might also open the door for more cross-partisan marriages. “For generations marriage has been an institution that has tempered the different impulses and orientations of young women and young men,” he said. “The ideological polarization that we are seeing among young men and young women just reinforces the divides that are inhibiting love and marriage and also making our political life more polarized as well.” Nightly talked with Wilcox, a self-described conservative, to learn more about his research, the role of partisanship in dating and how changes to federal policy and elite messaging could shift the conversation around marriage. The following interview is edited and condensed. In your book you argue that the institution of marriage is a huge driver of wealth, happiness and social mobility for Americans. Why is that? When it comes to adults, no group of Americans are more financially secure than married men and women. No group of Americans report more meaning in their lives, less loneliness and more happiness than married mothers and fathers. For many adults, marriage and parenthood are a path to financial security, meaning and happiness. For children, kids raised in stable married homes are more likely to be flourishing. … For kids and young adults there are very real benefits to coming from an intact household, and those benefits are even stronger now than they were decades ago. Here’s one of the most striking things: From my analysis, boys hailing from non-intact families were more likely to spend some time in jail or prison than graduate from college. In comparison, boys hailing from intact families are four times more likely to graduate from college than be in jail or prison. Now having said that, it’s important to acknowledge that obviously there are plenty of adults raised by single parents that are flourishing. … But on average, we know that men, women and children are more likely to be flourishing if they were raised in a stable, married family. In your book you argue that liberal elites in media, academia and government have disparaged the institution of marriage publicly, while benefiting from it privately. Why, as you argue, are liberal elites “talking left but walking right?” There’s a tacit recognition that it’s better for people to get married: It gives them direction and stability and is better for the kids. Marriage is still recognized as providing real value to couples and families. But as our culture has moved in a more progressive direction in recent decades, there’s been an embrace of what I call the family diversity theory, which suggests that every kind of family form is equally valuable. There’s also an assumption that what matters for Americans is structural, economic and policy factors rather than culture and family. Elites also tend to place a real premium placed on maximizing individual choices. … I also don’t think people want to come down strongly in favor of a stable marriage for fear of being hypocritical or seeming to be judging their own families or friends. This has all combined to make elites more likely to devalue and discount marriage in their public positions as journalists, professors, educators, policymakers, or Hollywood moguls, while often benefiting from it in their private lives. You also write about how the way federal policy is structured has made it more difficult for people to get married. What are the specific policy pitfalls you see? Since the 1960s and 1970s there have been a number of ways in which many of our means-tested programs and policies have unintentionally penalized marriage. Now the way that plays out is primarily with working class couples with young children. [Those couples] anticipate that it makes more sense for them financially to cohabit rather than marry. … For working class couples in the second quintile of the income ladder, they often benefit from programs like Medicaid and food stamps that make it more financially prudent to avoid marriage. This is what’s called the “marriage penalty.” What I would suggest is having a higher threshold for married families when it comes to means-tested policies. We need to double the threshold for means-tested programs like Medicaid. We do a lot of that on the income-tax side, but that’s benefited upper-income families that least need that assistance. In your book you also point to one part of the federal government, the Department of Defense, where federal policy has succeeded in increasing marriage rates. Tell me about that. You often hear that there has been no successful federal effort to strengthen marriage. That assertion ignores the largest federal agency, which is the United States military. Men serving in the military are markedly more likely to be married compared to their civilian peers who have not served and are not serving in the military. There’s about a 20 percent marriage gap between non-veterans and veterans among men aged 18 to 55—and this marriage pattern extends to working-class and African American men who have served in the military. It’s not true that public policy can do nothing to strengthen marriage. The military’s pattern of giving benefits to married couples rather than dating or cohabiting couples, clearly has been linked to higher rates of marriage. How is growing political partisanship impacting dating and marriage formation in young people? What we’ve been seeing is that among younger, unmarried women there’s been a drift towards the left and the Democratic Party. In 2022, more than 70 percent of never-married women, ages 18 to 40 were Democratic in 2022. For young, never married men, ages 18 to 40, we are seeing them becoming ideologically a little bit more conservative. Men are going from leaning slightly more Democratic, to leaning slightly more Republican in 2022, according to the General Social Survey. The fact that young women are moving strongly to the left, and young men are moving a little to the right creates one more challenge for bringing them together, both in terms of dating and marriage, but also in terms of forging political coalitions that are able to work across the sexes in our society. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at pschaefer@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @p_s_schaefer.
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