THE CITY

Winter 2015
real financial incentives for couples to remain separate and unmarried.” 8
Moynihan once observed that the principle difference between liberals
and conservatives was that liberals believed if you wanted to impact the
course of American culture, you had to impact politics first; conservatives
believed, he said, that if you wanted to impact politics, you had to impact
culture first. That is a probing, relevant insight into how we are to
address and attempt to solve some of the most important, and seemingly
intractable, social problems America faces today.
“One important lesson of the past half century is that counterproductive
cultural habits can hurt a group more than political clout can help it,”
Riley writes. “Moynihan was right about that too.” 9
Indeed he was, and devastatingly so. As a nation, we cannot continue
on this present course of family fracture and marriage upheaval. It would
seem to be an unsustainable course.
In 1995, looking back at his four decades in public life, Moynihan was
asked what had been the biggest transformation he had observed: “The
biggest change, in my judgment, is that the family structure has come
apart all over the North Atlantic world.” 10
So how to think about the moral revolution we are living through a
half-century after Moynihan published his famous analysis? One thing is
crystalline: The cultural crisis will never be fixed by money alone. The
family is foundational, and a bulwark against further erosion. It seems
to me that culture still leads, and is upstream from what is happening in
American politics of either party. Moynihan was right to assert that there
is a direct tie between the decline of family and the social pathologies of
the nation.
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald has eloquently echoed
Moynihan, advocating for a father-centric prescription:
The disintegration of the two-parent family is the greatest longterm
threat to American prosperity and cultural health … But
more consequential than the risks to individual children is the
8
Ibid.
9
http://www.wsj.com/articles/jason-l-riley-still-right-on-the-black-family-after-all-theseyears-1423613625,
date accessed November 27, 2015.
10
http://eppc.org/publications/walk-back-to-the-right-road-to-marriage-andparenthood/,
date accessed November 27, 2015.
11