Two Nations, Revisited | National Affairs

Two Nations, Revisited | National Affairs

Mary Eberstadt looks at poverty, #MeToo scandals, societal atomization, and identity politics as effects of the Sexual Revolution:

'The research was overwhelming, all of it proving the point that a stable family has come to trump material assets as the main currency of these two new nations. So much of this social-science evidence now exists, Wilson joked, that "even some sociologists believe it."

'The comment was made in jest, but it presaged our current puzzling situation. Twenty years ago, evidence from all over the social sciences already indicated that the sexual revolution was leaving a legacy of destruction. Two decades, and many more books and scholars and research studies later, a whole new wing has been added to that same library Wilson drew from, all demonstrating the same point he emphasized throughout his speech: The new wealth in America is familial wealth, and the new poverty, familial poverty....

'Only in a world where sex is allegedly free of consequences would any man dare to proposition women on the spot, over and over, as appears to have been the case among the repeat offenders accused in the harassment revelations of the past two years. Put differently: No Pill, no sexual-harassment scandals on the scale seen today.... The shrinkage of the family brought on by contraception has deprived many men of sisters and daughters. It has deprived many women of brothers and sons.... At a numerical minimum, it's a world in which the sexes know less about one another than they used to -- in which many women no longer know any men as protectors, but only as predators. It's a world in which many men who lack sisters, cousins, and the rest know women mainly through the lies absorbed in watching pornography.

'It also doesn't take a Ph.D. to grasp that the fractured family is a major engine of the increased welfare state. Why? Because overall, the state is the financial backer that makes single motherhood -- and absent fatherhood -- possible. In effect, the state has become the angel investor of family dysfunction. The fracturing of the family has rendered the modern state a flush but controlling super-daddy. The state moves in to pick up the pieces of the shattered family -- but, by bankrolling it, the custodial government ensures more of the same....

'Sexual identity, racial identity, ethnic identity, and the rest of the now-familiar pack have become the driving force of progressive politics -- so much so that imagining today's progressivism without these group identities is an exercise in futility. Identity politics is behind many of the most incendiary clashes of our time.... How did this way of doing "politics," which was only in its infancy 20 years ago, ever ascend to today's heights? To study the timeline is to see that identity politics in America has grown exactly in tandem with the spread of the sexual revolution -- and for good, if pitiful, reason. Western human beings today, like human beings everywhere, are desperate to know who they are, to whom they belong, where they have a place in the world. But today, the old ways of knowing all these desiderata -- that is, by reference to the family and extended family -- no longer exist for many people, and are growing weaker for many more....

'From the United States to Western Europe and beyond, many in the world's most advanced societies are feeling angry, ignored, and disenfranchised. And today, even more than in 1997, it seems an incontestable truth that politics alone won't heal their wounds. Most visibly in the United States, millions are looking to government and to their political-cultural tribes to replace what they have lost -- connections to family and transcendent communities....

'Though some of the riptides of 2018 are obviously political -- like arguments over immigration, tax reform, and the Supreme Court -- others, like those already discussed, spring from a more primordial place. Politics per se cannot account for the passion now attached to identitarianism, nor to the despair incarnate in today's rates of substance addiction, nor to the related fact that psychiatrists and psychologists have been reporting for many years that mental-health trouble is on the rise, especially among women and the young. Politics did not create these problems. The sexual revolution did. That's why politics alone will not solve them, either....'