It is a conservative’s nature to believe that society has gone off the rails. I believe that we have gone off the rails by having lost sight of the importance of children and grandchildren. I predict that many people today between the ages of 25 and 40 will find themselves becoming lonely and depressed by age 60 as they see the past as having little meaning and the future as having little purpose.

Note that being an aunt or an uncle can have some of the same satisfaction as being a grandparent. But with fewer siblings these days, becoming an aunt or uncle will be rare.

I believe that grandparents are the happiest people. This is based on introspection and observation. Show me a grandparent who does not love their grandchild.

Although I know happy grandparents who are divorced, grandparenting is more satisfying if you managed to stay married. At worst, a divorce may alienate you from your children. At best, it pretty much forces your children to divide up their visits, so that you get half the time with your grandchildren that you would if you had stayed married.

Nobody in their twenties makes decisions based on a desire to end up as grandparents. That is too far to look ahead. Instead, young people respond to immediate cultural influences.

Consider a repressive culture vs. a liberated culture, or R vs. L.

In an R culture, sex outside of heterosexual marriage is frowned upon and difficult to obtain; abortion and birth control are frowned upon and difficult to obtain; and divorces are frowned upon and difficult to obtain. In an L culture, none of these apply.

We are in an L culture, and even if we wanted an R culture there is no squeezing that toothpaste back into the tube. But in an R culture more people are likely to become grandparents.

As an aside, perhaps an L culture is somewhat self-limiting. Imagine that there is a polygenic score that measures likely deviation from straight heterosexual preferences. A score close to 0 means you are very straight. A score close to 10 means you are very non-straight. In an R culture, people with high scores are pressured to conform, so they try to get by in traditional marriages and have children. In an L culture, only people with low scores are likely to have traditional marriages and children. It seems to me that this would lead to a gene pool that tends to reduce the proportion of children who are born with a propensity to deviate from straight heterosexuality.

As another aside, perhaps some other people also want to take themselves out the gene pool.

The official Black Lives Matter organization, which has received vast sums in corporate funding, has listed the abolition of the family among its demands. Left-wing publications like the slickly produced anarchist Commune magazine have explicitly advocated for it. Last year Verso Books, the influential leftist publishing house, released Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family, which made the case for family abolition amid glowing reviews in Vice, the Nation, the Outline, and elsewhere. The Open Society Foundation and Ford Foundation-funded publication Open Democracy recently published an opinion piece by Lewis headlined “The Coronavirus Crisis Shows It’s Time to Abolish the Family,” while the Nation ran with “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family.”

I believe that grandparents are the most socially forward-looking people. They want the best for their grandchildren. For the most part, I think that this means that grandparents will vote wisely. But when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, I suspect that most grandparents think, “Those entitlements mean that I won’t be a burden on my grandchildren, so it’s good for them,” even though in the aggregate this is not the case.

People who are not raising children or who have never raised children have very little stake in the future of society. Perhaps they should not vote? Raising children means being in the same household with them. So perhaps single mothers should vote, but absent fathers should not?

Geoff Shullenberger writes,

Taken as a whole, [Christopher] Lasch’s body of writing offers an account of the limitations of the American political panorama of his era. Conservatism, he suggests, tends to provide de facto ideological cover for the economic developments that have eroded the social values it claims to promote. Liberalism, for its part, has overseen the rise of a state bureaucratic apparatus that promises to compensate for the effects of this erosion. However, in the process, it further weakens the autonomy of individuals, families, and communities, and enables the substitution of democracy with technocratic elite rule. While the New Left of the 1960s rebelled against the expansion of corporate and bureaucratic power, the end result of its revolt was not a reassertion of the local and the communal, but the infusion of those structures with a new therapeutic sensibility.

Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of the economic, social, and cultural tendencies Lasch deplored. While small businesses have collapsed in record numbers and average families have found themselves destitute, the major tech companies and retail conglomerates like Amazon have reaped massive profits and the stock market has soared; in response, the political class has delivered aid packages that blatantly favor the interests of the latter. As Alex Gutentag recently argued, “the pandemic is a convenient scapegoat for the largest upward wealth transfer in modern human history.” Lasch’s work suggests that the roots of this crisis extend far back into the last century, during which both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons, became increasingly indifferent to the degradation of average people’s lives and livelihoods. He offers us no easy alternatives, but his writings reveal the scale of the problems anyone attempting to look beyond the failings of liberalism must confront.

Over the past 250 years we have gone from nation of yeoman farmers to a nation of industrial workers to a nation of white-collar workers in technology, government, and the non-profit sector. With each transformation, the sense of being able to determine our own fate declines, and the sense of dependence on those with concentrations of wealth and power increases.