I think there’s moral power there.

On the other hand……we in the West have people making arguments that all of our social dissolution is the result of poverty or discrimination or sexism…….or whatever.

When black America was much poorer and deprived than now………their illegitimate pregnancy rates, and divorce rates were much lower than now.

And literacy was way higher then.

Why?

Because then they subscribed to something much more like the Confucian principle than the modern materialist arguments they hold now.

If Reno is not making the materialist argument……..more power to him.

But for those highlighting this issue for the purposes of advancing redistributive arguments which have demonstrably failed for decades……………..you are misguided.

Spiritual decline is the issue………and whether resources shield you temporarily from the effects………..you will have to square accounts eventually.

I don’t think G.K. Chesterton was a materialist, and a hundred years ago he predicted what is happening now: easy divorce, he said, would end up hurting the poor far more than the well-to-do. I remember reading the book when I was a teenager 40 years ago and I didn’t see his point; but he was right.

The well-to-do are often cushioned from the consequences of their own bad behavior. A poor man’s drinking may cost him his job and he ends up in the gutter. Whereas a rich man can continue to live comfortably and send his children to good schools.

Moreover, the poor have greater economic worries, and therefore more stress on their marriages. To say that moral and material factors can interact with each other to produce “vicious cycles” for the poor and the opposite for the well-off is not a very hard idea to understand. Anyone who has been paying attention for the last fifty years or so should be able to see many of the ways in which this happens.

They lost their moral authority because they misspent it.

The inability to separate a need from a want has been the bane of pretty much every great left wing idea of the 20th century – including not only unions (that can currently prevent a company from firing a known thief, but cannot make companies enforce safety regs – and don’t appear particularly interested in trying).

Feminism had moral authority and legitimacy when it attacked the real powerlessness of women. It went over the line, and instead of arguing for what is fair, it started coming up with justifications for why it could ignore real and legitimate issues – going beyond fairness to actually demand more than what is actually fair.

These things kill relationships.

Relationships – especially ones that involve sharing of resources and responsibilities – have institutions that evolve for the purpose of regulating what is fair. Liberals did very well when they focused on justice. They lost power – and, not coincidentally, marriages and unions both started failing – when liberals went beyond justice and into a pattern of targeting the supposedly “most powerful” member of the arrangement and opposing anything that granted him power – in essence, demanding that the heads of businesses and the heads of families continue to honor all the obligations that go with their positions, but without getting any of the resources (including emotional resources such as respect for authority).

The real problem is one of misdiagnosis.

It’s the economic policies of those who support what they call “free enterprise” that is driving the income inequality that is the greatest factor in the erosion of marriage.