this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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At risk of being downvoted, I am a conservative. I am a conservative for moral/social reasons. I consider our going off-course was a consequence of WW2 as those who fought would go home and seek a different way forward. That different way took a few years to brew but really came to light in the 1960's. Religiously, we had Vatican II council and the modern-rite Mass that gave the appearance the Church was throwing out her traditions and moral teachings. Socially, we had the introduction of "the pill" quickly followed by no-fault divorce and widespread legal abortion. Like these changes or hate them, there is no denying that these would have a HUGE effect on average family dynamics. Then Nixon opened China to the world and began the process of exporting industry to China. It started slow but continued to pick-up steam, hitting maximum industrial transfer during the Clinton administration. I was born after all these things. The effect is children being raised by only one parent, fewer children, men who cannot provide for their families without having a working spouse, and a whole host of trickle-down-effects like the fact that we now need 2x the housing to accommodate families of divorce.
Smart phones, AI, 9-11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and everything else people my age cite ... these are peanuts compared to the destruction of the family unit that happened by destruction of our religion, promotion of anti-natalism, dividing families, destroying jobs that are key to young people starting families, and creating an artificial housing crisis by doubling the number of houses needed per family.
Nixon and Reagan sending jobs overseas? Both those guys were staunch conservatives. By the time center Left Clinton came in it was a done deal.
The reason 'no fault divorce' broke up so many families was that there were a lot of women getting beaten by their husbands.
And it was conservative polices that destroyed the one breadwinner family. When Nixon came in 'middle class' was one Union job supporting a family of four. Nixon knew the Vietnam War was unwinnable, but he didn't want to be the one to lose it either. His solution was to keep printing money to pay for the war, while not raising taxes to pay for it. This caused inflation. Jimmy Carter was the one who cooled the inflation spiral down by hiring a man named Paul Volker. After Carter lost in 1980, Reagan kept Volker.
So from 1968 to 1992 you had four years of a Democratic President and twenty years of GOP Conservatives. That's when we went from one income being enough to support a family of four to needing two incomes. That's also the time when $1 million went from being a vast personal fortune to what a rich guy paid for a party.
Finally, one big reason a lot of people turned away from religion was hucksters like Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority. Many if the so-called religious schools in the south sprang up after the Supreme Court made school segregation illegal. Instead of sending their kids to school with 'those people' the so-called religious folks opened private schools that got around the law.
Maybe if the religious leadership of this country had actually followed Christ's teaching we wouldn't be here. We'll never know.
You may not have noticed but, other than Nixon opening China and the presidents since him accelerating the export of jobs, everything else I mentioned was non-political or on the margins of politics. People need to stop thinking of politics like a religion. There's a whole lot that happens outside the question of who the president is or what party is more popular. This stuff was going to happen no matter who was the president and no matter who ran congress. Virtually all these problems happened at the same time outside of the United States too, especially the western world. The problems opened-up because the effects of Vatican II and the modern-rite Mass. These were the restraints on moral relativism and modernism that had been pushing for a new way since the 1880's. Once the restraint was gone, the people acted without regard to an authority that no longer existed in their minds.
Back at the time of Vatican 2 being LGBT was illegal in most of the Western world. Hypocrites in the Church shielded predator priests and moved them from parish to parish when they got caught. People got sick of the two-faced moralists and walked away.
Also, you didn't respond to my point that a lot of marriages broke up because women were tired of getting beaten up.
Vatican II and the modern rite were pushed by the same people who raped little boys. I do not see any evidence that there were a significant number of marriages that broke-up because of physical abuse.
And the cause is capitalism, but you want to blame checks notes women getting rights
Wow you'll come up with anything, no matter how ridiculous, to avoid the obvious actual problem at hand. Fascinating
We didn't suddenly become capitalist in 1962.
No shit?
Everything was fine until 1962, then? Couldn't possibly be the evolution of capitalism under the deregulation of the very shit stain you mentioned before: Reagan. Or, maybe, was capitalism bad then, too?
Great deflection though, really helps you not think about the actual issue at hand and keep blaming civil fucking rights for the downfall of civilization, really outing yourself as a terrible person
Vatican II and the modern rite Mass did not do anything to civil rights. My country had long been capitalist. I see no reason why 1962 would be a breaking point for capitalism to cause all these changes.
First of all, thanks for showing a different perspective.
But that's just the way capitalism works. It not only destroys families, but everything in the way of profit maximization for the few chosen ones at the top. What conservative politics are striving to restore is merely narratives: of "good old days," of "a honest buck." But that's really only lip service. The system is fundamentally flawed. The selling out of the working class will continue until there's a violent revolution.
In the same vein, all this public kowtowing to our axiomatic corporate overlords as "job creators" is fundamentally flawed, because a) workers could organize all aspects of work themselves, but are being suppressed by an artificial notion of "competition" designed to divide the working class, and b) the jobs being created in the current system are often of the bullshit kind anyway. What a pointless exercise.
I'm a self-employed independent contractor because I don't like employer-employee relationships, so I agree with you concerning aspects of our current system. A better world is where workers are self-employed and own their own operations and everything that can work on a smaller scale does operate on a smaller scale. I'm not opposed to larger operations having democratic processes and would be happy to see labor unions buy up enough shares of the companies the workers work for to own the board of directors and make decisions for themselves.
I also agree that the commodification of everything is a problem. Take abortion, for example. There's an entire industry around promoting and earning revenue from commodifying the lives of these unborn children. We also need to stop defining success by career aspiration or income or other metrics that create a cultural desire for abortion of "inconvenient" babies.
That said, the big changes in family life did not happen because of capitalism. Families survived capitalism. It was some other change that happened. It was a change in the underlying religious and philosophical values of our society. The change was Vatican II and the modern rite Mass.