Normal women and the men who love them

From the Wall Street Journal comes this silly story about the alleged "backlash" against Hillary Clinton leading to an alleged "backlash" against women in general. (Hat tip to Instapundit.)

Unlike blacks and whites, who are still too separated from one another, men and women spend enough time together and understand each other well enough (sometimes too well) to make such worries seem pathetic. And listen to the absurd assumptions behind all such sloppy journalism: we need such candidacies to feel "empowered." What a joke: politicians almost always reduce our freedom - they rarely enhance it.

In our society, the position of women and the way men view them, and the way women view themselves, has little linkage to the vagaries of politics and the ups and downs of Hillary Clinton. It was always a mistake for her and her supporters to frame her candidacy this way. Fortunately, relations between the sexes are not much impacted by such things, and the influence that radical feminists once had, 20 or 30 years ago, on our thinking has mercifully faded to almost nil.

Too bad for the identity politics mongers - but nice for the rest of us.

Mistaken identity

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are running neck-and-neck in the Democratic primaries, but to listen to the media, once you get beyond the horserace aspects of the Presidential elections this year, there's nothing more important than the fact that one candidate is "black" (although it's unclear what that means here) and the other a woman. Those mere facts are supposed to emblematic of something that no one can quite articulate.

There's both more and less here than meets the eye.

Identity politics has little rational basis, although the larger forces that drive identity politics are easy to pick out. While it's supposedly about identity expression, identity politics is really about identity weakness. People with real identities just take them for granted, and their politics is expression of their interests and principles - identity itself plays no direct role. Identity politics is for people who need politicians to mirror back to them something strictly talismanic or symbolic. It asks politicians to boost or create identity, which of course they can't. While identity politics doesn't require it, mixed with the late-welfare-state cult of victimhood, identity politics becomes a powerful expression of resentment. The welfare-regulatory state (including its media wing) encourages victimhood, so naturally we get more of it.

Until the 1960s, the most powerful form of identity politics in American life was the white supremacism of the post-Civil War South, expressed in practical form as the "Jim Crow" system. Unable to take it out on the Federal army or the Union at large, the defeated South took it out instead on the newly-freed and largely defenseless ex-slaves. (The early history of the Ku Klux Klan is testimony to this fundamental fact about the Jim Crow era.) Americans outside the South eventually acquiesced in this system, accepting the proposition that the South was "peculiar" and knew better, anyway - besides being ambivalent about race themselves. Resentment over defeat and despoilation by the North was the prime determinant of Southern politics until the end of World War Two. Even politicians who were conscious of the self-destructive nature of this system (like the young George Wallace) were unable to break with it. Only larger social change, after 1945, could undermine it. The triumph of the civil rights movement, climaxing with the 1964-65 civil rights and voting laws, also marked the end of the South's "different-ness" from the rest of the country. By this point, no one alive was left who remembered the Civil War or Reconstruction, and an end came to the days of Southern refusal to celebrate the Fourth of July (the same day as the fall of Vicksburg in 1863) or Thanksgiving (a New England holiday made national by Lincoln, also in 1863).

The most important contemporary identity politics in American life is the politics of race, although the appeal of race hustling has been fading for the last twenty years; even the mainstream media no longer jump when Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton say something. The most striking thing about Obama is that he's "post-racial." His life is a testimony to the declining importance of race in America in the last generation. OTOH, as a "black" politician, Obama seems to feel he has to play that big Race Politics Wurlitzer, because somehow, he's supposed to. Doesn't pushing those keys and buttons constantly remind everyone of the very thing we're supposed to be overcoming? The Race Politics Wurlitzer has a century-plus legacy, largely destructive, behind it. Wouldn't it be better if Obama just walked away from it? Doesn't he have any other tunes or instruments to play? Of course he does, but as the media inflate his importance beyond his slender national political career as a freshman Senator, playing old familiar tunes on a familiar instrument is tempting - sort of like comfort food.

Hillary Clinton's case is more straightforward. Her political career is built on the man to whom she is married. While she plausibly claims to have feminist beliefs, her career is no exemplar of feminism. The older custom of women occasionally getting into political power by family connections has produced a variety of women leaders - few truly bad ones, and a few (like Britain's two greatest monarchs, Elizabeth I and Victoria) who proved outstanding. Such achievements are real, but they are not feminist. OTOH, figures like Margaret Thatcher are feminist icons, perhaps in spite of themselves. They owe nothing to marriage or relatives.

There's nothing irrational about identity - it just is what it is. But identity politics is inherently irrational, and usually reactionary to boot, no matter how dressed up it is otherwise. It seduces us into a deadend of absurdities and paradoxes.

POSTSCRIPT: Having drafted this posting, I discovered that Christopher Hitchens had a short piece in Friday's Journal about just this topic. It's lucid and sensible, as Hitch typically is.

The new inequality

With John Edwards the dark horse candidate in the 2008 Democratic presidential contest, we'll be hearing a lot more in the next two years about "two Americas" and the "new" inequality/poverty. (Edwards himself isn't a po' tiller of the soil, of course, but a wealthy trial lawyer. His very large new house could probably fill at least one of those Americas.) This might be a good thing - but it might not, depending on the degree of honesty in what we hear. The Edwards rhetoric is, in part, about connecting the new inequality/poverty with globalization, but that relationship is loose and only a very recent development.

Conservatives (with some exceptions) are uncomfortable talking about poverty and inequality, while liberals love to talk about this pair of issues. They would be less happy talking about them if the issues were discussed honestly. Contrary to the impression you get from the media, inequality didn't magically appear under Reagan, disappear under Clinton, then magically reappear under Bush Jr. The new inequality started in the late 1960s, following four decades of growing equality after the 1929 crash and the Great Depression, and has been growing (at an uneven pace) ever since.

Inequality and poverty are not the same thing. Europe is often compared favorably with the US on these issues, but a better comparison is not country by country, but across the whole European continent. Then the picture is more like the US, at least in terms of poverty. Inequality is still significantly higher here and is largely due to the dynamism of the American economy - lots of new millionaires and billionaires have been minted in the last 20 years.

The best source on the "new" inequality and the related decline of urban life in the US is the great City Journal, published by New York's Manhattan Institute. The new inequality/poverty of the last forty years is driven by three trends. Two of them are rooted in changing family patterns, which reminds us - pace liberals and feminists - the family is still the single most important economic institution and, in some ways, more important than ever.

The first is the broken family/marriage caste revolution, a mixture of moral anarchy, the equalization of education and marriage between men and women, and bad welfare policies. It's the mix of these three, not any one, that set this trend is motion. This problem started in the late 60s, ran its course through the late 80s, and lately has been partly reversed by welfare reform. But it remains the single largest cause of child poverty. There are fewer teen mothers now, but single/working poor mothers now seem to be a permanent feature of our social landscape. Children of unmarried mothers are far more likely to repeat the behavior.

The Manhattan Institute's Myron Magnet and Kay Hymowitz have written on this development in their respective books, The Dream and the Nightmare and Marriage and Caste in America. Hymowitz is interviewed in this podcast.

The second trend is the decay of high school education and the large achievement gap that opened up between the college-educated and non-college-educated in the 70s and 80s. This phenomenon is no longer new and not as big a deal as it was 30 years ago. But it remains the largest factor in limited opportunities for working-age males and intact working-class families.

This second cause interacts strongly with the first to highten inequality. There's a strong correlation between being working or lower-middle class and having an education that stops at high school, on the one hand, and being middle or upper-middle class and having an education that extends to college and possibly beyond. This fact lays the ground for the strong assortative mating or homogamy trend of the last 30 years, whereby doctors don't marry nurses - they marry other doctors; and so on. Combined with the effects of single motherhood and feminism, this trend encapsulated most of the growing inequality of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

This somewhat tongue-in-cheek but ultimately quite serious article from the Daily Telegraph documents the British case, but the dynamic is similar in the US. The trend started here about a generation earlier than in the UK.

The third cause is illegal immigration - to put it in political/legal terms - or - to put it in economic terms - unskilled immigration. This is the major new factor that has reversed the good poverty and inequality trends that started in the late 80s. This cause is fairly recent and became strong only in the late 90s. But it's the sole reason for the large increase in poor people in the last decade and the main reason for increasing inequality. Essentially, we're importing very poor people without the skills to do much better.

The simplest way to see its effect is to view its impact geographically, in those states with the largest illegal/unskilled immigrant population. The resulting burden on local and state governments puts those cities and states, even in good economic times, in a difficult situation. Unskilled immigrants also drive down the wages of unskilled and semi-skilled Americans.

The third cause overlaps with the first two, inasmuch as virtually all illegal immigrants have little education and experience dramatic family breakdown once they move here.

The net result of these trends is a troubling self-perpetuating caste system, a two-track society. It makes liberals uncomfortable, but the reality is that having two parents matters; having a father matters; they impact education and the life chances of children, by far more than any other factor. Education in turn is the next biggest determinant of life chances.

Discussing illegal immigration also makes many people uncomfortable. Almost everyone has a reason not to. Libertarians and economic conservatives believe in "pure economic man," at least much of the time. Neoconservatives believe in limitless American opportunity, even for the unskilled, and have a sentimentalized picture of past waves of immigration. Liberals share this sentimentalized mythology and also view illegal immigrants as potential new Democratic voters.

Much of the rhetoric on poverty and inequality, when not connected with globalization, is stuck in concepts 40+ years out of date. The "old" poverty was largely rural poverty, what FDR meant in his 1936 inaugural address ("one-third of a nation ill-clad," etc.). It has shrunk markedly since the 1940s. A major mistake of American politics in the 1960s was assuming that poverty was mainly urban. Cities aren't incubators of poverty; they're places where poor people go to escape poverty. The basic problem was rural poverty - there's no poverty like rural poverty, because of the isolation it enforces. Economic opportunities are far better in metropolitan areas. But there is less social solidarity, and an advantage to rural poverty, in spite of its severe economic limits, is this social solidarity.

The "new" poverty, by contrast, is not rural or rooted in ancient class systems. It's urban or even suburban and a result of bad life choices, subpar education, and lack of skills. Real progress will be forthcoming when politicians start talking about why people should stop making bad life choices, about reforming public education, and about stopping illegal immigration. The last item is especially explosive, since it touches on the failure of the societies-of-origin to develop on their own. This was even an issue in the recent Mexican presidential election, an all-too-rare moment of honesty.

When politicians talk about poverty and inequality, grade them on the degree of their honesty concerning these three trends. For that matter, grade the media the same way - and buyer beware.