The birth of Prince George creates a problem for liberals. They love the idea of royalty because it validates their vision of an anointed elite with a divine right to the obedience of their subjects. However, this wonderful couple has created a traditional nuclear family that provides a powerful counterpoint to the kind of freak show dysfunction that liberalism requires to survive.
If families actually stayed together and raised their children, well, who would need the liberal elite?
Sure, the royal couple gets paid out of the British treasury, but it isn’t as if Prince William sits around being fanned and fed grapes. Besides cutting ribbons and promoting charities, he is a warrior who has proved his courage by seeking service on battlefields he could have easily avoided. Royalty is a bizarre concept, but he does work for a living.
By contributing to society, Prince William repudiates the basic premise of liberalism. If you vote for liberals they will redistribute free stuff to you from the people who contribute to society. This will allow you to wallow in the cesspit of social pathologies that led you to expect handouts in the first place, and thereby guarantee another generation of liberal constituents.
Liberalism depends on people continuing to do the things that ensure they will be poor. The most obvious among these bad decisions is to have kids out of wedlock. Yeah, we all know the single mom who is prospering or the gay couple with a great kid. That’s awesome, but it’s an anecdotal irrelevancy. The simple, unarguable fact is that the epidemic of broken families means a broken society, and liberalism feeds off the wreckage.
Society should stop being coy, and it needs to stop worrying that people will be offended. It should say, loudly and unequivocally, that you shouldn’t have kids if you aren’t married to a guy who’s not going to disappear when things get real.
A recent Huffington Post article buried the lede when it talked to a woman named Irene Salyers, who is currently living off of government disability checks while working at a fruit stand with her current boyfriend. Leaving aside that this makes her not disabled at all, Ms. Salyers was married and divorced three times. Her jobless, single-mom daughter, is living off her boyfriend’s disability checks and hoping “that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job.”
I’m guessing they all vote Democrat.
Liberalism, of course, must be in denial about the true causes of the poverty it exploits. “Marriage rates are in decline across all races,” the article notes. But in the very next paragraph it quotes some Harvard professor who “specializes in race and poverty” who says, “It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position.”
Hmmmm. Maybe their “economic class position” comes from having multiple illegitimate kids and dealing Oxy, Professor Einstein. But identifying and addressing that problem would result in academics who specialize “in race and poverty” having to get real jobs.
Instead of validating this kind of lifestyle chaos with “understanding” and “help,” we ought to apply that ancient, time-honored means of enforcing positive social values: Shame. You should be ashamed if you are a jobless felon shacked up with some deadbeat sperm donor who is milking Uncle Sucker while your kids wonder what it’s like to have a real father.
You’re not a victim. You’re a loser.
Concurrently, we need to model good behavior. Prince William and Kate Middleton should use their position and their visibility to hammer home the truth that solid families are the model to be emulated instead of merely one option in a smorgasbord of equally valid familial arrangements.
Let me be clear: Having some random dude move into your Section 8 flat so you can get a cut of the SSI check he gets because of his bogus anger management disorder is not a valid familial arrangement. It’s a petri dish for growing future inmates and welfare cheats.
President Obama should step up, but he won’t. The only thing conservatives appreciate about this neo-socialist disaster of a president is his obviously close-knit and lovely family. He occasionally pays lip service to the importance of intact families, but the fact is that his party supports the status quo.
As Dr. Helen Smith observes in her terrific new book Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters, government policy, the legal system and society have conspired to undercut marriage by making it unattractive to men. On the policy side, the welfare system has utterly cut men out of the picture by making their income unnecessary. Fathers are superfluous; for millions of Americans, government is their baby daddy.
Family courts are so tilted against men that when I was taking the Bar Exam, the joke about how to pass the family law question without studying was, “Give the kids to the mother.” Which I did, and I passed the first time.
Socially, radical feminist influence has led to men being viewed as incompetent buffoons when they aren’t violent exploiters. All men are either Homer Simpson or Ted Bundy. The only approved males are liberal icons, and they get a pass for over-enthusiastic hugging, genital sexting, Oval Office intern tapping and leaving women to drown in icy water.
No wonder, as Dr. Smith observes, men are simply opting out of the whole family thing. After all, what’s in it for them? Instead of changing the incentives that lead to this sorry result, Obama’s course of action is to chastise men even more. Apparently the floggings will continue until morale improves.
This is a huge opportunity for the GOP. It could fix the tax code so that getting married doesn’t cost people a fortune. If my wife started working, for example, her income on top of mine would be hit with a 50%+ marginal rate. Maybe in GOP states they could fix family law so that the man doesn’t lose before he walks into court. Maybe it could work to reduce welfare benefits so that having a man around actually means there is more money rather than less. But this is the GOP, so it will undoubtedly blow it by focusing on something else, like importing zillions of Democrat voters against the wishes of its base.
We need to make it so that the novelty of the birth of someone like Prince George is that he is part of a royal family, rather than that he is part of any family at all.