The Origins of the Red State–Blue State Divide

8/9/2019 The Origins of the Red StateBlue State Divide

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Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse 663 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road Suite 222 San Marcos CA 92078

www.jennifer-roback-morse.com email: [email protected] 760/295-92782007 No part of this document may be reproduced or disseminated in any way without the expressed written consent of theRuth Institute.

The Origins of the

Red StateBlue

State Divide

by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.

This article was first published by Family inAmerica.org in their Winter 2009 issue.

When first published in 1947,Family and

Civilization was a significant book on the

sociology of the family. Thanks to the

Backgroundimprint of ISI Books, it is back

in print. In this classic, Carle Zimmerman

brings clarity to the precise area of todays

greatest confusion: the definition and

evolution of the family. Instead of the

Triumphant March of Liberation presented

by the Life Style Left, the late Harvard

sociologist sees an ebb and flow of changes

in family structure. Instead of a contrast

between the nuclear family and the

individualist family, Zimmerman contrasts

three different family types. While he agrees

with Marx and Engels that family structure

is powerfully linked with economics and

politics, Zimmerman is more analytical and

less ideological. Providing evidence for

some of his most fascinating claims sixty

years later is The War between the State and

the Family,by British scholar Patricia

Morgan.

As an older work,Family and Civilization

can be a challenging read. But the

introduction by Allan Carlson makes the ISI

Books edition accessible to the intelligent

reader, including many non-academics who

have become marriage activists by necessity.

The edition would also be good reading for

college courses in history or sociology.

Carlson helps situate Zimmerman, who

opposed the neo-Marxist sociologists of the

Chicago School, within the larger stream of

twentieth-century family sociology. The

Chicago School argued that the American

family was losing its functions, with fathers

and later mothers leaving the home foroutside employment. But while mainstream

American sociology applauded this trend,

giving it the greatest of modern accolades

historical inevitabilityZimmerman

denied that there was anything permanent or

inevitable about the shucking off or

negation of familistic bonds. He argued:

The disintegration of the family into

contractual and non-institutional forms is sodevastating to high cultural society that

these atypical forms can last only a short

while and will in time have to be corrected.

The family reappears by counterrevolution.
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Zimmerman argues that the contractual

thinking of the eighteenth-century

rationalists channeled the issues in the

wrong direction. Political theorists such as

Locke and Hume, as well as prominent

French and German thinkers, viewed the

family as a private agreement between a

man and a woman for specific civil

functions. This definition constricted the

range of issues that these analysts could see

clearly enough to take seriously. Once the

contractual model is accepted as the basic

form of the family, scholars will interpret

history as the steady march from non-

contractual marriages to contractual

marriages, from forced or arranged

marriages to love or companionate

marriages. Stephanie Coontz is the best-

known modern exponent of this view.

Things are getting better because they are

getting freer, which means more contractual.

Zimmerman escapes this trap by focusing on

the sovereignty of the family. He lays out

his key analytical questions in the second

chapter:

Of the total power in society, how much

belongs to the family? Of the total amount

of control of action in the society, how much

is left for the family? What role does the

family play in the total business of society? .

. . If we want to marry or break up a family,

whom do we consult, the family, the church

or the state? If we are in need, to whom do

we go, the family or the community? If we

violate a rule, who punishes us, the family or

the state?

These questions suggest that no necessary

reason requires society to progress on all

fronts from one type of family inexorably to

another type of family. He deploys three

types of family: the trustee family, the

domestic family, and the atomistic family.

The domestic family and the atomistic

family would correspond roughly to the

modern family before and after the sexual

revolution. The trustee family is probably

the least familiar to modern readers.

The Trustee Family and the Atomistic

Family

In the trustee family, the living individual

members are not the family, but mere

trustees of its blood, rights, property,

name and position for their lifetimes.

According to Zimmerman, this familysystem dominated in Homeric Greece of the

ninth century b.c., in Rome from the earliest

tribes to the period of the Twelve Tables

around 450 b.c., and from the so-called Dark

Ages from the sixth to the twelve centuries.


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The trustee family exercises the most

sovereignty of any of the family types. The

family is the primary power in society,

controlling individual action, punishing

transgressions, and providing protection

against enemy attack. The concept of the

house is more powerful than the concept

of the home. This family type tends be the

dominant one in periods when the political

authorities are relatively weak. The family

keeps order, out of necessity: no one else is

doing that job. Individuals in the trustee

family do not typically own landed property.

Rather, the living members of the family

receive the property as a patrimony from

past generations and hold the property in

trust for future generations.

Modern economists might view the trustee

family as a family form based on common

property, but this is an anachronistic

interpretation. The tragedy of the

commons, in which no one takes care of

commonly owned resources, does not occur

in societies dominated by the trustee family.

That tragedy develops only in situations in

which a) the state hold the exclusive ordominant power to enforce property rights

and b) people view themselves as individual

agents rather than as part of an infinitely-

lived family, with powers of its own.

Neither condition appears in the trustee

family, which claims immense non-state

power to enforce norms of behavior

internally amongst its members and

externally against its enemies.

The trustee family is simply the strongest

social entity in its time, stronger than both

the state and the individual. This is why the

trustee family is almost incomprehensible to

Americans today, in an era of hugely

powerful government and fiercely

independent individuals. In contrast, the

atomistic family holds that sovereignty lies

with the individual, as against the family.

But society pays a price for this freedom

from family bonds. The very idea of liberty

itself changes, according to Zimmerman:

The individual is left more and more alone

to do as he wishes. At first the freedom

becomes an incentive to economic gain. . . .

But sooner or later the meaning of this

freedom changes. The individual, having no

guiding moral principles, changes the

meaning of freedom from opportunity to

license. Having no internal or external

guides to discipline him, he becomes agambler with life, always seeking greener

pastures. When he comes to inevitable

difficulty, he is alone in his misery. He

wishes to pass his difficulties and his misery

on to others. Consequently, he continually


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helps build up institutions to remedy his

misery. He willingly follows any prophet

(and they are mostly false ones) who comes

along with a sure-cure nostrum for the

diseases of the social system.

Hence, the atomistic family and the

powerful central government tend to co-

exist. This could have been written in 2010

instead of in 1947.

Moderation of the Domestic Family

Between the extremes of the trustee and

atomistic family models lies the moderation

of the domestic family, such as that of the

American family of the 1950s. Here,

Zimmermans reasoning provides helpfulbackground to defenders of the family that is

today deemed traditional. He claims the

domestic family satisfies the natural desires

for freedom from family bonds and for

individualism, yet it also preserves sufficient

social structure to enable the state or body

politic to depend upon it as an aid in

government. Zimmerman credits the

Catholic Church with the rise of thedomestic family in the Middle Ages. The

Church attempted to moderate the more

barbaric features of the trustee family

system, while preventing people from

lapsing back into the decadent atomistic

family of the late Roman Empire.

The Church strongly objected to

intermarriage among cousins and closer

relatives. This was a direct blow against the

barbarian trustee family, which used

intermarriage to strengthen the clan. The

Church loosened the power of the family to

control the marriage choices of its members.

Marriage was a union of equals, by mutual

consent of the parties, not of their parents.

The Church insisted that quarrels between

families were to be heard by public

assemblies, not settled by blood feuds and

vengeance. The Church restricted divorce,

which was characteristic of the late Roman

atomistic family, and repudiation, thebarbarian trustee-family version of divorce.

The Church also stood strongly against

abortion, infanticide, and the practice of

exposing unwanted infants to the elements.

Both the late Roman Empire and the

barbarians permitted parents to reject

infants, arguing that they were not social

beings unless their parents accepted theminto the family. Against both the barbarian

trustee and Roman atomistic family systems,

the Church introduced the idea that children

are automatically social beings, the children

of their mother and her husband, and could


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not be rejected. Most significantly, the

Church celebrated the bearing and raising of

children. As Zimmerman observes: The

family gives more and requires more of the

individual than do other social

organizations. The Churchs spiritual

incentives motivated people to undertake the

material sacrifices necessarily involved in

the bearing and rearing of children.

Modern Culture Wars

Zimmermans understanding of the

transition from the trustee family to the

domestic family corrects modern

misconceptions about the evolution of the

family. But his analysis of the transition

between the domestic family and theatomistic family is particularly relevant to

the current culture wars and leads

naturally to The War between the State and

the Family. In this book, Patricia Morgan

argues that the movement toward

individualism in the family was not an

inevitable result of impersonal social forces,

but rather the direct result of specific

policies enacted by specific people.Zimmerman shows why this happens, not

only in the United Kingdom of the twentieth

century but also in post-Revolutionary

France and in many other historical settings.

Zimmerman saw that not everyone in

society actually participates in familism,

meaning the social system that brings forth

the next generation: Reproduction, even in

the most virile times of a society, is limited

to a small segment of the living population.

He estimates that before World War Two,

only about one-third of the wives were

producing more than three-quarters of the

children. Men and women do not necessarily

understand and respect the demands of the

family, just because they grew up in one:

The great and revealing experiences of

familism come primarily after adulthood.

The child has gone through most of the basic

experiences of familism before he has even

a faint idea of their real meaning. Heunderstands only the pleasurable and

receiving aspects of the family system and

few or none of the sacrificial (pleasurable in

a different sense) and giving aspects of the

family.

Likewise, if the elites of society do not

participate in familism, they will create

institutions that encourage others to do thesame. Everything from the design of houses,

the durability of childrens toys, and the

dynamics of the labor market become geared

toward those with few or no children. For

families to sustain themselves becomes


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progressively more difficult. More and more

people abandon the effort, and the society

stagnates demographically. Society doesnt

immediately dissolve, notes Zimmerman,

because the backward, rural, mountainous,

isolated and distant populations or countries

still have to be drained of their surplus

population and familistic values. In the

meantime, the urban elites have no capacity

to even see the problem, much less see the

remedy, because they have never actually

participated in the domestic family as

opposed to the atomistic family.

Red states versus blue states, anyone?

Morgan illustrates this point from the other

side of the Atlantic. The government of theUnited Kingdom has steadily enforced the

march towards the atomistic family. The

state wishes to show no favoritism toward

marriage and no animus toward unmarried

mothers. The state does not wish to

encourage income sharing between adults.

The idea that mothers and fathers cooperate

in raising their children is alien, or perhaps

worse, to Her Majestys government.Marriage is penalized in the markets for

housing, for child-care options, and in the

tax code. Morgan shows that under the

influence of policies like these, the

proportion of one-person households in the

United Kingdom increased from 14 percent

in 1961 to 30 percent by 2004. The

proportion of out-of-wedlock births rose

from 8 percent in 1970 to 42 percent in

2004.

It is sometimes claimed that Americans, like

their European peers, have abandoned

marriage as part of the Triumphant March of

Liberation. But Morgans data strongly

suggest that people of modest means have

done no such thing. Marriage has been taken

from them by their betters. As industrial

societies continue their race toward greater

individualism, fewer people have the vision

to even see the problem, much less the

solution. Yet Carle Zimmerman, who would

not have been surprised at this, provides aprofound and excellent guide to those

wishing to restore a culture of familism.

Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is aneconomist and the Founder and President of

theRuth Institute, a nonprofit educational

organization devoted to bringing hope and

encouragement for lifelong married love.She is also the author ofLove and

Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a

Village andSmart Sex: Finding Life-LongLove in a Hook-Up World.
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The Origins of the Red State–Blue State Divide

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