Divided We Fall

Family Discord and the Fracturing of America

Bryce J. Christensen, M. Afzalur Rahim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351521970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the weeks that followed the horror of September 11, politicians of both major parties resolutely asserted America's national unity. Barely four years later, the illusions of the rhetoric of unity have given way to the divisive oversimplifications of Red vs. Blue electoral cartography. Divided We Fall: Family Discord and the Fracturing of America offers a more nuanced yet more disturbing picture of American disunity, a disunity both social and political, both public and personal. Deeper than the disagreements that separate voter from voter, this disunity increasingly separates man from woman, husband from wife, parent from child, grandparent from grandchild, and sibling from sibling.

Though the national turmoil in family life has unquestionably opened new divides in political life (on the questions of abortion and gay marriage, for instance), this analysis explores the bewildering cross-cutting tensions surrounding these fissures. The search for ways to bridge such fissures takes on particular urgency because of the mounting costs of family disintegration--social and legal, cultural and psychological. Because they recognize the often-desperate plight of single mothers and their children, policymakers have often worked together in bipartisan fashion to intensify government efforts to collect child support from non-custodial fathers, to place abused children in foster care, and to provide shelter for the family fragments on the street.

But these pragmatic government responses to pressing social needs are no substitute for deeper probing into the cultural causes of these needs. Indeed, as the author probes those causes--including the erosion of the home economy, of restraints on sexual conduct, and of the traditional family wage--he warns that continued reliance on government to compensate for family failure will make matters worse in the long run. While family failure puts ever more burdens on government, this investigation shows how such failure withers the selfless civic impulses that sustain any healthy government.

1
Divided We Fall: Family Strife in America’s Second Civil War

From bumper stickers and billboards to political speeches and church sermons, few themes received more attention in post-9/11 America in the weeks immediately after the terrorist attacks than the need for national unity in the face of ominous external threats. “United We Stand” sufficed for the bumper stickers and T-shirts, but clerics, journalists, and academics expatiated on the theme of national unity at much greater length. Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin, for instance, declared, “One deep truth about September 11 is that a community was attacked, not an assortment of individuals.” Within this community, Gitlin further explained that in post-9/11 America, “You are in solidarity with strangers: their losses are your own.” This national solidarity summoned all Americans to “commonality and sacrifice,” expressed through a “patriotism of mutual aid, not just symbolic displays.”¹ In the same vein, the Episcopalian cleric Richard H. Downes saw in the tragic events of 9/11 a forceful reminder that “church and nation both require a strong sense of collective affirmation to bring out the meanings each embodies.” In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Americans needed again “to ponder who we are and how we are obligated to each other.”² Speaking in a similar tone, author and commentator George Packer identified 9/11 as an event exposing the fatuity of the divisive modern politics that have “balkanized” and “fragmented” American public life. Though he suspected that “That day changed America less than most people anticipated,” Packer nonetheless believed that 9/11 occasioned a shift in public mood, as Americans “looked at one another differently.” For the first time in many years, Americans again realized that “they were not merely individuals with private ends but rather fellow citizens, alive to the sentiments once expressed by the poet Walt Whitman: “‘What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?’” Because it made Americans newly cognizant of their ties to their fellow Americans, Packer asserted that 9/11 “made Americans think about change—not just as individuals, but as a country.”³

The pervasive rhetoric of national unity perhaps served its purpose. It reassured a people unnerved by the unexpected and stunningly successful terrorist attacks of 9/11 and rattled by the prospect of other such attacks, perhaps by extremists armed with devastating nuclear, biological, or chemical weaponry. Indeed, this rhetoric of unity may even have done its work too well. For the rhetoric of unity obscured the sad reality of a nation deeply divided. In one way, those divisions emerged in 2004 as Red Americans and Blue Americans lined up on opposite sides of an overheated presidential election. Though real, that Red-Blue division unfortunately obscured a real unity still defined by shared social hopes. Even when they differ as to their political prescriptions for realizing these hopes, Red Republicans and Blue Democrats alike share recognizably similar hopes for happy and lasting marriages, for fulfilling and harmonious family lives. But even before the divisive election-year rhetoric heated up, millions of Americans (Red and Blue) were divided from their fellow citizens by the life-scarring experience of family failures. Even without the dubious labors of Red and Blue sloganeers, America has become a nation more deeply divided than it has ever been, a nation whose citizens have been pulled apart—personally, socially, morally, economically, ideologically, and politically—by the unprecedented disintegration of the nation’s marital and family life. The post-9/11 belief that such divisions could be healed through patriotic rhetoric and gestures (Republican or Democratic) was a cruel illusion.

In the more than two centuries of their country’s existence, Americans have never before seen more fragmentation and disarray in marital and family life than we currently see. Though the divorce rate has declined slightly since the early 1980s, it still remains more than 30 percent higher than it was in 1970, when it was already high by historical standards. Meanwhile, the national marriage rate has plummeted to an all-time low, dropping almost 40 percent just since 1970, a drop that helps to account for an illegitimacy rate that has skyrocketed from just 5 percent in 1960 to 33 percent in 1998. Just as dramatic has been the multiplication of the number of couples repudiating wedlock in favor of non-marital cohabitation: the Census Bureau counted 4.5 million such couples in 1999, compared to just 1.6 million in 1980. Also on the rise, the number of female-headed households with children has risen from 3.0 million in 1970 to 7.8 million in 1999. And while the number of married-couple households with children has remained relatively stable, declining from 25.5 million in 1970 to 25.0 million in 1999, it must be remembered that the population as a whole grew by almost 30 percent (about 60 million) during this period.⁴ It must also be remembered that among children who live with married parents, only a little over half live with both biological parents; almost as many live with a remarried biological parent and a stepparent.⁵ Problematic surrogate parents of a different sort have likewise insinuated themselves into the lives of a growing number—now over a million—of pre-school children whose employed mothers daily leave them in the care of day-care workers.

For a time, a post-9/11 upsurge in marriages and engagements encouraged some to hope that perhaps the harrowing shock of the terrorist attacks had renewed the country’s commitment to wedlock and family life. However, subsequent research into national attitudes suggests that the shift in family attitudes may have been “a mere blip” and that, overall, “attitudes of average Americans have not changed much since the September 11 attacks.”⁶ The moral challenge of having to fight Osama Bin Laden and his followers may have sobered some Americans, but it has not yet decisively reversed the country’s worrisome retreat from family life.

Nor can any sober commentator on the nation’s social life plausibly interpret the astounding national retreat from wedlock and family life as merely an innocuous shift in personal lifestyles. This retreat from marriage and family has seriously harmed our national public life, creating grievous tears in our national social fabric, profoundly dis-unifying the nation. Until Americans face that grim reality, even the most inspired talk about national unity will amount to no more than whistling-in-the-dark self-delusion.

To understand how deeply family disintegration has divided America, it may be helpful to contrast the country’s state of disunion in the early twenty-first century with the most often-invoked example of national disunion: the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. In trying to convey the horribly internecine character of the great national struggle of the 1860s, historians have often described it as a conflict of “brother against brother.” To be sure, in a significant number of cases, brothers did fight on opposite sides in this terrible bloodletting. General George H. Thomas—one of the Union heroes of Chattanooga—was a Virginian fighting against other Virginians. An entire Confederate Unit (the Shiver Grays) was recruited from a single town (Wheeling) in the Union State of West Virginia. The border state of Kentucky sent tens of thousands of soldiers to both sides of the conflict.⁷ Still, the war that Southern partisans referred to as the War Between the States was largely defined by regional allegiances: brothers who lived in the same state usually fought on the same side, and the tragedy of brother taking up arms against brother was largely limited to border states. Even in border states, the lines of conflict more frequently ran between families than between brothers. In the current civil war which is tearing American families apart, the lines of division run right through millions of dis-integrating homes.

Indeed, when future historians try to describe the ubiquitous social conflict that has rent America since the late 1960s, they may well invoke the phrase “brother against brother”—as well as many other similar phrases (“sister against sister,” “former husband against former wife,” “parent against child,” “grandparent against former daughter-in-law,” and so on)—to describe a genuinely internecine countrywide conflict fought out not on clearly defined battlefields such as Gettysburg and Cold Harbor but rather in tens of thousands of bitter and interminable domestic conflicts. For the social tragedy of family disintegration that now plays itself out hundreds of thousands of times each year in the United States pits husband against wife (or cohabiting lover vs. cohabiting lover), sibling against sibling, parent against child, grandparent against former daughter-inlaw, and stepparent against former parent. With good reason, the literary critic Alvin Kernan has remarked that in the firestorm of recent social change in America, “the family is probably the most desperate battlefield.”⁸

Domestic Battlegrounds

The conflict on these domestic battlefields has grown cruel and vicious as family life has decayed. In two studies at the University of New Hampshire, progressive-thinking sociologists who were not initially inclined to regard marriage as superior to non-marital cohabitation learned—to their astonishment—that cohabiting women are almost five times as likely as married peers to suffer “extreme violence” in their homes.⁹ In the violent domestic conflict increasingly wracking American society, children suffer as well as women. Researchers on child abuse have discerned a clear “association between physical abuse of children and deviance from normative family structure,” with careful investigation revealing that “battered babies are likely to be reared in broken homes” and that premarital pregnancy, illegitimacy, and absence of the child’s father are among the most common “precursors of baby battering.”¹⁰ Columbia University researchers have determined from available child-abuse data that children living in single-parent families are more than twice as likely to experience physical abuse (Odds Ratio of 2.26) than peers in two-parent homes.¹¹ And researchers from Ohio State University have established that domestic violence harmful to women and children is especially likely to erupt in “disadvantaged neighborhoods” in which 42 percent or more of the households are headed by single females.¹²

But besides fostering domestic abuse, the fragmentation of the family sets the stage for socially divisive custody fights that traumatize children and embitter and impoverish adults. When husbands or wives decide to file for divorce, they find that no-fault divorce laws have made it easy to sever the ties to an unwanted spouse. Those laws, however, have not simplified the legal adjudication of child custody. Indeed, legal scholar Lynn D. Wardle identifies an increasing number of acrimonious custody disputes as a prime indicator that the nationwide adoption of no-fault divorce statutes has not led to the reduction in adversarial litigation promised by no-fault advocates. Thus, while “there unquestionably is less hostile litigation regarding the grounds for divorce,” since the adoption of no-fault divorce laws, “it appears that this has been due primarily to a transfer of hostility into other facets of the divorce proceeding,” including especially those governing child custody.¹³ In the absence of a finding of fault as the justification for the divorce, the judges who weigh the competing claims of divorcing parents often split siblings—even identical twins—leaving them lost, disoriented, and dismayed at the sudden and unexpected sundering of their ties to brothers and sisters.¹⁴ When America’s Civil War of the 1860s split siblings, it split adults who freely—though tragically—decided on their opposing fates. But the siblings split by America’s domestic civil war of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are bewildered children with no control over what happens to them.

Even if custody disputes do not split siblings, they do separate children from parents. Psychologists have found that the children affected by this fissuring of the family typically have “expressed the wish that their parents were reunited.” Many of these children are “confused about which parent they ‘loved’ most and wishing that their parents ‘would stop saying unkind things about each other.’”¹⁵ Even after the pronouncement of the divorce decree, children thus find themselves pinned down in the ugly house-to-house combat that continues between the former spouses.

The hostility in child custody disputes has grown so intense that “the practice of one parent falsely accusing the other parent of child abuse, especially child sexual abuse, appears to have increased since the adoption of no-fault divorce grounds.”¹⁶ Such tactics naturally prolong the court proceedings necessary to adjudicate child custody and inflate their costs: the legal bills for one highly visible child-custody fight reached $4 million.¹⁷ And when the courts have finally reached a custody decision—a decision in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Divided We Fall: Family Strife in America’s Second Civil War
• 2. Friendly Fire in the War on Terror? The Bewildering Tactics of America’s Anti-Family Ideologues
• 3. Dead-Beat Dads or Fleeced Fathers? The Strange Politics of Child Support
• 4. Fostering Confusion: The Real Foster-Care Crisis
• 5. Homeless America: Why Has America Lost Its Homemakers
• 6. Queer Demand? Why Homosexuals Started Wanting What Marriage Had Become
• 7. The End of Patriotism: Family Tumult in “the Seedbed of the State”
• 8. A New “Fable of the Bees”: Has America Created a Family-Failure Economy?
• 9. Taking off the Rose-Colored Glasses: Post-9/11 Sobriety as a Basis for Healthier Family Life
• 10. Turning Back the Clock: Should America Try to Recover Lost Family Strengths?
• Index