Calling monogamy a choice is like opposing marriage

The continued plunge in the American birthrate, amid prosperity and low unemployment, has finally made fertility a topic that’s OK to worry about even if you aren’t a deep-dyed reactionary.

The tangle of questions involved doesn’t map neatly onto the existing lines of liberalism and conservatism.

Still, there is one key fact about the recent decline in the American fertility rate that inevitably revives, rather than transcends, a long-running right-left argument. While marital fertility fell in the 1970s after the baby boom ran its course, the baby bust of the last 10 years hasn’t affected married couples, whose fertility rate has stayed level or very modestly increased.

So while it’s important to debate questions like how the cost of child care affects childbearing decisions within marriages, the question of why marriage has declined so precipitously in the first place still looms over the fertility discussion. And with it comes a longstanding liberal-versus-conservative disagreement about how much to emphasize economic trends versus cultural transformations to explaining the waning of wedlock.

I would divide the modern progressive approach to marriage into several phases. In the first, which covers the 1960s through the ’80s, there was a clear liberal-led attack on the institutional form of marriage as it existed then, on the legal and cultural structure that privileged heterosexual wedlock, pushed couples toward its rules, and then constrained them from divorce.

The second phase I would call the period of reconsideration, in which liberals continued to believe the core legal and social changes of the 1960s and 1970s had been necessary and just, but acknowledged that the larger cultural revolution had incurred significant costs.

Liberals in this period continued to support no-fault divorce and legal abortion, continued to regard sexual fulfillment as an essential good and premarital chastity as an unrealistic ideal.

But notwithstanding its blind spots, this liberal worldview was and is essentially pro-marriage, in the sense of believing that it’s good for society to have a single normative destination to which most couples arrive, a single normative institution in which most children will be raised.

Over the last 10 years, I think we have reached a third phase in liberal attitudes toward marriage.

This new phase is incomplete and contested, and it includes elements — in #MeToo feminism, especially — hostile not only to anything tainted by conservative religion or gender essentialism but to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period, outside a bureaucratically supervised definition of “consent.” And it’s therefore disinclined to regard lifelong monogamy as anything more than one choice among many.

The combination of forces that have produced this ideological shift is somewhat murky — it follows a general turn leftward on social issues after the early 2000s, a further weakening of traditional religion, the increasing political polarization of the sexes and, of course, the so-called Great Awokening.

So in the never-ending right-left debate about how to explain the decline of marriage and what to do about it, the emerging phase of liberalism is less inclined to concede anything to conservatives on the cultural front. It is tracing a return to the spirit of the 1970s, to the promise of ever-widening liberation — and the long-term influence of that return on a society already shadowed by sterility and loneliness will be interesting to watch.