Liberals’ attitudes toward marriage continue to evolve

The continued plunge in the American birthrate, amid prosperity and low unemployment, has finally made fertility a topic that’s OK to worry about.

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 long-standing liberal-versus-conservative disagreement about how much to emphasize economic trends versus cultural transformations to explain the waning of wedlock.

On the conservative side, I think there has been a general advance in nuance over the last five or 10 years, with some of the writers stressing the interplay of social and economic liberalism, of leftwing and right-wing forms of individualism, in creating our more atomized, fragmented and post-familial society.

But whatever comes, the right’s why-marriage-declined story is presently contested, complicated, interesting and possibly getting closer to the necessarily complex truth.

Now what about the liberal side? I would divide it into three distinct phases. In the first phase, which covers the 1960s through the 1980s, there was a clear liberal-led attack on the institutional form of marriage as it existed then.

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

As a conservative I think this liberalism-of-nuance had real limits. In particular, its favored model of marriage — as a capstone on a long period of professional development and sexual exploration, rather than a foundation for adulthood and a home for adult sexuality — was linked inextricably to the educated class’s privilege and ambitious self-control.

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 and 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, a new outworking of cultural individualism that may eventually render the nuanced liberalism described above obsolete.

This new phase includes elements — in #MeToo feminism, especially — that could theoretically be congenial to cultural conservatives. But in general the emerging progressivism seems 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.