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Polarized Families, Polarized Parties: Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics (American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law) - Hardcover

Buch 14 von 21: American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law

Alphonso, Gwendoline M.

 
9780812250336: Polarized Families, Polarized Parties: Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics (American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812250338 ISBN 13: 9780812250336
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Struggles to define the soul of America roil the nation's politics. Debates over the roles of gays, lesbians, women, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and disputes over reproductive and abortion rights serve as rallying points for significant electoral groups and their representatives in government. Although the American family lies at the core of these fierce battles, the alignment of family with social or cultural issues is only a partial picture—a manifestation of the new right's late twentieth-century success in elevating "family values" over family economics.

Gwendoline Alphonso makes a significant contribution to the prevailing understanding of party evolution, contemporary political polarization, and the role of the family in American political development by placing family at the center of political and cultural clashes. She demonstrates how regional ideas about family in the twentieth century have continually shaped not only Republican and Democratic policy and ideological positions concerning race and gender but also their ideals concerning the economy and the state. Drawing on extensive data from congressional committee hearings, political party platforms, legislation sponsorship, and demographic data from the Progressive, post-World War II, and late twentieth-century periods in the United States, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties offers an intricate and sophisticated analysis of how deliberations around the ideal family became critical to characterizations of party politics. By revealing the deep historical interconnections between family and the two parties' ideologies and policy preferences, Alphonso reveals that American party development is more than a story of the state and its role in the economy but also, at its core, a debate over the political values of family and the social fabric it embodies.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gwendoline M. Alphonso is Associate Professor of Politics at Fairfield University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

IntroductionWe must first discuss household management, for every city-state is constituted from households.
—AristotleStruggles to define the soul of America roil through American politics. Reproductive rights and abortion, immigration, and gay, lesbian, and transgender equality are some of the controversies that serve as rallying points for significant electoral groups. Undoubtedly, the American family lies at the core of these strident cultural battles. However, the alignment of family with social or cultural issues is only a partial picture, a manifestation of the New Right's late twentieth-century success in elevating "family values" as the focus of family policy. This portrayal obscures divisions over family economics, which intertwine with and shape the so-called culture wars over family.

Polarized Families, Polarized Parties documents and analyzes the extraordinary rise of family in twentieth-century party politics in the United States, revealing the political parties' rightward turn in the later decades toward family values and its enduring tussle with family economics, two frames that have long organized policy debates. By situating late twentieth-century family wars within a broad historical arc that extends back to the start of the past century, the book suggests that the political salience of family values beginning in the 1970s is part of a long-term dynamic of competition in American politics between sectional family ideals, termed Hearth and Soul. Hearth and Soul are two central ideational frameworks through which political actors have viewed family; its normative relationship to the state, economy, and society; and its policy significance. The Soul family approach is southern and champions values, morality, and religiosity in policy, and the Hearth family approach is demonstrated as northern and more materialist, targeting economic conditions facing families. Both are also shown to contain distinct ideologies of state, society, and economy, including ideals of race and gender relations.

The chapters tell the story of politicized Hearth and Soul family ideals and attendant policy approaches, their intertwining developmental trajectories, and their evolving impact on the substantive policy agendas of the Republican and Democratic Parties through the twentieth century. The central argument is that the shifting allegiance of parties to these family ideals and their policy frameworks reflects changes in the family lives of their constituent bases as well as manipulation by political elites, as the parties court and respond to changing cores of supporters.

The book demonstrates that the late twentieth-century ascendance of family values onto the national political stage is neither a new nor unprecedented political development; it is an old song but sung more loudly and with modified lyrics. In particular, it reflects the growing southern influence in American politics in the century's last three decades and the Republican Party's successful revival of a Soul family values approach to appeal to a southern electorate, facilitating both parties' turn to family values since. Family economic assistance, once the salient fault line between the two parties, came to be articulated in valuational terms, such that family values emerged as a crucial axis of partisan divisions, obscuring (but not replacing) policy differences over economic assistance to families. This complex empirical story is told in the context of two previous periods in American history: the Progressive Era and the post-World War II period, in which similar political contestations over family ideals occurred in conjunction with widespread demographic family changes, decisively shaping partisan policy debates then and their legacies thereafter.

In telling this story, the book makes a larger theoretical claim regarding family and the history of party competition. It suggests that family is a valuable thematic tapestry on which to study American political development. Much like race, gender, or constitutional orders, family is a major organizing feature of American experience through time, whose evolving political relevance hinges on its recurrent capacity to serve as a vital site on which political actors assemble and combine ideologies of state, economy, and society, often in response to large-scale social and demographic changes.

In the narrative, although Hearth and Soul family frameworks each pivot on a unique family political ideal (i.e., family as instilling values or family as providing material/economic resources), each trades off politically against multiple values/ideals that Americans widely share, thus leaving substantial room for exchange and manipulation of their components by the two parties. Thus, for instance, the chapters reveal how the parties have differentially deployed the Soul family values approach at different periods of time to invoke a positive and negative state, to deploy more or less of a market-based rationality, or to emphasize family values that are at times more moralistic or racial and at others more neoliberal or patriotic; all are mutable and capable of change depending on the actors and contingencies of each historical period. A key motivation behind charting family political development is thus to assemble the shifting compositional elements of politicized family frameworks (their ideals of state, society, and economy) and to simultaneously trace the partisan dynamics of these elements through time—how the parties borrow from, build upon, and/or reverse each other's elaborations from one period to the next.

This longitudinal investigation into family, as an evolving and composite partisan institution, reveals its three developmental stages across the past century. In the earliest, most amorphous, stage of the Progressive Era, the significance of family to party competition is shown as muted by prevailing constitutional boundaries between national and state legislative powers. However, even then the book demonstrates how family served to tie contrasting sectional visions of American state, economy, and society in policy, albeit in a loose, less cohesive way. In the second stage, in the midcentury post-World War II period, the investigation finds that family began to assert its presence more visibly within partisan debate, emerging for the first time as a significant national policy issue, central to the well-being of the nation. At this time, sectional differences, even more than partisanship, are found to have shaped family's political relevance, insofar as southern Democrats constituted a powerful third bloc, separate from nonsouthern Democrats and Republicans, in advocating their ideals of family. In the final, late twentieth-century period, extending from the late 1970s and arguably into our own, the book demonstrates family as crystallized into a central polarizing issue between the two parties, acting as a vital force to guide and shape Republican and Democratic divisions over policy and electoral constituencies.

In an observable sense, family has thus progressively increased its impact on American party politics, ultimately emerging as a lightning rod between the two political parties. However, insofar as family binds together ideals of state, society, and economy, and these ideals have varied across geographical regions and often parties, it is more useful to envision the political relevance of family in a far more durable way. This is best understood by way of a loose chemistry analogy: at a visceral level, water appears progressively "weighty" when transformed from a gaseous, to a liquid, and then to a solid state, yet its compositional elements (hydrogen and oxygen) remain in all three states. Similarly, although the form (nebulous then forming and finally crystallized) by which family has impacted party development has altered considerably and...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812250338
ISBN 13 
9780812250336
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
247
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

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Trebbin
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