Bill Barr seems to be living in the early 1990s.
 | | A family gathered in their living room circa 1950s.Bettmann/Corbis, via Getty Images |
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Regular readers know that I’m somewhat obsessed with the economic contrast between U.S. regions, which were becoming more similar for most of the 20th century, but have been diverging again since around 1980. Partly that’s because I have some intellectual capital invested in the subject: Academic papers I wrote about economic geography some three decades ago are my most cited work, and seem more relevant than ever. But regional divergence has been getting attention from many people, because of its social and political importance. |
Today’s column delved into a somewhat different aspect of regional divergence: growing disparities in life expectancy. But it also ended up being in part about the remarkable fact that conservatives are still placing blame for all our social ills on the decline of religiosity and its supposed destruction of traditional family values, despite decades of evidence that this whole line of argument was and is totally wrong. |
There were several striking things about William Barr’s October speech denouncing “militant secularists” for destroying American society. It was much more partisan than we used to expect from the attorney general, who is after all supposed to serve the nation, not just the president and his party. It also seemed well over the line in violating the separation between church and state. |
What really struck me, however, was that Barr seems to be stuck in a time warp, repeating claims about family values and social order that were standard right-wing fare a generation ago but have since been utterly refuted by experience. |
Back in the mid-1990s, conservatives pointed to two trends — the decline of traditional families and rising crime — and insisted that the first had caused the second. For example, The Heritage Foundation put out a report titled “The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of Marriage, Family, and Community.” The report ridiculed claims that rising crime and social breakdown had something to do with declining economic opportunity, and suggested among other things that the reduced influence of organized religion was one of the causes of declining family values. |
Some people on the right went even further, arguing, for example, that mass shootings were happening because we were teaching children the theory of evolution — a claim you still see sometimes. |
Since then, however, a few things have happened. Traditional families have continued to decline in relative importance: fewer than half of American children now live with two parents in their first marriage. But violent crime has plunged. |
And while new social problems have emerged, above all the surge in deaths of despair, they have mainly manifested not among inner-city blacks but among rural and small-town whites — and are heavily concentrated in places that have suffered, yes, a decline in economic opportunity. Oh, and some of the worst-hit states happen to be among the states where an unusually large number of people say that they are “highly religious.” |
We might also note that other advanced countries are, without exception, less religious than America, and some places have gone even further than we have in moving away from traditional family structure — but crime is far lower, and there’s nothing like our surge in deaths of despair. |
Overall, experience since the 1990s has completely refuted the God-and-family-values theory of American social problems, and confirmed the view — associated in particular with the sociologist William Julius Wilson — that family collapse is mainly a consequence of lost economic opportunity, and that social ills are caused largely by economic forces, not mysterious changes in values. |
But here we have the nation’s chief law enforcement officer talking as if none of that had happened, and basically declaring both that faith in God is the answer to our problems and that sinister secularists are our mortal enemies. Then again, why should we be surprised? Facts have a well-known secularist bias. |
In Sweden, traditional marriage is clearly in decline: Young adults there are more likely than Americans to be living with a partner, but are much less likely to be married. Society doesn’t seem to be collapsing. |
Barr’s boss is also living in a time warp; his “American carnage” speech was basically a vision of a country that went away decades ago, where inner-city violence was the big issue. |
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 | | Appalachian music, Norwegian styleYouTube |
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In the past I’ve featured big-band standards from Barcelona. So how about some bluegrass from Oslo? |
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