Much as with Clinton's incorporation of much of Reagan's policy program, the most interesting thing about these shifts is that neither cultural conservatives nor communalist liberals seem especially happy about or interested in these changes. There's a whole set of public intellectuals that you think would want to stage a victory parade (well, maybe some of them are too elderly to march in it) but rather as with global population growth, the people who went all-in on the menace of youth sexuality or drinking or watching too much TV or delinquency can't afford to acknowledge any change that didn't come from strong public controls or compulsion. It's enough to make one suspect that they didn't particularly care about behavior as such, but only about the usefulness of arguing that a menace to the yutes justified the harsher use of juridical, regulatory or civic compulsion elsewhere.
This is what's interesting to me--so many of the kulturkampf fronts of the previous generation feel totally orthogonal. We haven't "cured" teenage pregnancy but we definitely have seen it become a third or fourth-order concern. Nobody quite knows what they ideologically think about video games (and the second-order impllications of video games for _reducing_ crime complicate the hottest of takes).
The idea that a lot of the Discourse of today and days past were about justifying policing--about getting the kids off one's lawn--does work to make sense of this! On the other hand, there's also not a lot of thought about what an ideal childhood under actually existing circumstances would look like and how we would go about promoting that as a project.
At least on the American right, nobody's ever cared about the "ideal childhood" in the sense of what leads to the best cultivation of self and capability because that's a vision that calls back to liberalism--what are the best and necessary conditions for the generation of maximum individuality in range and intensity. A lot of the American right has been more devoted to the idea of an ideal childhood being completely symmetrical with an ideal adulthood--that the goal has been as little variation in expressive, moral or intersubjective life as possible between adults and children. But it's possible one reason that the cultural right has become listlessly disinterested in some of the content of their 1980s era crusades (shoring up marriage, cracking down on porn, teaching religiously moral behavior in schools, sheltering children from hedonism and profane popular culture, etc.) is that it *really* annoys them that by most of the 1980s yardsticks, educated urban professional left-liberals cohere much more to the morality that they were preaching in the 1980s than evangelicals in red-state communities do--lower rates of adultery, lower rates of divorce, lower (or at least equal) use of porn, etc. So they'd rather change the subject to trans and LGBQT rights, to race--or perhaps more, change the subject to whatever most enables a will to power.
among the folks I personally know, this rings true: the success sequence is in full effect...among upper-middle class educated professionals. meanwhile, downscale voters (non-college whites etc) are .. not finding this to be the case in their personal lives.
Much as with Clinton's incorporation of much of Reagan's policy program, the most interesting thing about these shifts is that neither cultural conservatives nor communalist liberals seem especially happy about or interested in these changes. There's a whole set of public intellectuals that you think would want to stage a victory parade (well, maybe some of them are too elderly to march in it) but rather as with global population growth, the people who went all-in on the menace of youth sexuality or drinking or watching too much TV or delinquency can't afford to acknowledge any change that didn't come from strong public controls or compulsion. It's enough to make one suspect that they didn't particularly care about behavior as such, but only about the usefulness of arguing that a menace to the yutes justified the harsher use of juridical, regulatory or civic compulsion elsewhere.
This is what's interesting to me--so many of the kulturkampf fronts of the previous generation feel totally orthogonal. We haven't "cured" teenage pregnancy but we definitely have seen it become a third or fourth-order concern. Nobody quite knows what they ideologically think about video games (and the second-order impllications of video games for _reducing_ crime complicate the hottest of takes).
The idea that a lot of the Discourse of today and days past were about justifying policing--about getting the kids off one's lawn--does work to make sense of this! On the other hand, there's also not a lot of thought about what an ideal childhood under actually existing circumstances would look like and how we would go about promoting that as a project.
great insights and very informative! thanks!
At least on the American right, nobody's ever cared about the "ideal childhood" in the sense of what leads to the best cultivation of self and capability because that's a vision that calls back to liberalism--what are the best and necessary conditions for the generation of maximum individuality in range and intensity. A lot of the American right has been more devoted to the idea of an ideal childhood being completely symmetrical with an ideal adulthood--that the goal has been as little variation in expressive, moral or intersubjective life as possible between adults and children. But it's possible one reason that the cultural right has become listlessly disinterested in some of the content of their 1980s era crusades (shoring up marriage, cracking down on porn, teaching religiously moral behavior in schools, sheltering children from hedonism and profane popular culture, etc.) is that it *really* annoys them that by most of the 1980s yardsticks, educated urban professional left-liberals cohere much more to the morality that they were preaching in the 1980s than evangelicals in red-state communities do--lower rates of adultery, lower rates of divorce, lower (or at least equal) use of porn, etc. So they'd rather change the subject to trans and LGBQT rights, to race--or perhaps more, change the subject to whatever most enables a will to power.
among the folks I personally know, this rings true: the success sequence is in full effect...among upper-middle class educated professionals. meanwhile, downscale voters (non-college whites etc) are .. not finding this to be the case in their personal lives.