The Heritage Foundation has a new report “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” It provides a window into the people who dine with and write legislation for Republican legislators. As you can guess from the title, the 137-page report talks a lot about the decline of the family, but it’s far more than lamentation. It’s a policy brief with actionable advice, written by people who are getting used to winning, who know what they want and are optimistic about using government power to get it. They are not traditional Republicans, but they are not really Trumpists either. Their ideology is something I call everything bagel conservatism, the ideology of J.D. Vance, which combines Trumpist populism and some elements of the traditional Republican platform with RFK conspiracism and a strong dose of religious nationalist ideology that Trump usually shies away from. The result is a report that combines liberty-expanding good government reforms with fiscally irresponsible handout politics and some extreme policies that would destroy wealth, liberty, and the Right’s political fortunes.
I’ll start with the good recommendations, which include defaulting to 50-50 equal custody, making alimony never last longer than the length of the marriage, not requiring bachelor’s degrees in public-sector jobs, publishing statistics on how family court judges rule to increase transparency in elections, revisiting Griggs vs. Duke, imposing work requirements on welfare recipients, and making the “credits, programs, and tax benefits currently provided for paid childcare available for at-home parental child raising.” It also recommends YIMBY reforms, such as reducing minimum lot sizes, ending rent control, privatizing Fannie and Freddie, excluding infill housing from NEPA, and promoting “by-right” residential development within transit corridors. (though it’s unclear what that means.)
The report contains none of the pessimistic mindset that says liberal “progress” is inevitable. Humans are rational agents who respond to incentives. Great Society welfare programs incentivized single-parent families, and the result was a whole lot more of them. Massive subsidies for higher education, along with Griggs v. Duke Power, led many to acquire higher education who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. Dual-income families are incentivized by government programs that subsidize childcare so long as it is not provided by the mother. Incentives push in one direction and can be made to push in another. The report details how the divorce rate in Kentucky fell after it made 50–50 shared custody the default. It details how the decline in two-parent families immediately slowed after welfare reform:
Alas, you cannot get the good without the bad, and there’s a lot of bad. The report starts with Christian nationalists’ favorite quote from John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Tone set, this is what you get:
Some recognize the extreme gravity of the crisis and recommend extraordinary technical solutions. These include mass subsidies for IVF, egg freezing, and genetic screening combined with a market for babies where people (usually men of means) contractually create many children across many partners or surrogates. The ultimate end of this form of “pro-natalism” envisions a world of artificial wombs and custom-ordered, lab-created babies on demand.
The solution to the devaluing and commoditization of children, however, cannot be to treat them even more like consumer goods. A babies-at-all costs mentality would come at too great a cost, and not just financially, but morally and spiritually. Such an approach intentionally denies a right due to every child conceived—to be born and grow in relationship with his or her mother and father bound in marriage.
This statement may seem odd, as conceived via IVF are more likely to be raised by married, heterosexual parents than children made the natural way, but that’s no matter, for conservatives don’t care about reality. They want to believe that the salt-of-the-Earth rural working-class are practicing traditional family values and that rich educated people in cities are not - any data contradicting the narrative can be ignored.
The authors are concerned by IVF, and really don’t like artificial wombs:
What if, in 2045, the U.S. can build automated factories with artificial wombs that can gestate human babies from the moment of fertilization until they are full term? This would reduce the opportunity costs of pregnancy, especially for women with high-income potential: No morning sickness, no doctor visits, no pregnancy-related sick days away from work, no risk of gestational diabetes and c-sections, and so on.
To some, this may sound like the ideal way to address the birth dearth. To many others, however, it sounds dystopian, and for good reason: Such technology would destroy the natural ecology of the family in the most radical sense. From the procreative act of husband and wife, to the unique bond between a mother and her gestating and then nursing child, to even the exchange of genetic material during natural pregnancy, to the financial motives determining the level of “perfection” of each ordered child, every broken link in the natural chain of human reproduction would reduce the sacredness of marriage and begetting children into a consumer good, and, when combined with abortion culture, a fully disposable one. A preview of such a world already exists, where the “advanced” country of Iceland has been declared virtually “Down Syndrome free” because of its near-universal practice of eugenic abortions that now go up to the 22nd week in the womb.
This is completely opposed to the Nietzschean worldview, which looks toward the next stage in human evolution, the Overman. The conservative demands the freezing of evolution and progress, the sacralization of the peasant in his state of nature, pregnancy, nursing, throwing up. “Perfection” the conservative puts in scare quotes, he wants the whole concept to disappear, replaced by a universal equality that won’t deem anyone inferior. Perhaps it’s because he fears a society looking toward the future will leave him behind. Or perhaps it’s because he had been taught his Christian morality requires him to identify with the weak, for, as Jesus said, “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” In his glorification of the “natural ecology of the family,” the conservative fails even by his own logic, as in the state of nature, parents allow sick offspring to die to save resources for the healthy. This was the case in the animal kingdom and among our peasant ancestors.
Some young, BASED Rightists like eugenics, and think the only reason conservatives don’t is that liberals brainwashed them that it’s evil. As more and more taboos erode, yet the one against eugenics remains, it becomes clear that dysgenics is not incidental to conservatism, but driven by the ideology itself, its neuroticism about the human body and hatred of the superior.
The dysgenic religious stuff has long been part of conservatism. A recent addition to the everything bagel is RFK-style conspiracism, appropriately represented in the report:
Supporting care that improves natural fertility, lowers miscarriage risk, and strengthens overall health at a lower cost is squarely in line with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. This care naturally includes restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), which addresses hormone imbalances, endometriosis, or metabolic issues that can often be cured with proper diagnosis and treatment. Men and women who want, but cannot physically have, children may find hope in the developed, and still developing, field.
What About Restorative Reproductive Medicine (RRM)? RRM seeks to diagnose and treat the root causes of infertility. It combines cycle tracking, targeted lab testing, lifestyle interventions, medical and hormonal therapies, and corrective surgeries to restore natural fertility for both men and women. RRM can improve egg and sperm quality, decrease miscarriage rates, balance hormone levels, and optimize a woman’s body to support the child in utero
I know nothing about RRM, but tying it to MAHA does not inspire confidence. It’s clear that, whatever RRM’s utility, the report’s authors like it because of religion and their atavistic, dysgenic glorification of the peasantry.
On the surface, RFK Jr’s ideology shares little in common with Christian dysgenicism. Until two years ago, his policy preferences on nearly every issue were left-wing, and I bet he looks down on the Christian Right as a bunch of dumb hicks. Where the report complains that Iceland doesn’t have enough retards, RFK complains America has too many. But both ideologies are alike in their atavism, their glorification of the ancestral form, and their opposition to the application of technology to the human body.
Chomp on that everything bagel. What’s the next bite gonna bring? How about Trump Accounts:
First, Congress should build on the President’s innovative Trump Accounts by supporting marriage with a $2,500 initial deposit into a new investment account. Trump Accounts are in effect tax-free long-term bonds that provide a $1,000 deposit at the birth of a child to support his or her adult milestones such as college education, home-buying, or starting a business. Noticeably absent is support for the milestone of marriage. Congress should expand the Trump Accounts by creating separate Newlywed Early Starters Trust (NEST) accounts that support men and women who marry by or before the current average age of first marriage (about age 30) and that provide future retirement support for those who do not.
The initial deposit should be $2,500 and would be distributed over three years upon eligible marriage. To illustrate, if two people married by age 28, they would be expected to receive an inflation-adjusted NEST distribution of more than $38,000 by age 30. This amount would provide newlyweds with a boost to their lives together with any amounts unclaimed by 30 being converted to traditional individual retirement accounts (IRAs)
This is a good illustration of the spirit of the so-called New Right. Gone is any sense of fiscal responsibility. Gone is the notion that there’s something shameful about receiving money from the government. You might try to justify this as rebalancing a system that shovels money to the old with one that supports children and young parents. There are two problems with this. As a pro-natal measure, the idea is dubious, prospective parents considering the cost of having children want money to pay for diapers; they aren’t thinking about their newborn’s retirement. More fundamentally, this idea coexists with another Trumpist idea (no tax on social security, put into practice as a special tax break for the old) that shovels even more money to the retirement home. Trumpism is little more than a never-ending parade of irresponsible, sleazy promises made by a used car salesman.
Let’s consider the proposal to make the distribution available only to those who marry by age 30. You could make an argument for it on pro-natal grounds, that it’s a needed nudge against the culture of late marriage which is both anti-natal and dysgenic. Will the targets perceive it that way? Probably not if you precede it by telling them you think they’re a threat to the Republic because they’re not religious. They’ll see it as a way for the state to transfer money from their tribe to yours.
The subculture that marries around age 37 and produces 1.2 children is contributing to dysgenics and often has bad political views. But they’re usually fine people to have as neighbors. They pay their taxes and don’t drain the welfare system. And, this is something Heritage authors in particular should care about, they vote in midterm elections, so it might not be a good idea to make them the enemy.
The report condemns the welfare and tax disincentives for marriage, but wants to go further than neutrality. Instead, it calls for marriage subsidies:
Second, Congress should apply the current $17,670 adoption tax credit to married parents for each of their own newborns. This newly proposed credit would be structured to make up for existing marriage penalties in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). To incentivize marriage stability for eligible children, the credit would be distributed annually in four equal installments across three to four calendar years. To recognize the investments involved and the societal benefits that accrue from large families, married parents that already have two or more children would receive a 25 percent Large Family Bonus for each additional child. To avoid repeating past policy mistakes that punished and disincentivized work, at least one parent would be required to be engaged in verifiable employment for the family to be eligible for the tax credit.
You can’t be too mad at Republicans for behaving like almost every single political party on Earth in wanting to direct money to its voters. Democratic politicians provide student loan forgiveness to the educated, childcare for women who work outside the home, welfare benefits to single mothers, and affirmative action for women and minorities. It should hardly surprise anyone if the GOP wants to direct money to married couples with many children, who are more likely to vote Republican, instead of being a narrow small-government party. But could these policies last? They’d come under heavy pressure to make them available to singles and the divorced.
Further recommendations in the report include resisting proposals to decriminalize marijuana, restricting vaping (no detail is provided as to how), and raising the minimum age to use social media to 16. Even if these are good ideas on paternalistic grounds, Republican politicians will find them difficult to implement given their political coalition. The GOP of the past, with its strength in the suburbs, could afford to be paternalistic toward weed-smoking working-class youth because it didn’t rely on them for votes.
One of the more surprising policies the report advocates for are blue laws that mandate the general closure of businesses on Sunday:
A uniform day of rest that limits commercial activity can provide temporal boundaries that help communities to set aside time for religious observance, family gatherings, outdoor activities, and rest. A stable base of research shows that these practices correlate with better mental health, stronger social bonds, and more stable family structures.
With the advent of on-demand delivery, shopping can be shifted easily and conveniently to other days of the week. By restoring a common rhythm of rest and reflection, community rest laws could help to reverse the trend toward “spiritual homelessness” and foster the social habits necessary for communities to cohere and flourish.
If the goal is to make people more community-minded, this may well backfire, replacing an outing at the mall or amusement park with a night at home watching TV. It would invite political corruption, as businesses and industries demand exemptions. It would be unpopular, as the authors acknowledge, writing that once day-of-rest laws are abolished, they are very hard to restore. Yet their conclusion is to enact such laws in new communities:
Where new, planned communities or transitioning communities form, they should consider adding rest days as part of their master plans for balanced and thriving community life.
Will people want to move into such communities? Will businesses? An older generation of Republicans worked hard to attract people and businesses to their states. This led to an understandable backlash against the almost sadomasochistic obsequiousness some Republicans showed to liberal CEOs who hate conservatives. If it goes so far in the other direction that younger conservatives no longer consider the business perspective at all, the rise of the sunbelt could be halted or reversed. There’s no law of physics that says that people have to move to Texas and Florida and be raw material for Heritage authors’ social engineering experiments.
Back in 2016, many predicted that Trump would move the GOP in a more “European” direction, toward a focus on national identity and away from religion. To some extent, he’s done this, embracing prominent atheists like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk and claiming that “my administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” Yet among the conservative intelligentsia, the opposite has occurred. 2018 Charlie Kirk expressed support for the separation of church and state, by 2022, he was saying “it’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.” Many “red-pill” guys started by talking about feminism and picking up women, then decided the next level redpill was converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and sperging out about “baby murder.” It seems that any Right-wing movement that doesn’t start out explicitly anti-Christian will sooner or later circle back to Bible thumpery.
There’s a parallel to wokeness, which was not demanded by work-a-day Democratic voters, nor necessary for the Democrats’ electoral success. It was driven by a tribal radicalization process among the Democratic staffer class, who competed among one another to produce increasingly woke policy papers that would repel normal voters, but didn’t, because normal voters don’t read policy papers. But once politicos themselves began parroting the woke stuff, voters heard it and punished them. Ordinary people won’t read this Heritage report, but people like J.D. Vance will. If they take it to the campaign trail, that spells trouble, for while many politicians don’t care about whether the stuff they say is sensible or true, they all care about whether it’s popular. We’ll see how well “Christian, husband, dad” does with the voters.
The Heritage Foundation has a new report “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” It provides a window into the people who dine with and write legislation for Republican legislators. As you can guess from the title, the 137-page report talks a lot about the decline of the family, but it’s far more than lamentation. It’s a policy brief with actionable advice, written by people who are getting used to winning, who know what they want and are optimistic about using government power to get it. They are not traditional Republicans, but they are not really Trumpists either. Their ideology is something I call everything bagel conservatism, the ideology of J.D. Vance, which combines Trumpist populism and some elements of the traditional Republican platform with RFK conspiracism and a strong dose of religious nationalist ideology that Trump usually shies away from. The result is a report that combines liberty-expanding good government reforms with fiscally irresponsible handout politics and some extreme policies that would destroy wealth, liberty, and the Right’s political fortunes.
I’ll start with the good recommendations, which include defaulting to 50-50 equal custody, making alimony never last longer than the length of the marriage, not requiring bachelor’s degrees in public-sector jobs, publishing statistics on how family court judges rule to increase transparency in elections, revisiting Griggs vs. Duke, imposing work requirements on welfare recipients, and making the “credits, programs, and tax benefits currently provided for paid childcare available for at-home parental child raising.” It also recommends YIMBY reforms, such as reducing minimum lot sizes, ending rent control, privatizing Fannie and Freddie, excluding infill housing from NEPA, and promoting “by-right” residential development within transit corridors. (though it’s unclear what that means.)
The report contains none of the pessimistic mindset that says liberal “progress” is inevitable. Humans are rational agents who respond to incentives. Great Society welfare programs incentivized single-parent families, and the result was a whole lot more of them. Massive subsidies for higher education, along with Griggs v. Duke Power, led many to acquire higher education who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. Dual-income families are incentivized by government programs that subsidize childcare so long as it is not provided by the mother. Incentives push in one direction and can be made to push in another. The report details how the divorce rate in Kentucky fell after it made 50–50 shared custody the default. It details how the decline in two-parent families immediately slowed after welfare reform:
Alas, you cannot get the good without the bad, and there’s a lot of bad. The report starts with Christian nationalists’ favorite quote from John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Tone set, this is what you get:
This statement may seem odd, as conceived via IVF are more likely to be raised by married, heterosexual parents than children made the natural way, but that’s no matter, for conservatives don’t care about reality. They want to believe that the salt-of-the-Earth rural working-class are practicing traditional family values and that rich educated people in cities are not - any data contradicting the narrative can be ignored.
The authors are concerned by IVF, and really don’t like artificial wombs:
This is completely opposed to the Nietzschean worldview, which looks toward the next stage in human evolution, the Overman. The conservative demands the freezing of evolution and progress, the sacralization of the peasant in his state of nature, pregnancy, nursing, throwing up. “Perfection” the conservative puts in scare quotes, he wants the whole concept to disappear, replaced by a universal equality that won’t deem anyone inferior. Perhaps it’s because he fears a society looking toward the future will leave him behind. Or perhaps it’s because he had been taught his Christian morality requires him to identify with the weak, for, as Jesus said, “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” In his glorification of the “natural ecology of the family,” the conservative fails even by his own logic, as in the state of nature, parents allow sick offspring to die to save resources for the healthy. This was the case in the animal kingdom and among our peasant ancestors.
Some young, BASED Rightists like eugenics, and think the only reason conservatives don’t is that liberals brainwashed them that it’s evil. As more and more taboos erode, yet the one against eugenics remains, it becomes clear that dysgenics is not incidental to conservatism, but driven by the ideology itself, its neuroticism about the human body and hatred of the superior.
The dysgenic religious stuff has long been part of conservatism. A recent addition to the everything bagel is RFK-style conspiracism, appropriately represented in the report:
I know nothing about RRM, but tying it to MAHA does not inspire confidence. It’s clear that, whatever RRM’s utility, the report’s authors like it because of religion and their atavistic, dysgenic glorification of the peasantry.
On the surface, RFK Jr’s ideology shares little in common with Christian dysgenicism. Until two years ago, his policy preferences on nearly every issue were left-wing, and I bet he looks down on the Christian Right as a bunch of dumb hicks. Where the report complains that Iceland doesn’t have enough retards, RFK complains America has too many. But both ideologies are alike in their atavism, their glorification of the ancestral form, and their opposition to the application of technology to the human body.
Chomp on that everything bagel. What’s the next bite gonna bring? How about Trump Accounts:
This is a good illustration of the spirit of the so-called New Right. Gone is any sense of fiscal responsibility. Gone is the notion that there’s something shameful about receiving money from the government. You might try to justify this as rebalancing a system that shovels money to the old with one that supports children and young parents. There are two problems with this. As a pro-natal measure, the idea is dubious, prospective parents considering the cost of having children want money to pay for diapers; they aren’t thinking about their newborn’s retirement. More fundamentally, this idea coexists with another Trumpist idea (no tax on social security, put into practice as a special tax break for the old) that shovels even more money to the retirement home. Trumpism is little more than a never-ending parade of irresponsible, sleazy promises made by a used car salesman.
Let’s consider the proposal to make the distribution available only to those who marry by age 30. You could make an argument for it on pro-natal grounds, that it’s a needed nudge against the culture of late marriage which is both anti-natal and dysgenic. Will the targets perceive it that way? Probably not if you precede it by telling them you think they’re a threat to the Republic because they’re not religious. They’ll see it as a way for the state to transfer money from their tribe to yours.
The subculture that marries around age 37 and produces 1.2 children is contributing to dysgenics and often has bad political views. But they’re usually fine people to have as neighbors. They pay their taxes and don’t drain the welfare system. And, this is something Heritage authors in particular should care about, they vote in midterm elections, so it might not be a good idea to make them the enemy.
The report condemns the welfare and tax disincentives for marriage, but wants to go further than neutrality. Instead, it calls for marriage subsidies:
You can’t be too mad at Republicans for behaving like almost every single political party on Earth in wanting to direct money to its voters. Democratic politicians provide student loan forgiveness to the educated, childcare for women who work outside the home, welfare benefits to single mothers, and affirmative action for women and minorities. It should hardly surprise anyone if the GOP wants to direct money to married couples with many children, who are more likely to vote Republican, instead of being a narrow small-government party. But could these policies last? They’d come under heavy pressure to make them available to singles and the divorced.
Further recommendations in the report include resisting proposals to decriminalize marijuana, restricting vaping (no detail is provided as to how), and raising the minimum age to use social media to 16. Even if these are good ideas on paternalistic grounds, Republican politicians will find them difficult to implement given their political coalition. The GOP of the past, with its strength in the suburbs, could afford to be paternalistic toward weed-smoking working-class youth because it didn’t rely on them for votes.
One of the more surprising policies the report advocates for are blue laws that mandate the general closure of businesses on Sunday:
If the goal is to make people more community-minded, this may well backfire, replacing an outing at the mall or amusement park with a night at home watching TV. It would invite political corruption, as businesses and industries demand exemptions. It would be unpopular, as the authors acknowledge, writing that once day-of-rest laws are abolished, they are very hard to restore. Yet their conclusion is to enact such laws in new communities:
Will people want to move into such communities? Will businesses? An older generation of Republicans worked hard to attract people and businesses to their states. This led to an understandable backlash against the almost sadomasochistic obsequiousness some Republicans showed to liberal CEOs who hate conservatives. If it goes so far in the other direction that younger conservatives no longer consider the business perspective at all, the rise of the sunbelt could be halted or reversed. There’s no law of physics that says that people have to move to Texas and Florida and be raw material for Heritage authors’ social engineering experiments.
Back in 2016, many predicted that Trump would move the GOP in a more “European” direction, toward a focus on national identity and away from religion. To some extent, he’s done this, embracing prominent atheists like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk and claiming that “my administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” Yet among the conservative intelligentsia, the opposite has occurred. 2018 Charlie Kirk expressed support for the separation of church and state, by 2022, he was saying “it’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.” Many “red-pill” guys started by talking about feminism and picking up women, then decided the next level redpill was converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and sperging out about “baby murder.” It seems that any Right-wing movement that doesn’t start out explicitly anti-Christian will sooner or later circle back to Bible thumpery.
There’s a parallel to wokeness, which was not demanded by work-a-day Democratic voters, nor necessary for the Democrats’ electoral success. It was driven by a tribal radicalization process among the Democratic staffer class, who competed among one another to produce increasingly woke policy papers that would repel normal voters, but didn’t, because normal voters don’t read policy papers. But once politicos themselves began parroting the woke stuff, voters heard it and punished them. Ordinary people won’t read this Heritage report, but people like J.D. Vance will. If they take it to the campaign trail, that spells trouble, for while many politicians don’t care about whether the stuff they say is sensible or true, they all care about whether it’s popular. We’ll see how well “Christian, husband, dad” does with the voters.