Articles

Women have made impressive gains in the past forty-five years. But progress toward family-friendly social policies has been exceptionally slow. In 1971, Congress actually passed a comprehensive childcare bill only to have Richard Nixon veto it after concerted lobbying by antifeminists and right-wingers. It took until 1993 just to get the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gave workers in large companies up to twelve weeks of unpaid job-protected leave.

Since the presidential election, pundits have struggled to explain Donald Trump's upset win. Liberal columnists are united in shock that so many people voted for a man who inflamed racial, ethnic and religious tensions, insulted and mistreated women, and was deemed temperamentally unfit to be president, even by many of his supporters.

For all the hand-wringing about how modern Americans have separated sex from love and devalued marriage, Valentine's Day is a reminder of just how romantic we are. Restaurants are reserved months in advance for romantic dinners for two. Thousands of lovers use the occasion to "pop the question." Married couples vow to renew their ardor. The focus is on passion, sure, but passion in a marriage or a long-term relationship.

The problems bothering white Americans without a college degree have less to do with immediate economic insecurity or material hardship, although those are widespread, than with the collapse of a whole way of life.

Older generations always seem to fret about the sexual behavior and romantic lives of the younger crowd. In the 1920s, there was alarm when boys stopped visiting in the parlor and started driving girls around in what one newspaper called “a house of prostitution on wheels.” This worry paled in comparison to the panic evoked by the rowdy sexual revolution that began in the late 1960s.

I have spent most of my career pointing out the dangers of imagining a Golden Age in the past that we should try to recapture. Nostalgia offers a warped explanation of what actually did work in the past and airbrushes out what did not. It leads to the scapegoating of those who supposedly ruined “the good old days” while providing no tools for coping with the new realities that underlie contemporary challenges.