All in the family?

In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, public commentators largely cast the anomaly of Trump's success in terms of two rival narratives: on the one hand, ‘Trumpism’ is primarily a reactionary exhibition of white racist nationalism against the changing demographic makeup of the country; on the other hand, it is the expression of a long-simmering (white) working-class economic anxiety finally bubbling over, seducing the anxious into political alliances that are not ultimately in their interest. While one economist theorizes Trumpism to be ‘a direct result of the frustration of working class Americans’ (PBS Newshour 2016), another study is said to ‘debunk’ that theory and demonstrate that Trumpism is ‘primarily driven by racism’ (Dylan Matthews quoted in Denvir 2016). Yet another demonstrates the extent to which sexism was the predictor (Onion 2017). There is certainly some truth to all of these stories, and many others.¹ However, the public conversation about Trumpism abides principally as a debate about what matters more – economic processes or cultural phenomena – and, therefore, activates a long-standing failure on the Left to recognize the sophisticated imbrication of economic and cultural politics² and what the specificity of their interplay signals about the complex changing realities of everyday life. There is an increasingly urgent need for rigorous intellectual and critical work, historical re-inspection, and theoretical ingenuity aimed at producing a better sense of the capital and cultural forces that underpin the hegemony of the neoliberal project and the intensifying polarity of US politics. As scholars in cultural studies have consistently asserted, such an endeavor should begin by identifying the questions posed by the contemporary context rather than assuming one already knows what shapes it.³

In Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism Melinda Cooper skillfully demonstrates just this kind of work by turning to ‘family values’ as a prism through which to re-assess several key assumptions about the nature of the free-market reformation we call neoliberalism and the dynamic and creative political alliances that have composed and sustain it. She asks: What is the discourse of the ‘family in crisis’ about? How do we square the centrality of family in social and economic policy in this ‘neoliberal era’ if neoliberalism supposedly privileges atomized individuals as economic free agents? How did neoliberals and neoconservatives manage to erect such a powerful, illiberally modern ordering of economy and power, despite their seemingly irreconcilable differences? What are the implications of the answers to these questions for making sense of and responding to these transformations? Well-evidenced and wide-ranging in argument, Cooper's careful articulation of historical accounts of the political and economic factors contributing to the stagflation crisis in the 1970s with cultural expressions of the American family in crisis is a crucial contribution to critical literature on capitalism. It offers much needed perspective on the peculiar, specific articulations and negotiations between economic liberalism and social conservativism during their mutual evolution in 1970s and beyond and challenges the Left to rethink any politics predicated on the security of familial attachment.

The dominant story that has been told of the rise of neoliberal capitalism over the last 35 years, while complicated, coheres around some generally accepted elements: it is a project on the part of capital which aims to revitalize depressed economies by elevating the calculative logics of economic relations over politics. In so doing, it advances a form of liberal governmentality that directs individuals to think of themselves as economic agents, enterprising individuals who self-invest; and that transfers risk as well onto the individual (e.g. Rose 1999, Brown 2003, Giroux 2004, Foucault 2008). Materially, this project is realized through, for example, cuts on welfare spending, the reorganization of social programs around job training, and the diffusion of securitized credit markets. Despite the continued prevalence of the figure of ‘the family’ in social policy and popular culture over the last several decades, Leftist critics who tell this dominant story often argue the political rhetoric of the crisis in ‘family values’ during this era was ‘peripheral to structural economic battles waged over (for example) monetary policy, state-deficit spending, or the redistribution of wealth through taxation’.⁴ For them, the family functions as a cultural smokescreen to cover over the ‘real business’ of macroeconomic reform meant to address a depressed economy resulting from the ‘progressive tendencies’ of the redistributive movement exemplified by the New Deal welfare state and its successor, Johnson's Great Society (Cooper 2017, p. 22, 49).

Offering a rejoinder to this narrative, Cooper demonstrates that the family in crisis has been central to the rise of neoliberal capitalism, and not merely as a concession by neoliberals to the social conservatives with whom it has been important for neoliberals to build and maintain alliance. Cooper takes the eventual replacement of the 1935 Aid for Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC) federal assistance program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program in 1996 as one of her primary case studies to illustrate how neoliberals and a new generation of social conservatives united over ‘a general crisis of the American family’ (p. 29). New Dealers in the 1930s insisted that the public was responsible for the welfare of the Fordist worker and his family. The New Deal erected support programs such as Social Security and unemployment relief, which drove up inflation and induced dependency on the state. The policies of this period, ‘instruments of redistribution’ (p. 23) subject to changes in the racial composition of the Fordist labor force in the South, were followed by a public morality crisis over which women were deserving of what kind of welfare assistance. Voices in this crisis included a number of liberal and leftist welfare reformists concerned with the decline of the black family based on the numbers of African American women on welfare rolls. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, for example, wrote an article advocating for the reinstatement of a male breadwinner's wage as an alternative to public welfare, which they argued was ‘substituting check-writing machines for male wage earners’ such that men – ‘especially Negro men’ – were ‘robbed’ of their ‘manhood, women of husbands, and children of fathers’ (Quoted on p. 42). Welfare aid was thus extensively qualified to favor working men's rights over those of women and children and established new forms of racial hierarchy based on adherence to familial and sexual normativities.

Civil rights activists, feminists, and other countercultural forces did fight policies which demonized populations like unmarried women with children, leading to ‘an all too brief moment’ when ‘revised AFDC rules allow divorced or never-married women and their children to live independently of a man while receiving a state-guaranteed income free of moral conditions’ (p. 97). But these gains incited a new slew of arguments about the breakdown of the family, and not just by neoconservatives. As Cooper explains, though neoconservatives like Samuel Huntington and Irving Kristol voiced concern about neoliberalisms’ amoralism (which they saw as something it had in common with the countercultural left), neoliberals like Milton Friedman and Gary Becker saw familial care as ‘central to the constitution of the free market as the utilitarian incentive of self-interested exchange’ (p. 57–58). The neoliberal individual, in other words, must have family values. As Gary Becker put it, since ‘the family is the foundation of all civic society’, neoliberals must concern themselves with the ‘enormous changes in the stability and composition of families’ (quoted on p. 9). While many critics of neoliberalism draw from Michel Foucault's analysis of Becker's theory of human capital to critique the primacy of the neoliberal individual as ‘the preferred form of life’ of present-day capitalism (McGuigan 2014), Cooper's work demonstrates that it is a mistake to think that neoliberals were not centrally invested in maintaining the family, because without it, the free-market order would cease to function (p. 58).⁵ The privatization of risk and deficit spending through the family by way of performance-based fines, sanctions, and rewards for those seeking welfare assistance⁶ addressed both economic concerns with inflation and the moral threat of nonnormative kinship models emerging at the time.

Rather than something new, Cooper sees the revisions to state assistance beginning in 1960s and 1970s as a re-tooling of a much older custom of private family responsibility known as the seventeenth century ‘poor law tradition’, which combined monetary policy with moralistic welfare and tax reform in the formation of ‘an immense federal apparatus for policing the private family responsibilities of the poor’ (p. 21). She spends a great many pages tracking the parallels and divergences of the Elizabethan tradition and the modern impoverished welfare state, showing how in both cases families must depend in the first instance on each other for care, and barring that, suffer the loss of social capital, privacy, and other freedoms in exchange for public assistance. While many popular accounts of post-70s welfare reform focus the neoliberal ethos of individualism as principal in the sustained attack on social risk protection, Cooper draws the reader's attention to a complicated confluence of individual and family responsibility in neoliberal economics and the ‘new’ social conservativism, marked by the emergence of The New Democrats in 1985. A far cry from the 1960s New Left, this morally conservative, centrist collective was ‘obsessed with the decline of marriage, rising rates of illegitimate childbearing, and the resultant epidemic of “fatherless families”’ (p. 110), but with a progressive bent (e.g. many supported gay marriage rights). Clinton's replacement of the AFDC with the TANF, which gave states the responsibility of surveillance and enforcement of paternity obligations such as alimony and child support as a precursor to any provision of federal economic assistance, signaled a new era of ‘family responsibility’ welfare reform and ratified what Cooper calls the ‘new bipartisan consensus on the social value of monogamous, legally validated relationships’ (p. 68). Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the role of the state in cultivating family values and family ties was expanded by a number of ‘healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood’ initiatives.⁷

One of the novel contributions of Family Values is Cooper's emphasis on just how bipartisan it has become to perceive the breakdown of the family and its values as a primary threat to democratic society.⁸ It is not only neoconservatives and neoliberals who lament the state of American families; Cooper cites leftist social theorists like Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Eva Illouz, Wolfgang Streeck, Nancy Fraser, Luc Boltanski, and Eve Chiapello, who all, often nostalgically, ‘point to the increasingly fleeting character of love in an era dominated by the short-term contract and employment at will’ (p. 9). According to Wolfgang Streeck's analysis, for example, the so-called Fordist family – the backbone of economic security in the postwar era – was systematically destroyed by the instillation of what he calls ‘the flexible family’. In Cooper's reading of Streeck, this more flexible family and the dismantling of postwar worker securities is the result of feminist efforts to secure independent wages and transform marriage into a dissolvable contract through policies such as ‘no-fault divorce’ (Cooper 2017, p. 11). Cooper also cites the critiques levied by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello as well as Nancy Fraser as examples of prominent progressives who see the complicity of the 60s and 70s feminist and anti-racist movements in the neoliberal assault on economic and social security, and who forward a politics predicated on the restoration of the social unit of the family – with a genderless division of labor, perhaps – as the foundation of economic security.⁹ What these critics fail to see according to Cooper, however, is that capital is itself compelled to reassert the reproductive (legal) institution of the family to ensure the unequal distribution of wealth across time (p. 16). In other words, reinventing the family to counter the logic of capital is not a strategic politics, since reinventing the family is already necessary to capital's double movement.

In the post-industrial era, people are increasingly sutured into relations of familial dependency and care, and the state is increasingly ‘willing to enforce – indeed create – legal relationships of familial obligation and dependence where none have been established by mutual consent’ (p. 105).¹⁰ Beyond welfare reform, Cooper goes on to demonstrate how individuals are increasingly bound to kinship through the slashing of student aid and rise of student debt (think here, for example of the emergence of the “Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students) and the increasing role family inheritance plays in economic security.¹¹ In November 2017, for instance, the Trump administration rolled out a comprehensive tax overhaul which would altogether eliminate the student loan interest deduction as well as the modern estate tax – a tax on cash, real estate, stock, or other assets being transferred from one generation to the next. Both of these proposed reforms lend credence to Cooper's assertion of the hegemony of the neoliberal family, its necessity for the dynamic reproduction of neoliberal capitalism, and her wariness of a progressive politics unable to think outside of the midcentury sexual contract and the demand for the restoration of some version of the family, even when this version is more progressive in appearance.

In terms of conclusions we might draw, we could understand the point of Cooper's work as a darker version of Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh's 1982 argument in The Anti-Social Family,¹² which was that the family under capitalism is anti-social (suited to the requirements of the capitalist mode of production),¹³ and accordingly, it is not the family but ‘the society that needs it’ that must be transformed. While Barrett and McIntosh were optimistic that short-term transformations in social policy and the character of familial relationships would eventually denature a familial society, Cooper recognizes that those very transformations were the conditions of possibility for the conservative-neoliberal consensus. Avoiding a stronger critique of state-based welfare in general¹⁴ in her critique of familialism, Cooper's work poses (and leaves unaddressed) the peculiar and substantial problem of what is to be done. One might ask of her work: if we are to reject the family unit, how are we to reimagine kinship and support networks that are not so easily incorporable? I ask: beyond imagining alternatives to the family as the basis for social security, what might paying attention to the palpable tension today between the rejection and embrace of familialism (Brouillette 2017) show us about a possible emergent politics? Indeed, while a recent Gallup study by Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016) found middle-class anxiety about intergenerational mobility to be a key indicator of Trump support, those young people the aging middle-class boomers are so concerned about are found to be increasingly fed up with their perpetual dependence on the family for survival, and either ‘can't or won't do family or school or work or sex approximately the way they’ve been done before’ (Winant 2017). As student and credit debt accumulates, the old get older, and the labor market becomes more unforgiving for the young, in light of crucial work like Cooper's, the Left must ask what relationship to past politics must be forged and nourished to allow for a new future.

Notes on contributor

Megan Wood is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research combines cultural studies and feminist approaches to examine such issues as corporate sovereignty, the state of feminism, the construction of ‘working-classness’ in the US, surveillance, authenticity, and the politics of care. Her work has appeared in journals including Communication Studies, Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies, Lateral: A Cultural Studies Journal, Review of Communication, Sexuality & Culture, and the Duke anthology Feminist Surveillance Studies.

Notes

1 Even as they each, against the others, make intriguing premises for titular popular ethnographies or op-eds.

2 When it is established that the stories are related – that white working-class abandonment-turned-resentment expresses itself as xenophobia or racist aggression, the analyses fall short of explaining how such an account explains the “anomaly” of Trumpism, considering that this story of the Left failing to understand the needs of the working class for all its focus on matters of “culture” is not a new one.

3 See, for example, Grossberg (2016).

4 See, for example, Frank (2004); Krugman (2007).

5 Cooper footnotes a pertinent argument by law scholar Richard A. Epstein, who writes that “biological constants … lie at the root of family behavior, and demarcate the zone of voluntary market exchange from that of the non-price, nonexchange economy of the family. Every legal system must draw some distinction between those within the family and those outsiders who deal with the family at – to use the instructive legal phrase – ‘arm’s length’” (Cooper, p. 335, n. 93).

6 These performance-based “incentives,” Cooper argues, are meant to account for and correct “family failure,” which is akin to “market failure” (p. 63).

7 Such initiatives, led by organizations such as The National Fatherhood Initiative, the Ford Foundation, and the Administration for Children and Families in the federal Department of Health and Human Resources, support programs like the Healthy Marriage Initiative which federally funds marriage promotion efforts throughout the states. These organizations “frame the problem of female and child poverty as stemming from the absence of economic and social opportunities for minority men and therefore envisage the restoration of proper gender hierarchies as a necessary first step in the project of social justice” (Cooper 2017, p. 111).

8 This can be seen in the bevy of arguments about the societal consequences of hypersexuality, single parenthood, divorce, or abortion.

9 Fraser, for example, recently argued that feminist “critique of the family wage [and of “traditional authority”] … now supplies a good part of the romance that invests flexible capitalism with a higher meaning and moral point,” (quoted on p. 12; Fraser 2009, p. 110) such that refusing obligation to the social unit of the family is the problematic basis for feminist politics at either end of the social spectrum – high-income professional woman to domestic worker. For more on Fraser's account of feminists’ contribution to the rise of neoliberalism and its flexible labor markets, as well as criticisms of it, see Fraser (2009); Funk (2012).

10 This is demonstrated by, for instance, aggressive modern child support enforcement systems.

11 Cf. Piketty (2014).

12 Cooper does not refer to Barrett and McIntosh's work in her book, despite the similarities.

13 By antisocial, they mean “the family embodies the principle of selfishness, exclusion and pursuit of private interest and contravenes those of altruism, community, and pursuit of the public good … the unit of self-support is not the individual but the family” (1982, p. 47).

14 As Brouillette (2017) points out,

The economy that supported the pre-neoliberal era of relatively high wages, and relatively generous public deficit spending on welfare and education, was also hugely resource extractive and suburbanizing. The capacity to redistribute wealth more evenly in the US was, in addition, contingent upon broader economic transformation that required dispossessions, expulsions, enclosures, primitive accumulations, US hegemony propped up by global wars, and the origins of the whole phenomenon of US industrial triumph after WWII in wartime accumulation and relative devastation across Europe. Wherever one looks, the accumulation of wealth requires these devastations, making even the lushest times at the ADFC, and the possibility for a temporary flourishing of alternative kinds of family structures, into a troubled gain.