The fusionist alliance has frayed, to the point where classical liberals and traditionalists often see one another as political enemies more than allies. It’s odd in a way, because in many ways, their goals intersect more now than ever before. Under the old Reaganite coalition, one side was concerned about freedom and economic prosperity, while the other worried about family, culture, and natural law. Today, as marriage and birth rates dwindle, it is more obvious than ever that a family-friendly culture is needed to maintain a healthy economy, but recent economic history has again resoundingly affirmed the importance of free markets for protecting both opportunity and freedom more broadly. A workforce needs workers, and families are the primary source. At the same time, prosperity (literally and figuratively) lays the table for family life. The goals of classical liberals and religious conservatives still align to a very great degree.

　　Fusionism Foundering

　　That’s not at all the picture one gets from recent right-wing discourse. The ”New Right” seems to see markets as a threat to families more than a source of support, while commentators at the Wall Street Journal look at sensible pronatal measures, such as child tax credits, and see nothing but lost revenue. This is distressing. The global fertility collapse is a real problem, not a fringe obsession of the manosphere. Failing to see this, when some nations have birth rates below one child per woman, is simply obtuse. A wealthy country like the United States can bolster its workforce a bit through immigration, but while naturalized citizens make many valuable contributions, a society that can’t raise its own citizens has a dim future. In a very real sense, families and businesses are the primary engines of prosperity, each ideally reinforcing the other.

　　I don’t wish to be too hard on the libertarians, though. Pronatalists haven’t been especially friendly to free markets of late, or even to freedom more generally. Their messaging can sound uncomfortably statist, and sometimes even tilts into reactionary, chauvinist rhetoric that clearly won’t attract many Americans to the cause of liberty. It doesn’t have to be that way. In theory, most traditionalists do recognize, in keeping with principles of subsidiarity, that the family is a natural institution that should be left as free as possible from state interference, both for reasons of subsidiarity and for reasons of justice. That should be an entry point for appreciating the importance of liberty, but in practice, traditionalists often resent creative destruction and worry about the ease with which liberty bleeds into libertinism. In our own time, right-wing populists have largely given up on the old Reaganite message about moral responsibility, which is basically the glue that holds freedom and family together.

　　That uncomfortably demanding plank has been replaced by a blistering critique of the American elites who have ostensibly ransacked the American family by failing to “preach what they practice.” This, in turn, gives rise to a demand for a new social compromise that can restore the “great American middle.” There’s no way to make freedom a central plank of that platform. You need a nanny state (or a patriarch state?) to broker that kind of New New Deal, and indeed, many on the new right have called for exactly that. It would be unfair, therefore, to attribute the decay of fusionism to “free market fundamentalism.” Traditionalists have certainly done their part to sabotage it.

　　A Society of Welfare Queens

　　Haven’t America’s family values frayed rather badly, though? Isn’t there a real need for family policies that try pro-actively to bolster a traditional family structure? My flyby reference to the abandonment of moral responsibility is perhaps a bit tendentious, because there are far more sympathetic ways to make the case for a pro-active family policy. If the traditional family is decaying, tracing the sources of that decay and addressing them might be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We can’t necessarily entrust that sort of job to laissez-faire libertarians who were always inclined towards indifference when it comes to the ordering of American domestic life.

　　One of the New Right’s most popular lines of argument, enthusiastically promoted by Tucker Carlson (among others), claims that family life was destroyed by the combination of two malign forces: feminism, and the collapse of American manufacturing which deprived men in the heartland of decent jobs. The solution, similarly, is twofold: a return to traditional gender norms, and a re-embrace of industrial policy, which would ostensibly revitalize the family by enabling men to be reliable breadwinners. The logic is easy enough to grasp, but hard to credit after an extended period in which the labor market has been red-hot especially in the trades, and in manly jobs such as roofing and policing. Diehard proponents of this approach sometimes try to salvage the argument by feebly protesting that coastal elites don’t adequately respect tradesmen. That’s probably true, but if we’ve reached the point where manly men in the heartland can’t work or support their families without applause from urbane Manhattanites, industrial policy won’t save us.

　　Where family policy is “a centerpiece of the welfare state,” raising a family is likely to be seen as a fallback option for people with few marketable skills.

　　Stronger lines of argument do exist. It could be that families need more help nowadays for reasons that are rooted in the very structure of our society. Raising kids is far more expensive than it used to be, and not just because they have zillions of toys. In a liberal society with a rarified labor force, kids need extensive education and formation to have a strong chance at a successful life. They aren’t profitable from young ages, as kids used to be in agricultural societies, and as women have assumed a robust role in the workforce, mothers have paid an increasingly heavy opportunity cost by leaning out to care for children. Even after the kids grow up and start earning, those earnings will be taxed and redistributed, enabling the childless to reap the rewards of parental labors in their old age. It’s a badly-devised system that is now so firmly entrenched that neither party has the political will to change it. Accordingly, it may seem that more redistribution is the only realistic fix. This is presumably the sort of thinking that recently led Ross Douthat to declare that family policy will need to become “a centerpiece of the modern welfare state” if it is to have a meaningful impact.

　　It would be hard to overstate how much I hate this idea. I understand the argument for it, but the idea that families should come to be seen as presumptive wards of the state is so deeply distasteful that I could almost be persuaded to give the industrial policy another look as an alternative. Recent history strongly suggests that flooding any population with subsidies changes motivations, sensibilities, and behavior in far-reaching ways, tamping down independence and creating a paralyzing foundation of entitlement. People within defined state protectorates learn to petition the government for solutions to their problems, instead of adapting to changing circumstances. Subsidies inevitably create a forest of moral hazards.

　　Haven’t we learned this lesson by now, after struggling for decades to find better solutions to poverty traps, elderly infirmity, and disabilities? Even when there are very strong reasons for showering a particular group of people with taxpayer largesse, the negative externalities are always significant. In particular, it seems to me that sub-groups that rely heavily on government subsidy tend to be marginalized in terms of their cultural influence and respect. It’s hard to measure this with precision, both because cultural respect is not easily quantifiable and because there is no clear baseline for how various groups should “naturally” be viewed. An extended conversation would have to consider the situation, not only of low-income Americans, but also of indigenous people, seniors, military veterans, and others. But I think, in the final analysis, the evidence strongly suggests a negative correlation between government subsidy and cultural capital. Is it really necessary to inflict that handicap on parents?

　　Where family policy is “a centerpiece of the welfare state,” raising a family is likely to be seen as a fallback option for people with few marketable skills. Wealthy elites might go on raising a small number of silver-spoon babies, with help from nannies and other support staff, while high fertility comes to be strongly associated with dependency, lack of ambition, and unemployment. It’s a painful line of reflection for those of us who have argued for years that maternity should be more respected. Must we all become welfare queens?

　　In fairness, Douthat did not definitely endorse the family-policy-as-welfare-centerpiece option. Rather, he suggested that Americans might face a binary choice: either we can flood families with state benefits or we can wait on “some new cultural-technological-religious dispensation” to reverse cratering birth rates. I would gladly get behind the second option. But perhaps it is possible to facilitate such a transition with more than our thoughts and prayers. In fact, conservatives have been down this road before, though the last such effort was effectively tabled in 2016, with the rise of the populist right. Maybe it’s time to pull that old agenda out of mothballs.

　　Reform Conservatism 2.0

　　Suppose we viewed families, for policy purposes, more on a level with businesses. Like a successful business, a family is a productive enterprise making a vital social contribution to society at large. Like businesses, families are likelier to flourish if we respect the principle of subsidiarity and allow them wide latitude to order their own affairs. The state should be wary of both aggressive oversight and the sort of “help” that distorts incentives and deters healthy innovation. But it can still take steps to encourage a thriving economy, by creating a climate in which it is easier for entrepreneurs to acquire needed capital and make decisions in support of their worthy goals. A “business-friendly climate” is understood to imply low taxation and a relative lack of onerous regulations. A “family-friendly climate” could be similar. Give families significant tax relief, and try to clear the way so that it is easy for both markets and private or local institutions to meet their needs. This sort of approach was explored in the Tea Party era under the name “Reform Conservatism.” At that time many populists rejected child tax credits as excessively generous to families; today right-wing populists seem eager to commandeer the entire US economy in the interests of making it more “family-friendly.” Anyone interested in meeting in the middle?

　　If we really want more babies, the disaffected young men and childless cat ladies will need to be persuaded to marry one another. Do we seem to be advancing towards that goal?

　　It’s hard to give hard numbers, for the simple reason that our nation is already so indebted. However, as a long-haul strategy, legislation along the lines of Mitt Romney’s proposed Family Security Act would be worth considering. This more than doubles the existing child tax credit, gives benefits for every child (regardless of family size), avoids marriage and work penalties, and leaves the state neutral with respect to caretaking decisions. (That is, families receive the same benefit regardless of whether they rely on paid childcare, leave a parent at home, or ask grandparents or others to help care for children.)Further discussion of the issue can be found in the 2015 Room to Grow series, put out by the American Enterprise Institute in 2015, and still remarkably insightful and thought-provoking.

　　The logic of the middle-ground solution presumes that, like the business-friendly climate, the family-friendly climate is likely to build on itself by naturally drawing the cooperation of businesses and ground-level organizations. In most cases, child tax credits probably won’t make a dispositive difference in people’s calculations about how many children to have. But if parents have more money, markets will move to meet their needs, supplying family-oriented products and entertainment. Over time this could move the birth-rate needle. When urban neighborhoods are full of fine-dining restaurants, bars, salons, and other adult-oriented entertainment, prime-age adults may not be eager to trade their single (or DINK) lifestyle for sandboxes and sippy cups in the suburbs. But family life can be fun too, and if some of those adult establishments are replaced by ice cream parlors or laser tag adventure parks, that may shape people’s sensibilities in subtle but important ways. It’s dreadfully lonely to be the only person in your social circle with young children, but if many people have kids, social life tends to adapt to accommodate them.

　　If the goal is to foster a more family-friendly climate, it may make sense to draw a sharper separation between fully refundable and non-refundable child tax credits. Pronatalists today tend to push for the former, partly out of an admirable desire to help poor families, but also (I suspect) because many actively want to blur the distinction between relieving tax burdens and directly subsidizing family life. A freedom-friendly family policy would move in the opposite direction, treating family policy and poverty relief as more distinct initiatives. This is not to deny that poverty relief raises particularly strong moral concerns in households with children. But alleviating bare needs and facilitating a thriving family culture may turn out to be somewhat distinct goals. Falling birth rates are not primarily a feature of poor nations, but of wealthy and developed nations. A successful family policy should be responsive to that reality, recognizing that Americans today forego childbearing less because they worry their prospective children might starve, and more because they struggle to see a path to a style of family life that seems both respectable and appealing.

　　A prudent family policy should think about the options open to parents, and try to clear the way to developments that would increase them. Churches are and remain a vital source of community for families, so religious freedom is an essential component of a family-friendly culture. Policy planners should also be especially interested in forms of deregulation that can open employment and housing options for families. Building regulations can be pared down in ways that will increase the supply of affordable housing. Telework and gig work are often great options for parents and caretakers, so labor laws should be careful not to foreclose those opportunities. Many of these measures can be taken without invasive state action, simply by considering (and sometimes prioritizing) the needs of families in different areas of policymaking.

　　School choice is another family-friendly initiative that has already built tremendous momentum in many areas, but that needs to be further expanded (especially in blue states). The federal government needn’t wait on the states: it could help parents nationwide by permitting them to deduct school tuition payments from their taxable income. Where public school systems are failing, networks of private schools can supply essential support for families. Even if poor families can’t benefit immediately, this represents the right sort of organic movement, which could over the long run expand its reach to help more people.

　　Insulting “childless cat ladies” is cheap and easy, but that kind of rhetoric is ultimately counterproductive. If we really want more babies, the disaffected young men and childless cat ladies will need to be persuaded to marry one another. Do we seem to be advancing towards that goal? How can we possibly get there without persuading young people that marriage and parenthood are worthy life goals?

　　A freedom-oriented family policy stands a much better chance of generating a family culture that is appealing, honorable, and sustainable. Think about it, conservatives. Maybe it’s time to give the old Reformocon agenda another chance.