George Will reflects on a book written by Thomas Edsall of The New Republic who offers what is, from his point of view, a dispiriting assessment of the rise of the Republican party and the demise of the Democrats. Will points out how lefties like Edsall consistently attribute GOP success to all the wrong reasons and are utterly purblind to the fact that their own message has very little resonance with the majority of Americans.
Will's entire column is good, but his last two paragraphs put a sharp point on his argument:
Edsall notes that one-third of American children -- and almost 70 percent of African American children -- are born to unmarried mothers. Then, in an astonishing passage about this phenomenon, which is the cause of most social pathologies, from crime to schools that cannot teach, he explains how Americans differ concerning what he calls "freedom from the need to maintain the marital or procreative bond."
"To social conservatives," he writes, "these developments have signaled an irretrievable and tragic loss. Their reaction has fueled, on the right, a powerful traditionalist movement and a groundswell of support for the Republican Party. To modernists, these developments constitute, at worst, the unfortunate costs of progress, and, at best -- and this is very much the view on the political left as well as of Democratic Party loyalists -- they constitute a triumph over unconscionable obstacles to the liberation and self-realization of much of the human race."
Looking for the real reason for the rise of "Red America"? Read that paragraph again.
The major problem the Democrats have is that too many of their movers and shakers hold it as a religious dogma that the social dysfunctionalities of the last four decades are actually a good thing. Until they realize that "red staters" regard these dysfunctionalities as extremely harmful to our culture and associate them with liberal social attitudes, the Democrats will have a very difficult time turning red states blue.