DANIEL GREENFIELD: OBAMA’S POST FAMILY AMERICA
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-post-family-america/print/
The Republican Party went into the 2012 elections with a number of handicaps. One of the biggest of these handicaps was that it genuinely believed in a single country defined by the American Dream of family values, hard work and national greatness. The Democratic Party, which scored decisive victories across the country, never believed in any such thing, though its leading lights, like Obama, occasionally paid lip service to the idea as a sop to older white voters who would have been turned off by the 2012 version of Obama sounding like the 2002 version of Obama.
Where the Republican Party thought to bring out a national movement, the Democratic Party relied on a coalition of interest groups with little in common except for a dependency on the government and an outsider’s cultural antipathy to the Republican Party.
While the Republican Party still aspires to a vision of a single America, the Democratic Party pulls the strings of a broken America, a disassembled collection of hostile and suspicious groups protecting their own turf in post-American multicultural urban and suburban wastelands. This broken country of lost souls, fractured families and makeshift tribes is the Democratic Party’s base.
The Democratic Party is defined by the broken family in the same way that the Republican Party is defined by the family. It is a refuge for minority groups where fatherlessness leads to single mothers and government dependency and for white middle-class Julia types who use government dependency as a substitute for parental dependency.
Family defines continuity. Enough families taken together form a community. The common culture of the community is a multi-generational heritage that shapes the identities of their children. Take away the family and you have rootless individuals looking for tribes to affiliate with, clumping in artificial groups based on some common characteristic and economic interest. And that is the Democratic Party.
Take away the family and millions of seniors have no recourse for their needs and even their survival, but to turn to the government. Take away the family, and single mothers raising children on their own have to turn to the government. Take away the family and children no longer look to their parents to help them get a start in life; they look to the government. Take away the family and you take away identity. You take away everything that makes us a country and a people.
Take away the family and you have ghettoes where men prowl, leaving behind the children of different mothers, and the mothers of those children wait in line to cash their welfare checks. Take away the family and a generation of boys and girls wait in public housing to repeat the same cycle where the rite of passage is a prison sentence for boys and a prenatal exam for girls.
At the middle class level, parents no longer count on their children to take care of them when they grow old and children no longer count on their parents to pass on an inheritance to them. Marriage and children become an expense, not a net benefit. Abortion becomes logical when the economic interests of the middle class are no longer tied to having children, but to avoiding having children because the only people who benefit from having children are on public assistance. Parents and children become strangers thrown together by biology with no common future holding them together, all too grateful to a government that takes them off each other’s hands.
Under such conditions, dependency becomes a way of life. Without the family, individuals affiliate with identity groups that promise to help them get ahead in life. People who have little in common except race or gender affiliate with groups that shape them into artificial collectives based on race and gender, with the promise of economic benefits and outsider solidarity.
The descendants of Southern European immigrants from a dozen countries and multiple cultures begin calling themselves a persecuted racial minority. Women are encouraged to cluster into “sisterhoods.” Men attracted to other men join their own identity group. New identities are constantly discovered and formed. These identities provide no true mutual support and serve as an inferior and artificial substitute for the organic structure of the family.
Everyone in the Democratic Party is either a victim or a would-be savior of victims, but they aren’t a victim of some imaginary majority. They are victims of the fracturing of the social structures of a country. And the fracturers have done an excellent job of organizing their own victims into the post-American coalition that won them the election. While the fractured have ethnic, racial and gender studies offered in every college and university, all that the papers and courses do is paper over the tragic reality that they have no idea who they are. All that they have become and are is an aching need waiting to be filled from a government dispensary.
In a low turnout election, the dependent are the most reliable vote because they have few other options. They may not be enthusiastic about the candidate, but the dependent don’t need to believe because they aren’t voting on faith, but out of self-interest. They have become slaves to subsidies and those subsidies are the slave collar that drags them to the polls when they have reason to believe that their subsidies are threatened.
Government has become their father, a faceless paternal figure that dispenses food stamps and welfare checks, pays for their abortions and rocks the cradles of their abandoned children. Government is the father that teaches them to read — badly — pays for their tuition, while piling debt on their heads, and offers them limited medical care when they grow old. Government is everything to them and nothing.
The Post-Family Party is also the Post-American Party. The two invariably come together. Broken families make for broken communities and a broken nation. The end of marriage is also the end of responsibility. The end of fatherhood is also the end of adulthood. Cities full of overgrown children haunting the streets and the dorm rooms are never going to understand why we can’t just borrow more money to pay for the things that they want now. We are all their fathers and mothers, and the more we give them, the more they hate us for the one thing that we can’t give them; a sense of who they are. And they are never going to identify with a country when they have no healthy identity of their own.
Post-America is not just multicultural, it is post-family. Its multiculturalism is a sham disguising the broken nature of families in minority communities and the random nature of identities that pile all minorities under the category of “brown people” and demand economic benefits on their behalf.
The Democratic Party is the post-family party. Its base consists of groups of lost people trying to find some identity in an increasingly estranged country. The Democratic Party understands the state of fractured America and how it can be exploited, because it did much of the fracturing. Destroying the support structure of the family paved the way for destroying the support structure of America. Obama, with his complicated background and his third culture dislocation leading to a self-created identity, is the perfect figurehead for a broken family party that is as foreign to itself as it is to us.
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