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Via Ace, I see that the once well-respected blogger turned amateur gynecologist Andrew Sullivan has now turned his blog into an “Online Cry for Help.” His latest post:

Sadly Yes

I had a dream last night that I was lost in Sarah Palin’s garden. It was springtime, and there were bluebells everywhere. I suddenly realized where I was and tried to get out to the street. But there was just more garden …

While not a professional in this field, I would gladly analyze this dream, both for its wealth of Freudian imagery and the interesting fact that Sullivan does not refers to it as “dream” rather than a “nightmare” (perhaps yearning for subjugation to the mighty Palin uterus?). But I far prefer the poem Andrew emailed me randomly the other day.

I dreamt last night of floating
Naked, hairless, weightless
A warm darkness enveloped me
And in the distance, sound
The heartbeat of the world
I danced with the abandon
I normally reserve for early ABBA
It was heaven, but then
I heard it gash through my Eden
That shrill, fascistic soprano
“You betcha”
To my screams, I awoke

Follow me to freedom on Twitter.

Conor Friedersdorf, subbing for Andrew Sullivan, shares his ideas on my Once Was America essay with a post at The Daily Dish today which I think is worth a response. My chief concern in my original essay is that we have failed to recognize a technology-and-culture driven fluctuation in fertility, union, and mortality that may hold widespread ramifications for the nature of our country, representing a permanent and fundamental shift from the past. Within the current generation, the value assigned to marriage and family have decreased dramatically, resulting in a delay in the median age of marriage, a marked decline in reproduction rates, and an associated loss of some of the admirable qualities that enabled Americans to contend with the great trials and challenges of the 20th Century.

As I pointed out in response to Peter Lawler and James Poulos, from 1950-1970, the average man got married by age 23, and the average woman when she was 20; from 1979-1994, the echo boom had 60 million children, the second largest generation in American history. For all the negative things that can be said about the Baby Boomers, they got married young and therefore reproduced at high rates — Echo Boomers so far have not, and I believe that they will not. I believe this represents a fundamental shift in what Americans value — that children and family have diminished as other things have risen to take their place.

Conor disagrees, but I believe he is disagreeing out of impressions formed, as he writes, “In my experience.” I’d suggest Conor consider that the experiences he and his friends have gone through in recent years, while fascinating in their own way, are not a broad enough sample group to evaluate how children and marriage are viewed in 21st Century American life (were I to rely only on my own experiences, one would assume the American family is thriving and reproducing at an astounding rate) — and in some cases, I believe Conor is mistaking chicken for egg.

Conor writes: “Young people in the middle and upper classes in America delay marriage partly out of a desire to avoid the rampant divorces that plagued their parents’ generation.” In other words, they just want to wait to make sure their families work, since the marriages of their parents did not. While this might make rational sense, I don’t believe most young people view their relationships in terms that are equivalent to social science, and I simply don’t see the data to support this perception. Marriage gets delayed for a lot of different reasons: men can have more fun (see the classic 2002 documentary Buying the Cow), women can somewhat fulfill feminist career demands, everyone can delay the responsibility of babies and growing up (as Kay Hymowitz has written) — but a sober reflection on the endurance of late marriages is not among them. I see no reason to doubt Robert Bitter’s 1986 study on this point, nor Sandra McGinnis’s work with the NCFR on cohabitation. Absent statistical proof to the contrary, I believe fear of divorce is just not a statistically significant reason for delaying marriage — especially as divorce’s occurrence has plateaued — and certainly not significant enough to result in the kind of dramatic shift we’ve seen since the 1970s.

To demonstrate the nature of this shift, I’d recommend the work of Robert Schoen of Penn State, whose statistical studies bear reconsideration. In 2005, in the course of a study co-written with Vladimir Canudas-Romo, Schoen demonstrated the overall trends tracking marriage and fertility rates based on relative ages: “Over the last several decades, the West has seen a dramatic retreat from marriage. There have been substantial increases in the mean age at first marriage, and recent period first-marriage rates imply large declines in the proportion of men and women who will ever marry. These changes have typically been accompanied by marked increases in cohabitation, very low fertility, and rises in the proportion of children born out of wedlock.”

In case you need a clearer picture: the top is England and Wales, the bottom the United States. Both trendlines have continued in the six years since these statistics end.

Conor writes that “The rise of career women — now dubbed ‘women’ — is another major factor.” He’s completely right that women in the workforce are a major factor in delayed marriage — and he’s completely wrong that we may now assume this is an unquestioned norm for American women. “Now dubbed ‘women’” can fairly be considered code for this assumption — which is a perfectly rational assumption, all the easier to reach if one knows precious few married women. As it happens, it is also wrong. The Department of Labor says so.

See item one: only 59.5% of eligible women are actual participants in the workforce. What are the other 40.5% doing? Whatever it is, they are failing to live up to the Friedersdorfian definition of “women.”

Extrapolating from this data (DOL doesn’t appear to have a male-specific statistical set), there are 82,838,710 eligible men in the workplace. We can get the 15-and-over male population of the U.S. through tedious addition of population pyramids here. It comes to 119,566,265 for mid-2009, which I’ll round down to 118,000,000 to exclude 15-year olds. So what’s the eligible-male participation in the workforce as a proportion of the total? About 69.3% — quite a lot higher than the 59.5% of women. Why the difference? And why do we see women vastly overrepresented as “Secretaries and administrative assistants” (the plurality top category in the DOL stats), and vastly underrepresented as senior management?

The answer to both questions: children! There’s actually been a great deal written about this at conservative institutions like the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and The Atlantic. (Note to archival Atlanticists: please, fix the spelling of George Gilder’s name).

Note that the ideological arguments in these essays (especially in the CSM piece) that “economics,” not children, drive women’s decisions to leave the workforce are all still child-centric, and merely cast the demands of child-raising in economic terms (mostly as failures of governments and employers to provide appropriately economic remedies, like the Village it Takes.) Also note that while it’s true that the upper and middle class in America have longer educational periods, and that this is one (though I would argue a very small) reason for the heightened delay in marriage, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics study quoted by the NYT shows declines of mothers in the workforce “have occurred across all educational levels and, for most groups, by about the same magnitude.”

As Conor notes, I certainly agree that if an upper or middle-class individual chooses to stay in college longer and enter the workforce later, it has an effect on marriage ages. It’s a generalization, but an accurate one I think, to contend that if you enter the workforce at a younger age, you may view yourself as an adult earlier, and one of the things that comes with adulthood is a tendency to value marriage (see the Kay Hymowitz series I referenced in my first piece). But only 29% of Americans have a college degree, a figure that is not expected to increase dramatically in the coming years — so what’s Conor’s explanation for the decisions of the other 71%? I don’t know how many of Conor’s friends are in this category, but before he responds that concerns about the economy are the largest motivation, it’s worth noting that the data we’re working from is all from before the current economic downturn began. Even in prosperous years, Americans are choosing to invest their money in personal enjoyment over family and children. This suggests that there is more going on here than the ramifications of class and career — it implies a fundamental underlying social cause.

Conor claims that he wishes to “push back against Mr. Domenech’s culturally driven arguments, which seem to assume that delaying marriage and family imply devaluing those things.” When people get married and have children, they transform from being a potential society to being real societies, creating a cycle of productivity and inheritance that allows individuals to succeed and surpass their parents, and forming a community of stability and support that dramatically reduces the demand for larger government to provide for the health and economic needs of the young (as poverty is feminized), the infirm (as caregivers disappear), and the aging. Increases in the number of unwed and childless individuals necessitates demand for expanded social programs and governmental authority to take the place of family. As a putative conservative, it surprises me somewhat that Conor would take issue with a position as paramount to conservatism in all its forms as the importance of culture, and the family as a crucial element of American culture. Or perhaps that is just the price of admission if one wishes to be published in The Daily Dish?

In any case, while I don’t concur with the entirety of his findings, the University of Michigan’s Ron Lesthaeghe’s belief that the United States is in the midst of a Second Demographic Transition is overwhelmingly borne out by what we know to be true. If one looks at the data, and not the anecdote, it is clear that women and families actually behave as if there is an either/or choice. This, in turn, leads a reasonable person to believe there is a valuation process underway. Conor may believe that this is not the case, but if he does so, he is deriving the substance of his ideas from something other than measurable facts.

In every presidential term, even the more successful ones, there’s at least one major constituency that feels particularly ignored and slighted by the leader they supported. There can be more than one offended party, of course — Jimmy Carter managed to insult or offend more of the constituencies whose votes made him president than some would have thought possible — but typically, one group rises above all the rest in terms of feeling a level of distinct betrayal by the president they supported and labored for over months and even years.

Work your thoughts back toward the summer of 2004, and the constituency that clearly felt most betrayed by the Bush presidency was the socially conservative right. Hadley Arkes, a prominent scholar and a leading voice against abortion, took to the pages of First Things to excoriate the president and his staff for missed opportunities and lack of courage in a cause he claimed to support:

Hence the paradox that afflicts us now: we have the most pro-life administration that has ever been assembled, and at the head of that administration is a good, sympathetic man, who is deeply reluctant to make the pro-life argument in public or to start the kind of discussion that might bring about real change. It has been suggested that the leadership for pro-life initiatives must emanate from the Congress. And from the Congress, in the next year, the measures I’ve outlined may indeed come forth. But if this President’s second term is anything like his first, we can expect that Congressional Republicans will receive little help from the top of the administration. This state of affairs leads to the following melancholy judgment. For pro-lifers Mr. Bush must be counted as a real friend. But by his example, he is establishing what must surely stand as the most corrosive lesson that could be taught in this country right now—that in the judgment of an accomplished political man, it is either impolitic or unrespectable to make the pro-life argument in public. Whatever else may be accomplished by the Bush administration, this implicit teaching can have only debilitating and destructive effects on the pro-life cause.

Of course, Bush redeemed himself with pro-lifers in his second term with his appointments of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito to the Supreme Court, the near-total vindication of his stem cell policies, and the addition of a conscience rule on abortion which, while Obama immediately overturned it, drew a clear line in the sand regarding the rights of Catholic hospitals and other faithful health care providers.

But if you were to assess the constituencies disappointed with Barack Obama’s presidency thus far, you could write an astonishingly similar paragraph today, replacing “pro-life” with “gay rights” and “Bush” with “Obama,” and it would be a surprisingly accurate description of the current state of affairs.

As Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith outline today at the Politico:

Gay rights campaigners, most of them Democrats who supported Obama in November, have begun to voice their public frustration with Obama’s inaction, small jokes at their community’s expense and deafening silence on what they see as the signal civil rights issue of this era.

His most important campaign promises repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and the military ban on openly gay and lesbian service-members have not been fulfilled. And the news, which emerged quietly earlier this year, that he’d supported same-sex marriage back in 1996, then changed his mind, especially rankles. As mainstream Democratic politicians such as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) move to support same-sex marriage, gay rights advocates say that the barrier-breaking president looks increasingly odd for opposing what they see as full equality.

They are hardly alone — President Obama’s administration has left several of its voting constituencies feeling betrayed, and not on minor matters. Centrist Democrats are disappointed with his budget and his “vulture capitalism” approach to Wall Street; environmentalists are displeased with his Interior Department policies, and gun control advocates dislike his acceptance of concealed weapons in parks; and of course, Glenn Greenwald and others are very disappointed with Obama’s continued defense of many Bush administration officials and positions, his pushback on truth commissions, policies on the NSA and classified intelligence, support for military tribunals and the whole of his detainee policy (policies which I and others right of center have been pleasantly surprised by for the most part).

As Greenwald wrote just a month after the election, when the disappointment was limited to the response to Obama’s appointments:

So many progressives were misled about what Obama is and what he believes. But it wasn’t Obama who misled them. It was their own desires, their eagerness to see what they wanted to see rather than what reality offered…

But Barack Obama is a centrist, establishment politician. That is what he has been since he’s been in the Senate, and more importantly, it’s what he made clear — both explicitly and through his actions — that he intended to be as President.

Yet if there is any constituency that should feel betrayed by the Obama administration in its early going, it has to be the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) community. It started with the inclusion of Rick Warren in the inaugural festivities, and now extends far beyond the positively apoplectic Andrew Sullivan, who’s written that Obama is thinking about meeting the desires of gay supporters with the “Fierce Urgency of Whenever,” to a wider swathe of more representative leaders within the party. As Martin and Smith report, quoting Howard Dean:

“There’s going to come a point where’s he going have to deal with it,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who now supports same-sex marriage, said of Obama. “I’m in favor of giving him a little more time. He’s got an awful lot on his plate.”

“But he is a politician like everybody else, and he’s going to respond to pressure. And I don’t blame the LGBT community for trying to push,” Dean said.

Dick Cheney’s position on the matter hasn’t made things easier for those same-sex marriage supporters who backed the president in November. As Jake Tapper pointed out, the President “honored LGBT pride month by not supporting same sex marriage” — a lack of support made all the more frustrating in comparison to the recent remarks by the former Vice President in support of states deciding marriage issues themselves, saying in response to a question:

I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay, and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don’t support. I do believe that … historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis. … But I don’t have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that.

For those keeping count, this means that, as Donald Trump recently pointed out, Obama and Miss California Carrie Prejean have the same position on the matter — and Cheney is more progressive, or I would say more federalist, than either of them.

This isn’t a new position on marriage for Cheney. In fact, in 2004, he said almost exactly the same thing. And you can’t assign his position to catering to public perception, either — Gallup indicates that marriage views are essentially unchanged since 2004, with the latest poll indicating 57% opposition to same sex marriage, and 40% support.

Part of the reluctance on Obama’s part to deal with the hot button issues of marriage is a simple political calculation — his gay and lesbian supporters made up a relatively small portion of his electoral constituency, and were outnumbered in nearly all key states by minority and moderate supporters who are still uncomfortable with mandated same-sex marriage. For all his many faults as a candidate, John McCain won a surprising amount of support from gay voters: 27% of self-acknowledged gays and lesbians voted for McCain, representing a full 1.3 million votes — more than any Republican presidential candidate has received — as he held a position on marriage that was nearly indistinguishable from Obama’s.

One wonders if there is potential here for an opportunity for conservatives who share Cheney’s views on social policy to make inroads with a constituency that the president seems to feel he doesn’t need. Ever since the marriage fight began, the balance of opinion on the social right has been more fractured than mainstream media coverage seems to acknowledge. While it’s true that the majority of the 57% of Americans opposed to same-sex marriage do so for moral reasons, a driving force behind much of the opposition to these unions is more about the nature of the process that led to this decision. As Moe Lane pointed out recently, the attempts to “do an end run around the legislative process” through the court systems have only fueled voter-driven responses in the forms of state constitutional amendments requiring traditional marriage, exactly as we saw in California recently:

Poll after poll shows that the American people are more supportive of visitation rights, inheritance rights, adoption rights, insurance rights, and even formally recognizing and regulating domestic partnerships; they just don’t like being ordered to do it, and thanks to sixteen years of poor message discipline, they’re currently associating the same-sex marriage advocate’s position with a sneer.

But there’s another option here, one that — if gays and lesbians who support same sex marriage or civil unions are more interested in adopting a beneficial long-term tactic — should be considered as a national strategy that would require little if any support from President Obama, and alliance with moderate Republicans who share many of their goals.

It requires a consideration of what my colleague Dan McLaughlin describes as The New Federalism, an approach to divisive hot button social politics that was originally presented as a principled path for Rudy Giuliani to take as a way of ameliorating conservative concerns over his social policies on abortion and other issues. McLaughlin spun this idea into a speech he recommended Giuliani give, and one I still believe would’ve prompted a significant reexamination of this idea, based on the view that “I’m not saying that social issues are not important enough to be Washington’s business – I’m saying they are too important to be Washington’s business.”

[S]omewhere along the way, we wound up spending way too much time in presidential campaigns talking about a whole lot of things that really should not be the job of the president – in fact, things that shouldn’t be decided in Washington at all. Washington shouldn’t be fighting a “culture war,” and every day we spend fighting one with each other is a day we are distracted from fighting the real war.

So I’m not running to fight the culture war. But I’m not running to surrender it to one side, either. I’m running to propose a truce, a cease-fire we should all be able to agree on – a New Federalism that will return control over social and cultural issues to the states, cities and towns where these issues belong.

In the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time traveling this country and talking to people about their values – and you know what? People in other places don’t want anybody telling them to live by New York values, either. And the one thing nobody wants is to force everyone to accept Washington values. But the more these issues are decided in Washington, the more that’s precisely what happens.

Conservatives and Republicans didn’t like it when activist liberal judges started forcing their values on everyone else. And now that we have more conservatives on the courts, and a conservative president and for a while there a lot of Republican conservatives in Congress, a lot of our liberal friends started waking up and saying to themselves, “maybe getting these issues out of Washington isn’t such a bad idea after all.” Amazing thing for them to discover that all of a sudden. As Casey Stengel would say, you could look it up.

Over the coming months, I will lay out my vision of how the New Federalism will change the way Washington makes decisions. As President, I will oppose any effort to force people in Texas and South Carolina to live the way New Yorkers live, for the same reasons why I wouldn’t want New Yorkers to be forced to live like people in some other city or state. This is a great country, and it’s big enough for a lot of different communities and lifestyles. The New Federalism isn’t about my values, and it isn’t about Washington’s values. It’s about yours and your neighbors’, wherever you live.

The essential point is no different than the one Cheney more recently endorsed: the idea that every American should have the right to have their voices heard on these issues by voting in their state is a good one, and inherently true to the nature of our country. Clearly, on the abortion issue, this would require a repudiation of Roe, and many states would adopt abortion policy regimes that matched the current national law. But many would not — and those states would not be forced to, any more than Texas or Iowa should be forced to accept the same marriage laws that California or Massachusetts have adopted.

Supporters of same-sex marriage are always arguing that young people all agree with them on the issue, and that as the next generations become more politically active, it’s inevitable public opinion will shift in their favor. If this is true — and it probably is — then accepting this path will be a way for them to win their battle by convincing Americans it’s the right thing to do, not forcing the decision on an unreceptive public before its time (as they did in the 1990s, with the Defense of Marriage Act as a consequence), ensuring the culture wars continue for another generation.

If gay and lesbian advocates are truly disappointed with President Obama, perhaps they should start pursuing political alliances, however unlikely they may seem, with those who believe that American voters, not judges, should decide these critical issues. Ultimately, I suspect they would be wise to do so.

Y esterday Moe and I with his colleagues in respected corners of the news media who had disparaged Sarah Palin, relying on the rantings from the foulest corners of the blogosphere as the basis for their articles. Douthat’s disappointment – along with that of his colleagues McArdle and Goldberg – turned slowly into outrage over the course of the day, as it became clear that much of his frustration was directed at the worst offender of them all: Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is on the extreme edge of the assault on Palin – even as Campbell Brown and others have drastically scaled back their attacks on Palin as they realized their allegations were either unfounded, irrelevant, or significant stretches of fact, Sullivan continues to beat the drum. He repeats rumor and innuendo as established truth, but even worse, insists that every tabloidesque rumor be met with immediacy by Palin herself. It’s more than a little pathetic: Andrew Sullivan, once one of the most brilliant wits of the neocon blogosphere, now occupies that darkened zone of the tabloid preacher – the streetcorner pamphleteer who cries to all who will hear, “The Government will not respond to my writings the existence of extraterrestrials among us, and THIS LACK OF DENIAL PROVES DEFINITIVELY THAT THEY ARE HERE!”

As Jonathan Last blogs at the fantastic Galley Slaves: Sullivan demanded that he be able to inspect Palin’s amniotic fluid or Trig Palin’s placenta in order to determine the “hidden truth” about Palin’s pregnancy. Sullivan posted repeatedly, writing over and over again – with no basis other than his own expertise in photo analysis and the rantings of bloggers and commenters with no reputation for accuracy – that Palin’s pregnancy was a suspect issue that demanded clarification. Was the baby hers? Who was the father? Was it a faked pregnancy? All were questions that Sullivan insisted needed answering.

In the wake of revelations about Bristol Palin, rendering much of what he argued moot, Sullivan now insists that his continued writings and tabloidesque musings about Trig Palin’s conception and birth aren’t out of bounds at all, merely because the baby exists.

Presumably, they should put it wherever people put babies to keep them out of the public eye.

Sullivan’s public descent into rampaging dementia is frightening, and one wonders what it could possibly signify about his relationship with The Atlantic. I have been public for years in my belief that The Atlantic is the best magazine in America, and it has, as others have noted, a brand built on a century of brilliant writers and the best minds of the literati. Today, Sullivan represents a complete downfall of that brand name – embracing fully the worst kind of speculatory writing, based on nothing more than what he sees on television and receives from adoring fans in his inbox.

Sullivan has had a bizarre series of public loop-de-loops in recent months, primarily motivated by his devout affection for Barack Obama. His insistence on ignoring his own past political views led to a strong back and forth earlier this year, when Pete Wehner – who I know to be a former fan of Sullivan’s writings before the man went nuts – showed how Sullivan’s current claims completely conflicted with everything he’d once written about the war on terror. To which Sullivan, after much ridiculousness in response, could only respond: “I was deceived and feel terrible responsibility for my naivete.”

Perhaps someday Andrew Sullivan will say he feels deceived by the Andrew Sullivan he is today, and feel terrible responsibility for believing the rantings of the nuttiest members of the online left. But until that day, if it ever comes, he will keep up his courageous quest, insisting that he is just “posing questions,” that he has no bias on this point but a search for hidden, dirty, scandalous truth. He will ask the tough questions, the hard questions, the questions he can ask about medical practice and birth because of his long history as an OB-GYN, an educated nurse, and the handsomest midwife in the tristate area.

The Atlantic sure is getting what it’s paying for.

originally posted at redstate