Not long ago I heard a so-called "progressive" ask the questions, "When have the conservatives ever been right?" and "Where are the examples of the disasters the conservatives predicted when progressive policies were adopted?"
The speaker was in his 30s, and was the victim of an almost exclusively progressive education, and so can be forgiven for his lack of awareness, but here are some answers to those questions.
It is apparent that the EU, for example--which has been the vanguard in adopting progressive policies--is nearing economic calamity on top of its demographic calamity. Here's one version:
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Increasingly secular since the 1960s, Europe is also collapsing demographically, with fewer marriages, more divorces, and fewer children. Each European generation is smaller than its predecessor. The notion of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” is largely myth today; most young Greek children have neither brothers nor sisters, aunts nor uncles. Almost half of all Swedish households today have only one occupant.
The relationship between increasing secularism and decreasing marriage and birth rates was noticed long ago, and was understood as a causal one: Secular people tend to marry later, if at all, and to have smaller families. In other words, religious decline precedes demographic decline." More
here.
And, of course, there was Vice President Dan Quayle’s well-known 1992 “Murphy Brown speech” in which he discussed “the breakdown of the family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society.” The speech earned its nickname from the single brief reference to the TV show Murphy Brown: “a character,” Quayle maintained, “who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” The speech was met with ridicule from pundits and even uncertainty from the White House. However, the following year social scientist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote her famous piece “Dan Quayle Was Right” in The Atlantic Monthly. Reviewing the scholarly literature from the past couple decades, Whitehead argued,
Taken together, the research presents a powerful challenge to the prevailing view of family change as social progress. Not a single one of the assumptions underlying that view can be sustained against the empirical evidence. Single-parent families are not able to do well economically on a mother’s income. In fact, most teeter on the economic brink, and many fall into poverty and welfare dependency. Growing up in a disrupted family does not enrich a child’s life or expand the number of adults committed to the child’s well-being. In fact, disrupted families threaten the psychological well-being of children and diminish the investment of adult time and money in them. Family diversity in the form of increasing numbers of single-parent and stepparent families does not strengthen the social fabric. It dramatically weakens and undermines society, placing new burdens on schools, courts, prisons, and the welfare system. These new families are not an improvement on the nuclear family, nor are they even just as good, whether you look at outcomes for children or outcomes for society as a whole. In short, far from representing social progress, family change represents a stunning example of social regress.[8]
Murray returned later that year with a WSJ article on the increasing illegitimacy among both whites and blacks:
Every once in a while the sky really is falling, and this seems to be the case with the latest national figures on illegitimacy. The unadorned statistic is that, in 1991, 1.2 million children were born to unmarried mothers, within a hair of 30% of all live births. How high is 30%? About four percentage points higher than the black illegitimacy rate in the early 1960s that motivated Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write his famous memorandum on the breakdown of the black family.
The 1991 story for blacks is that illegitimacy has now reached 68% of births to black women. In inner cities, the figure is typically in excess of 80%. Many of us have heard these numbers so often that we are inured…But the black story, however dismaying, is old news. The new trend that threatens the U.S. is white illegitimacy. Matters have not yet quite gotten out of hand, but they are on the brink…In 1991, 707,502 babies were born to single white women, representing 22% of white births…As the spatial concentration of illegitimacy reaches critical mass, we should expect the deterioration to be as fast among low-income whites in the 1990s as it was among low-income blacks in the 1960s. My proposition is that illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time — more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else. Doing something about it is not just one more item on the American policy agenda, but should be at the top.[9]
