Family Values

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It is a telling peculiarity of the family-values issue that it is so often framed in visual memories of television shows. Many Americans conjuring images of an earlier family ideal think of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show. They may even think that family values are something enacted in black and white -- the home returned to after school, the milk and cookies, a rustling of Mother in full stiff skirts. Americans almost never cite books as aide-memoire or illustrations of family values, perhaps because the TV sitcoms of American childhoods tended toward the sunny, whereas the novelists (think of John O'Hara, Philip Roth, John Cheever), if read at all, made their money by prying open American private lives and showing dirty secrets.

Republicans and Democrats often mean something quite different when they talk about family values.

The Republican meaning of family values tends to point toward a cultural ideal (two-parent heterosexual households, hard work, no pornography, a minimal tolerance of the aberrant). Says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values: "Republicans really do want to argue about the culture. They want to argue about morality, what's right and wrong, standards of private behavior. They really do want to argue about sexuality, procreation and marriage."

Conservatives tend to say, Change the culture. Democrats tend to think of family values as matters that might be addressed by government policy -- which is precisely Dan Quayle's complaint. Conservatives uphold the private realm, Democrats the public realm. Conservatives tend to stress individual responsibility and changing behavior to correct the problem; liberals are inclined to think first of programs to mitigate the bad effects of trends such as unwed motherhood.

During the Democratic Convention, Bill Clinton and Al Gore staged a sort of pre-emptive celebration of family values, claiming the issue for themselves. How well they succeeded remains to be seen. They know the danger of Democrats' seeming promiscuously tolerant of all bizarreness in some aging '60s, Phil Donahue fashion. Clinton has often sounded virtually Republican in his insistence on personal responsibility.

"Bill Clinton accepts that there is a moral decline," says his campaign pollster, Stan Greenberg. "That the values of mainstream America have not been respected and supported. But George Bush is part of the problem." The Clinton strategy is summarized in the slogan that top strategist James Carville has posted in the campaign war room at the Little Rock, Arkansas, headquarters: "It's the economy, stupid." The Clinton approach, says Greenberg, is that "family values is about fifth on the list of what voters want addressed by their President."

Much Republican rhetoric posits a model of the family that is becoming rarer in reality. Almost all family values have to do with children, with how to make them happy and give them safe, decent lives. The real debate Americans should be having, says social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, concerns "what all adults would give up to secure a childhood of innocence and freedom." Every expert and practically every citizen agree that children are better off being raised in a family with two parents. For various reasons, that is less and less the model of American child rearing.