Abstract
In Polarized Families, Polarized Parties, the political scientist Gwendoline M. Alphonso demonstrates the centrality of family in the development of American political parties in the twentieth century. She effectively corrects a political science literature in which family has been overlooked as a central force in shaping partisanship, including within the received wisdom about the conservative ascendancy of the late twentieth century. Unlike much of the scholarship on the politics of the family in the late twentieth century, which focuses on issues related to feminism and the so-called culture wars, Alphonso focuses on family economics. She argues that while by the late 1970s the politics of family values came to overshadow policy differences based on the government’s role in the economy, that shift was more rhetorical than actual: family politics in the late twentieth century was economic politics, articulated through a values framework but in many ways continuing the debate over economic assistance to families that had marked the earlier period. Here Alphonso seeks to undermine the “existing artificiality of the economics-culture dichotomy” (5−6) prevalent in scholarly work on American parties, a laudable goal.
Methodologically, Alphonso blends quantitative modeling and qualitative discourse analysis by examining major party platforms, US legislators’ sponsored bills, and transcripts of congressional committee hearings. She seeks to explain change over time; in line with the goals of the political science subfield of American political development (APD in the disciplinary lingo), she historicizes family “as an evolving and composite partisan institution” (3). She does so comparatively, homing in on three periods: The Progressive Era, the post-World War II era, and the period spanning the late 1970s through the early twenty-first century. Schematically breaking down policy proposals having to do with family over the decades under consideration, she finds four main policy types: 1) ascriptive (related to family biology and reproduction), autonomous (focused on private, internal qualities of a family and its separateness from the national state), regulatory (targeting forms of family behavior defined as contrary to the well-being of the nation), and welfare (concerning economic conditions of families). While she argues that specific circumstances changed—namely, that by the late 1970s, family “crystallized into a central polarizing issue” between Democrats and Republicans—she demonstrates that the core underlying importance of family as a driver of “ideational political change” (3) remained prevalent throughout the twentieth century.
Alphonso’s central organizing principle is the development of two “intertwining ideals of family, society, and economy” (9). First is the materialist “Hearth” framework that sees family economic cohesion and security as key to well-being, recognizes the need to improve existing social arrangements, and views a legitimate role for the state in family affairs. Second is the conservative “Soul” ideal, which prioritizes traditional social arrangements, measures family strength by morality rather than economic security, and opposes redistribution of economic benefits by the government. Overall, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties finds that across all periods, legislators introduced more economics-centered Hearth bills than values-based Soul ones, but they were increasingly communicated through a values-based approach as the parties responded to each other’s policies throughout the century. During the Progressive Era, “social-progressives”—aligned with Republicans—argued for a Hearth-oriented framework that endowed the national government with more power in order to protect child welfare while Democrats subscribed to a more Soul-oriented and localist, traditionalist worldview, as is evident in debates over issues such as women’s suffrage and interracial marriage (58). The Great Depression provided a catalyst for Democrats to rethink the obligations of the modern state to include the economic security of families, and New Deal policies toward that goal catapulted the family into national policies; from the New Deal through the Great Society, both parties pursued a Hearth family approach with an emphasis on economic security. The parties were less polarized on issues of family. In the 1960s, Republican platforms began to change to an emphasis on a Soul family approach, in which they connected family strength and stability (rather than their traditional focus on the individual) to free-market values in order to push back against an expanded welfare state. In turn, Democrats increasingly responded in values-based, rather than economic security–based, terms: personal dignity, inclusion, and equity were at the center of Democratic statements. By the 1989–2004 period, the distinction between Hearth and Soul policy proposals became starkly partisan, reflecting a polarized family ideology. Effectively, the parties reversed family ideologies throughout the century: Republicans went from supporting Hearth bills in the Progressive Era to championing Soul policies by the end of the century.
Although she seems primarily to be concerned with her APD audience within the political science discipline, Alphonso’s book draws from and complements work done over the past two decades by historians of gender and politics, bolstering our understanding of the ways in which family has served as a salient political symbol. In particular, Alphonso’s Heart and Soul schema overlaps considerably with Rebecca Edwards’s description in Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (Oxford University Press, 1997) of the largely sectional differences between models of normative white families: middle-class domesticity in the Northeast and patriarchal power relations in the South and working-class pockets of the urban North. Central to Edwards’s book is the different economic models of North and South; one of the most valuable aspects of Alphonso’s analysis is that it takes into consideration the large structural economic forces and demographic realities underlying political debates over the family. Natasha Zaretsky’s No Direction Home: The American Family and Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) similarly demonstrates that political debates about gender and the family since the late 1960s were deeply interwoven with the history of capitalism in the United States, particularly around the collapse of the (male) family wage. Polarized Families, Polarized Parties bridges these two books chronologically and supplements their contributions, encouraging scholars to consider the histories of family, politics, and economy together.
The book also supports explicitly or implicitly many of the insights historians have made surrounding the rise and fall of the so-called post-World War II liberal consensus, and it contributes to an ever-growing body of scholarship about American conservatism. Notably, Alphonso finds an enduring connection between family conservatives and the South throughout the twentieth century—across partisan lines and time periods. It was the marriage, so to speak, of neoliberal economic ideology and conservative family ideals that created the successful New Right, and that partisan/ideological realignment had as its geographical center the Sunbelt South. Polarized Families, Polarized Parties therefore engages with and seeks to broaden the scholarly consensus on the southernization of American politics and the concomitant rise of conservatism to de-emphasize race and center family: The Soul family increasingly transcended its regional associations and took on national prominence, bringing the politics of the South to the nation as a whole.
Here the distinctions get murky, however. Her assertion of (white) southern values as essentially static would benefit from more evidence. Further, she posits a causal relationship between demographics and the elevation of Soul family values: as the population and the political center shifted southward, conservative values took on increased importance in national politics. But demographics aren’t destiny, and values are not simply reflected in rhetoric, they are simultaneously expressed and constructed; the latter is a main theoretical insight of post–cultural turn scholarship on discourse.
Regarding the imbrication of race and family within the southernization of politics, Alphonso’s discussion is best when she describes the ways that conservative Soul rhetoric helped shift the political landscape between the 1960s and 1980s from a race-conscious liberal framework to a colorblind one, thereby facilitating a continuation of white supremacist norms—albeit in a shifting language—through the vocabulary of family. Yet in hewing to her Hearth/Soul dichotomy, she misses an opportunity to explain more fully the complex ways in which the shift to a language of values was constructed in direct response to a contest over material resources mediated by the federal government. For example, Alphonso argues that late-century Republican Soul family values “focus[ed] on moral and character traits as opposed to material conditions” (167). As historians of the welfare rights movement such as Premilla Nadasen have demonstrated, the rise of conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s took shape in reaction to the demands of activists of color for expanded resources from the government: voting and employment protections, fair housing, welfare rights, reproductive freedom, and busing to achieve school desegregation. These were material issues; that the reaction was expressed in dematerialized, valuational terms is an important insight, but we should be careful not to make that point at the expense of the material ramifications of rights-based claims by racial minorities. In a period of economic contraction, rights-based claims on the state were experienced by many in the white majority as attacks on their access to existing resources.
In terms of historical actors, Alphonso makes an argument well-supported by recent historical scholarship: that the parties’ approaches toward issues of family were not only determined by a top-down power arrangement but were instead informed by elite party leaders’ responses to ordinary constituents’ views. The book advocates for a dialectical process in which ordinary people’s experiences and party leaders’ strategies shaped and reacted to each other. Here Alphonso’s claim calls to mind social historians who have charted the importance of grassroots activists in creating a “pro-family politics” in the late twentieth century, such as Marjorie Spruill’s Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights That Polarized American Politics (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) and Stacie Taranto’s Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). To support this conclusion, though, Chapters 2 through 5 rely on historical documents created by and large not by ordinary people but by their elected officials—namely, stories about constituents, told by members of Congress as part of committee deliberations. These were not necessarily reflective of the actual lived experiences of ordinary people but instead consisted of narratives refracted through the lens of political debate. In her valuable effort to contextualize political debate using structural and demographic economic realities, she overstates her intention to examine “lived family experiences” (9).
Yet the book is very effective at highlighting trends among the family-based rhetoric of members of Congress. While the evidence does not support her methodological claim to consider the actual experiences of constituents, Alphonso does succeed in demonstrating something else altogether: that politicians increasingly looked toward “real” quotidian stories to convey their positions. She convincingly depicts an evolution of a political discourse in which ideological claims and policy debates were increasingly framed by elites around the evocation of average, authentic American families. As a rhetorical phenomenon, this insight is quite interesting, and it contributes to our understanding of how the conservative realignment played out. One wonders how this evolution of political rhetoric might have been affected by the opening up of Congress in the 1970s through institutional reforms and the innovation of televised proceedings.
Polarized Families, Polarized Parties continues to push the discipline of political science to historicize analyses of party development, which benefits everyone engaged in historical study. This is a valuable survey of congressional rhetoric about family over several decades. Alphonso is most successful in emphasizing that competing ideologies of family as drivers of partisan identification and policy agenda did not arise in the 1970s; she demonstrates effectively that family was salient to American politics long before the rise of the New Right. She also reminds us of the importance of reading high-level political rhetoric within the context of economic and demographic structures. Ultimately, Alphonso’s work points to historical moments deserving of further study in which political rhetoric around family changed and in which evoking the family became particularly effective for politicians.