The Working Class Majority by Michael Zweig

Author:Michael Zweig
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8014-6478-2
Publisher: Cornell University Press

The Rise of “Family Values”

In the 1980s and 1990s, as the living standards of the working class steadily deteriorated, “values” came to increasing prominence as a political issue. But values were separated from economic questions. Instead of considering economic justice and social responsibility, values came to mean what some called “family values.” As right-wing political forces came to prominence, they redirected the focus of moral debate by asserting conservative responses to such vital questions as abortion, the rights of women, and homosexuality. The energy of these assertions, backed by grassroots mobilizations through many right-wing Christian churches, created a climate in which the moral character of political candidates and party platforms seemed to rest on their stands on these “family values” issues—not on policies to deal with poverty, inequality, military budgets, or the rights of workers to organize unions.

Liberal and pro-labor politicians have answered these attacks in policy terms. But these leaders have too often been on the defensive in the moral debate. They have not expressed a coherent moral code of their own to answer the right’s claims of moral leadership. They have not articulated an ethical system to justify their policies, integrate their views on family values with workers’ needs, and motivate broad political participation by people who seek moral leadership as well as improvements in their everyday lives.

The rise of the “family values” agenda was the work of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, and other organizations of the Christian right. Their rise to a central spot in American politics coincided with the increased power of corporate interests to set the country’s economic policies.

The Christian right has not limited its program to abortion and school prayer. Their leaders have consistently supported the same limited government, tax cut, privatization, and welfare reform agenda championed by the traditional corporate base of the Republican Party. With the merger of corporate and Christian right agendas, the conservative, pro-business agenda came to be associated with a moral agenda of sorts. The corporate elite and their allies have succeeded in redefining more than the country’s economic priorities to support business interests. They have redefined what we mean by values as well.

The New Deal of the 1930s was based on values of mutual responsibility organized through government action, in programs like Social Security, government protection of unions, and laws establishing minimum wages and overtime pay for millions of workers in private corporations. Supporters justified these policies with moral appeals to economic justice and economic democracy. But in recent decades, only “efficiency” has been associated with the word “economic.” Justice and democracy are gone. Corporate ideologues, with the assistance of the Christian right, have emptied all economic content from moral debates, and substituted “family values” in their place, making it possible to talk about morality while ignoring the systematic attacks on the working class that I have documented throughout this book.

This change in the meaning of values in public life has been an important part of the attack on working people.

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