How Conservatives Can Promote Family Through Policy

In recent years, the emphasis on family-related issues on the right side of the political spectrum has been growing. Some Republicans have taken the label of being “pro-family” seriously, and tried to develop policies to meaningfully buttress parents’ ability to have, raise, and educate their kids in ways that go beyond mere lip service. 

This has been happening as the Grand Old Party undergoes something of a transition, attracting voters without a college degree, including minorities, and losing the support of college-educated suburbanites. You don’t have to be a die-hard political junkie to understand that the Republicans’ standard political agenda—which traditionally emphasized tax cuts for corporations and for those with above-average incomes—may prove less appealing to their new coalition of working-class voters. 

The conservative movement today is bound together by antipathy towards the “wokeness” of the left. That alone may be enough to win elections. But it may struggle to articulate a fully “pro-family” approach to policymaking unless it takes seriously some of the points raised in a new National Affairs essay by the conservative policy analyst John Shelton. 

Shelton bears impeccable credentials from the traditional wing of conservatism that likes limited government and free markets. Shelton, like myself, is a former Congressional staffer for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and he is current policy advisor to Advancing American Freedom, a think tank set up by former Vice President Mike Pence. His essay aptly illustrates the opportunities and pitfalls awaiting the conservative movement today. 

The first half of his essay makes the case that “fusionism”—the marriage between social conservatives who prize civic order and traditional values, and the more libertarian-minded branch of conservativism that champions economic efficiency and limited government—can be resurrected. Yet, as my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague Henry Olsen has written, “fusionism” has a history more complicated, and future applications more limited, than its proponents often admit. 

The Reagan-era “fusionism” Shelton writes about had a habit of subordinating family concerns for business ones, as Frances FitzGerald points out in her comprehensive history, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. Religious conservatives were given lip-service and blue-ribbon commissions, rather than any effort at exerting political capital. “We want to keep the Moral Majority types so close to us they can't move their arms,” one Reagan advisor told the Washington Post.

The 1980’s “New Right,” who were pushing Reagan to adopt socially conservative positions, was largely “an anti-elitist attempt to influence our politics from below,” in the words of historian George Nash. But they had failed to convince party leaders of the rightness of their cause: To “other conservatives, long preoccupied with economic and geopolitical issues, the concerns of the largely Christian New Right seem of secondary importance and, in any case, of limited political appeal.” 

Shelton argues that despite the lack of any meaningful legislative accomplishments, Reagan’s domestic policy was more family-oriented than popular memory gives it credit for. He highlights the Meese Commission on Pornography, which was largely a success until the Internet made such attempts at enforcement obsolete. And he lauds the creation of a “Family Policymaking Assessment,” which purported to analyze all new legislation from the standpoint of its impact on families. 

Yet the “Assessment,” in the telling of long-time family policy scholar Allan Carlson, never had the teeth its supporters intended. As written, it “avoided any language that would threaten the interests of big business,” Carlson wrote in his 2003 history of family policy, The American Way. “Moreover, it was intentionally vague” about issues ranging from family wages to stay-at-home parents, and as such “had little real effect.” 

Could these pitfalls be avoided today? Today’s “New Right” bears some resemblance to the “New Right” of the 1980s, accusing the mainstream of the Republican party of having subordinated cultural concerns for military or economic ones. As Shelton aptly points out, the more muscular voices—your integralists, National Conservatives, and post-liberals of various stripes—similarly don’t have enough elite buy-in (much less popular support) to fundamentally reorient conservatism on their own. What matters, in his telling, is not the ultimate ends of various right-leaning factions, but that they can agree on a general direction—supporting families.

As a matter of principle, the understanding that the family is the key institution of a healthy society, and as such deserves to have policies aimed at its preservation, should be celebrated. But that alone does not absolve us of the need to grapple with different values when turning principle into policy. 

Shelton would have today’s conservatives resurrect the Reagan-era family impact statement for conservative ends: “New-right statists and technocrats should be content with embracing further government inefficiency for the sake of the family.” He argues that adding a new, family-oriented lens to today’s bureaucratic rulemaking could slow down the wheels of government. New safety or environmental measures should be evaluated not just for their impact on the economy or the environment, but for their impact on family formation. 

There is some wisdom here. In an era of declining marriages rates and falling fertility, it is appropriate and laudable for regulators in D.C. to keep an eye out for unintended consequences that might, for example, inadvertently subsidize cohabitation or penalize families with multiple children. But it does not follow that the policy upshot will be the same for a family-focused conservatism versus one that favors deregulation. 

Take his example of car seat safety regulations, which some research has suggested may have had an accidentally contraceptive impact as parents shy away from purchasing bigger cars. Relaxing car seat safety regs could boost birth rates – but at the cost of increasing infant mortality. Is the right prescription to deregulate car seats or to cross-subsidize parents’ ability to afford the costs of family life (perhaps by making car seats tax-free, as Florida and other states have done)? A purely “fusionist” approach can’t inform that judgement. 

Or consider this year’s vocal debate over the Child Tax Credit. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) negotiated a compromise that—while not the perfect ideal of a tax credit – would have meaningfully improved how the credit operates for low-income and working-class families, particularly those with more than one child. Traditional conservative groups, including the organization Shelton works for, came out hammer and tongs against the modest expansion of assistance to families making in the ballpark of $30,000 in annual income, calling it “a welfare catastrophe.” If this new “fusionism” is as opposed to assistance for working-class families (the new base of the Republican movement) as the old one, it doesn’t offer much of a political path forward. 

Shelton’s essay raises important questions for future efforts to support families. Particularly in an era of high and rising deficits, there are plenty of ways to graft the newfound populist energy around support for parents to the more traditional supply-side focus of the Republican party establishment. But the goals of reducing the size of government or boosting economic growth will not always necessarily align with the goal of stable and thriving families. A “fusionism” that is unable to prioritize between those goals will likely struggle to avoid the fate of prior, ultimately toothless attempts to steer economic policy in a pro-family direction.

Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes from Columbia, South Carolina.