It must be the bowtie

I tend not to make it a habit of readings things that I know will merely piss me off and add nothing of even nominal use to my intellectual corpus, but sometimes the vile magnetism of those dreamy hunks of token conservativism at the New York Times, David Brooks and John Tierney, are just too much for a mere mortal to resist.

Take this gem from Mr. Brooks, published today, about how Democrats should start focusing more on social policies than economic ones, because the former are what really affect people:

In the current issue of The American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta also notes the interplay between values and economic issues. "Traditional values have become aspirational," she writes. "Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle-class people they want to be like."

With these sentiments, Democrats seem to be moving away from materialistic determinism. In past decades, Democratic political campaigns have been based primarily on appeals to economic interests. But especially in the information age, social values and cultural capital shape a person's economic destiny more than the other way around.

If you are a middle-class woman, you have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing. If you have a daughter, you're right to worry more about her having a child before marriage than about her being a victim of globalization. This country's prosperity is threatened more by homes where no one reads to children than it is by big pharmaceutical companies.

So (says the rich, white, presumably married and Christian Republican man), less than "perfect" social conditions cause less than prosperous economic ones.

That is such a load of crap, I don't know where to begin. If that were true, I should be a broke, drug-addicted high school dropout on my second or third out-of-wedlock kid by now, and everyone I know from "real families" should be portraits of model humanity.

Sure, some social factors make for more difficult lives–but that's because social conservatives like dear Mr. Brooks here have structured the system so that if you don't conform to their notion of what is correct and ideal, you're at an economic and practical disadvantage.

It's a hell of a lot easier to sit and preach about living according to proper norms and ideals when you don't have to worry about being able to quite literally survive.

What do moralizing social policies that punish people for not being married or having children "out of wedlock" (what era are we living in here?) do to improve individual lives, much less the collective lot?

Believe it or not, conservatives, but many people's lives do not follow idealized scripts. It's not because they're immoral–that's just how life works when you're not privileged at every step of the way and in the position to stick (at least in public) to a code that you deem reasonable to force on everyone else.

Women who actually have the balls to be independent do not have more to fear from divorce than outsourcing. Decent parents would want their daughter to have success and happiness as she defines them for her own life, professional and personal, regardless of whether she's married. And if you're in a position to seriously define "prosperity for all" in terms other than monetary, you should be donating your time and excess funds to people less fortunate, or less "enlightened," than yourself.

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And holy crap, to anyone who might care, coreweekly, the paper I freelance, just got killed. Which rather sucks. But, they did have me, a heathenistic child of divorce, on staff, so I guess it was only a matter of time.