platforms—much more than Democratic ones—continued to also highlight market-based values. Initially, the Republican Party had embraced such values wholly as centered on the individual, and family was incidental to this focus. In the 1960s, this began to change. Republican platforms began their long turn toward a Soul family approach, now connecting “family” to free-market “values” first in planks on poor families and welfare reform. In planks on juvenile delinquency, the Republican Party began to call for federal programs to “strengthen family life.”64 The party also openly condemned Democratic welfare programs not only on the usual grounds that they created “debilitating dependence which erodes self-respect” but now also that the programs “discourag[ed] family unity and responsibility.”65 By 1968, the Republican Party was calling for revision of existing welfare programs to “encourage and protect strong family units.”66 It was on planks regarding welfare and the poor that the party first experimented with and developed what was to become a durable Soul family approach, crystallizing their broad valuational approach with a new focus on the family, connecting social traditionalist values such as family strength and stability to neoliberal, free enterprise values. The fact that the Republican Soul family approach was first politicized in welfare policy as a central ground to limit state involvement underscores the strongly uneven and punitive character of that approach that continued to apply to exclude certain categories of families from programs and benefits even while it created other programs to enhance the rights and autonomy of other kinds of families.
For its part, the Democratic Party too began to develop its own set of values in the 1960s, in this case incorporating values to extend material benefits to more families than ever before. Values of personal dignity, inclusion, and equity permeated its platforms and were increasingly applied to assert the inclusion of (economically) disadvantaged and vulnerable families. With the growing prosperity of the 1960s, the 1964 Democratic platform stressed the “common good” principle by entitling the platform “One Nation, One People.” In that platform, Democrats asserted that the well-being of each American depends on the prosperity and (economic) well-being of all.67 The party thus continued and expanded its focus on the poor and disadvantaged, condemning “the inequity and waste of poverty” and asserting that its national purpose was not only to “continue the expansion of the American economy” but also to “exten[d] the benefits of this growth and prosperity to those who have not fully shared in them.”68
Equity, equal protection, and inclusion of marginalized families permeated Democratic platforms of the 1960s, where they asserted the ongoing necessity of federal programs in order “to assure that every American, of every race, in every region, truly shares in the benefits of economic progress.”69 The party thus opposed state eligibility restrictions, which denied assistance to children of unemployed parents or those that prohibited all assistance when the father was in the home; sought repeal of the “arbitrary limit” on the number of children who could receive assistance; and opposed the provision requiring mothers of young children to work in order for children to be eligible for aid.70 The party also pledged a revamping of federal taxes “to make them more equitable as between rich and poor and as among people with the same income and family responsibilities.”71
Thus, in the 1960s, both Republicans and Democrats began to increasingly invoke values in their pledges to American families. Democrats stressed secular-humanist values such as “inclusion” or “equal protection”/“equal access” and “personal dignity or fulfillment” in their promises for enhanced Hearth family policies. They did not formulate a valuational Soul family ideal distinct from material security but instead asserted the valuational structure underlying their economic approach. Republicans, on the other hand, were beginning to formulate a wholly noneconomic Soul family ideal: the “traditional family” as a fundamentally moral and valuational unit, assembling a valuational policy agenda that began to combine ideational elements of both a neoliberal and a social traditional cast. This approach would soon come to permeate and challenge the very essence of the longdominant economic family approach, championed by New Deal Liberal-Labor Democrats.
Late Century to the Present, 1968–2012: Invigorated Soul Family Ideal and Enhanced Polarization
The year 1968 marked a decisive turn in partisan politics, with far-reaching effects on family political development. In the midst of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, the tight grasp of the postwar Democratic Coalition over national politics began to loosen, making way for a shift in policy—away from economic security toward values and cultural battles.
Following riots at their National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Democrats adopted a series of changes to their nomination and convention rules, accommodating cultural progressives into their ranks and ensuring significant change to the party’s ideology. In 1972, the Democratic platform avowed an agenda that was more attentive to values and postmaterial concerns than merely economic redistribution. The party described three things that “people want” as an interplay between secular-humanist values and material needs: “They want a personal life that makes us all feel that life is worth living,” “a social environment whose institutions promote the good of all,” and “an opportunity to achieve their aspirations and their dreams for themselves and their children.”72 This was a far cry from the agenda contained in the Economic Bill of Rights to which Democrats had long pledged, in which they had asserted hard economic rights, concerned only with a family’s material life, such as “the right to earn a minimum wage,” “the right of every famer … to earn a decent living,” and the “right to a decent home.”73
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Democratic platforms, however, continued to emphasize the postwar Hearth focus on family economics, attributing family change and “disintegrating families” not to changing cultural values or family norms but to disadvantageous economic conditions, such as poverty and unemployment. In their family pledges, they promised to hold families together by “provid[ing] the help a family needs to survive a crisis together.”74 Still concerned that “prosperity will not be evenly distributed among regions and communities,” they pledged “special efforts to help families in economic transition who are faced with loss of homes, health benefits, and pensions.”75 In their family pledges, Democratic platforms expanded and made explicit their postwar commitment to values of equality, fairness, and inclusion underpinning their economic Hearth policy approach rather than develop anew their own valuational Soul family one.
Starting in 1976, the Republican Party on its part thoroughly revised its platform ideology and welded Judeo-Christian constructions of family values more centrally onto its neoliberal approach of free markets and private initiative.76 In a large plank entitled “American Family,” the Republican Party in that year asserted that “families must continue to be the foundation of our nation” and emphasized its role in preserving a traditional (social and economic) valuational order: “Families—not government programs—are the best way to make sure … our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved.”77 As part of the pledge to create a “hospitable environment for family life,” the Republican platform committed to several policy positions regarding taxation, economic policies, education, employment, reproductive rights, and welfare. The preservation of the nuclear (heterosexual) family emerged as a central organizing feature for many Republican social and economic policies.78
In 1980, the Republican platform used the rejuvenated Soul family ideal to launch its strongest repudiation yet of the postwar Democratic agenda. Family and its (independent social and economic) values were declared as “fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic.”79 The platform asserted that “all domestic policies, from child care and schooling to social security and the tax code, must be formulated with the family in mind.”80 In the immediate postwar period, free market–based Republican family values such as self-reliance, found in pledges on the family farm, were directed at opposing the liberal administrative state. However, starting in 1976, Republican platforms thereafter made
