Can Lone Wolf Yelps Still Save Civilization?

Can we connect the dots between a drastic increase in fatherless families & such societal trends as daylight carjacking, shoplifting gone amok, gender ID du jours & homelessness? A lib economist suggests the most obvious causation.

Jason Riley’s WSJ article notes how “Melissa Kearney worried about being pigeonholed as she wrote ‘The Two-Parent Privilege’ book” because it tries to explain to her fellow (yet blind) progressives “how [the institution of marriage’s] decline has led to a host of economic woes – problems that have fractured American society & rendered vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.” To put it more bluntly: “The absence of a father from a child’s home appears to have direct effects on children’s outcomes & not only because of the loss of parental income.” Someone pinch me, but I recall reading these exact same words in my social studies classes when attending UIC back in the late 60s, as columnist Riley goes on to also point out, while citing many published research works of that era.

Perhaps the obvious is getting too obvious for even some academic elites who may have stumbled upon those earlier studies while trying to understand today’s breakdown of societal common sense. As Riley notes, “a forthcoming volume from University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox is called ‘Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families & Save Civilization.’” Indeed, that title alone “encapsulates Ms. Kearney’s dilemma.” Observes Riley: “Whether the topic is family structure, climate change or the New York Tiimes’s ‘1619 Project,’ the intellectual cowardice on display in recent years has been stunning … It’s clear that our intellectual class, like every other special-interest group, has its own agenda & its own blind spots. For too many academic scholars, integrity has become a secondary concern.” Kudos, then, to Ms. Kearney & Mr. Wilcox for their lone wolf yelps.

Davd Soul