CHEAP TRAGEDIES: Noli Irritare Leones has a brief reply to my red/blue families post; here are three quickish points.

1. Right, all of us live in a “contracepting culture,” I wasn’t clear about that. I made it sound like I thought the basic divide was between people who don’t believe in contraception and people who do, which would be a ridiculous claim about contemporary America. I was more referring to the reasons people might be less consistent/diligent about contraception, which includes stuff like mental health and general risk-aversion but also–and this is the real point I was trying to get at, sorry!–how much you feel like your future is in your own hands. People with less of a sense of control or agency are IMO likely to have a more Roman-hands-and-Russian-roulette attitude toward contraception. I may be overly influenced by pregnancy center counseling, but this doesn’t seem unlikely, and seems very obviously class-linked rather than e.g. about whether you voted for Obama.

2. A related and perh more interesting point: The more I think about this red/blue families thing the more it seems like the r/b narrative and the “marriage gap” narrative are like those pictures which are a vase, but also two faces; or a duck but also a rabbit. The r/b narrative is the liberal one (not Left, but liberal) and the marriage-gap one is conservative. The r/b narrative promotes one set of solutions and the marriage-gap narrative promotes a very different set. The r/b narrative seems to emphasize politics and religion in its framing, while the marriage-gap narrative emphasizes poverty and race. Both often pay lip service to class (the intersection of economic status and culture, or the culture created by economic status) but really downplay it… which leads me to suspect that class is one of the biggest drivers of this divide. (Here’s Jonathan Rauch on the marriage gap as a class gap.)

Anyway I’ll probably end up writing a longer thing about these two competing narratives–with any luck, playing them off of each other will illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of both–ideally for money….

3. I am not sure how to flesh out what’s essentially an aesthetic argument, but my problem with many of the red/blue commentaries recently is not that they’re polemical but that they’re pharisaical. “I thank God that my sins are not as the sins of this Republican” and all that. Thus class gets elided, for example, in favor of charging evangelicals with hypocrisy. (I don’t think NIL is doing that! Just that it’s the attitude which spurred my earlier post.)

…Also, though, a reader sent me this essay (PDF), which is a very early use of the r/b phrase and which I remember thinking was quite good. Still obviously from a liberal perspective but I seem to recall it as a fruitful and provocative one, rather than a self-comforting one. Will re-read shortly.