Review of Troubled

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is a book by Rob Henderson that provides an inside look at lower-class white America. I give it four stars out of five. It was a page-turner, interesting and well-written. Initially, this was a review of the book, but as I was writing it expanded into a review of Henderson’s wider writings and worldview. While I found a lot to like in Henderson, he sometimes reminded me of a Marxist who rails against the evils of capitalism while providing little detail on how his alternative is supposed to work in practice. At times, Henderson sounded like all he was doing was re-inventing the wheel of dead-on-arrival Moral Majority tradconnery.

Henderson’s Early Life

Rob Henderson rarely tells us when things happen. He doesn’t even tell us what year he was born. The user is left to calculate via events in the book that it would have been sometime around 1989. This is thus a millennial story, the generation of cell phones and avocado toast, Uber and social media, Iraq and the great recession. This book will bring back memories of those horrible times when you walked around Blockbuster video reading the backs of DVDs, knowing that you risked having to pay money to watch a sucky movie. When “flat-screen TV” was a luxury item. When there was no Uber or Lyft.

Rob is born to a Korean immigrant and her Hispanic paramour. He barely remembers his mother, a neglectful drug addict he is seized from early in life. He never knew his father. He writes that he has no desire to have contact with either biological parent.

He is shuttled around through different foster homes, sometimes abusive, always borderline neglectful. Finally, he is adopted by a family in Red Bluff, California, a town in the north of the Central Valley with a population of 12,363 in 1990. One sign you live in low-class white America is that your town’s name contains a natural feature. (bluff, river, lake, etc.) Though Rob is not white, he is raised in a mostly white environment, with race rarely mentioned in the book. Two quotes illustrate how profoundly alien Red Bluff is compared to the world of upper-class white America:

“I remembered something Shelly had told me: in Red Bluff, grown men on bicycles usually had had their licenses taken away for committing crimes, because otherwise they’d be driving cars”

“I’d heard of this before; one of the eighth graders at school had had a miscarriage and had to take time off from school.”

Rob’s adoptive parents are your stereotypical proles. Dad works as a prison guard and then as a truck driver. Mom works as a cashier and then as a certified nurse’s assistant. Rob has a younger sister named Hannah, who isn’t adopted. One gets the impression that family are basically good, responsible people trying not to fall into the dysfunctional culture that surrounds them:

Dad told me how one time he had gotten into an argument over the phone with another guy. Dad invited the guy to come over to settle their disagreement. When Mom got home from work, she saw Dad and the other man fistfighting in the middle of the street. She was furious with him and threatened to leave. That’s when he stopped drinking alcohol and started drinking O’Doul’s instead.

The family is Seventh-day Adventist and goes to church most Saturdays. I theorize that one reason religion is relatively common in such places is because it allows the more functional middle and working-class people to form social spaces that repel the chaotic, unstable underclass. Rob doesn’t tell us anything about the doctrine preached in the church or what type of people attended it, and religion overall makes little impression on his life.

Family Chaos

One of the themes of Troubled is that family instability, not lack of money, was the main traumatizing factor in Rob’s life. Initially, he finds a stable, loving family in Red Bluff, but it doesn’t last. We aren’t given dates in Troubled, but we are told that from Rob’s adoption until his parents’ divorce was “over a year.” He isn’t initially told why, just that it was Mom who had initiated the breakup. Later, Mom tells him she’s gay and is entering a relationship with another woman named Shelly. They have to keep it secret from Mom’s parents, who “believed that being gay was against the Bible.” I find it rather funny that it’s the lesbianism they’d have a problem with (whether the Bible prohibits lesbianism is questionable) rather than her abandoning her husband, which very clearly is against the Bible.

While Mom agonizes about whether to tell them, Dad writes them a tell-all letter. The Grandparents tell their daughter they “disagreed with her lifestyle but would always love her” and that they considered Shelly to now be part of the family! This is a very 2000s story. The power and grace of the Bible, his Holy Spirit, “Judeo-Christian American values” crumbled quite easily against the dissolving power of the almighty television. Not with a bang but with a whimper. The lesbianism is somewhat of a social contagion:

Then Sean explained that after Mom and Shelly had revealed that they were gay to his Mom, Alice, Mom and Shelly then introduced Alice to a bunch of their friends. Alice hit it off with one of the women and decided to leave Sean’s stepdad, Jim, for her. Then Jim decided to move out, and Alice’s new partner began staying the night a lot. Later, Alice asked Jim if he could still pay the bills for the house and offered to have threesomes with him if he did. I started laughing.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“Not bullshitting you, man.” Sean laughed too. “This is what’s happening. She told him he could even stay in the house, just in a different bedroom, but they could have threesomes once a week if he kept paying rent and shit,” Sean said.

Of course, this is just one kid telling a story to another kid, so take it with a grain of salt.

As for Dad, he decides he just doesn’t feel like being Dad anymore. He’ll continue seeing Hannah, but not Rob. From his biological father, he got the first name Robert. From his biological mother, his middle name Kim. From his adoptive father, his last name Henderson. All three abandoned him.

Shelly, who also divorced her husband after “discovering” she was gay, becomes the latest pseudo-parent to enter Rob’s life. Shelly has three daughters who live with their Dad. The book says nothing about whether Shelly is paying child support for them, though it doesn’t seem likely. Four years later, Rob still has not met Shelly’s daughters. He overhears Shelly and his mother having a conversation:

After one night of “bored games” and TV, I eavesdropped on Mom and Shelly as they were getting ready for bed.

“I made a lot of mistakes,” Shelly said. “Rob and Hannah don’t know how good they have it.”

{snip}

“That was just weird, Shelly,” Mom said.

Listening closer, I gathered that they had visited Shelly’s old house, where her ex-husband and two daughters still lived.{snip}

“We just walked in,” Mom said in an aggravated tone, “picked up your mail, never said hello to anyone, and left. Your daughters were there, and they didn’t say anything to you.”

“That’s just how we are right now,” Shelly said. She explained that things hadn’t been the same since she left them a few years ago. She and her ex were on good terms, but her relationship with her daughters was tense.{snip}

“You have grandkids,” Mom said, the volume of her voice slightly rising. “And none of us has ever met them.”

Shelly, like most of the adults in the memoir, does not appear in a very good light. But how reliable is this? This is a conversation being overheard by a thirteen-year-old and remembered decades later. The book would be more credible if it were written more like an autobiography and less like a memoir. He could have gotten Shelly’s divorce records, which are public in California. The adults in his life do not seem particularly reliable or trustworthy; he might have found out they lied to him about this and much more else.

Later, Shelly is shot in an accident at a gun range and gets a big insurance payout. Neither Shelly nor Mom appears to have any experience in business or construction, but they decide to use the money to buy three houses, one to live in and two to “flip.” Predictably, the scheme fails. Shelly and Mom announce their intention to move to San Jose, which has a better job market. Rob, with one year left of high school, decides to stay in Red Bluff and stay with his friend’s Dad. When he asks his sister Hannah if she will leave with her mother, she “was irritated that I even asked and said that of course she was staying with her dad here in Red Bluff.”

Shortly thereafter, Hannah’s decision is overturned:

She explained that a few days before, Mom and Shelly had suddenly arrived at her dad’s house. They told Hannah to pack up her stuff, announcing that she was moving with them to San Jose. My sister said she had no forewarning of this, and that Mom, Shelly, and her dad had arranged it without asking her. Mom helped her pack a couple of suitcases, and off they went. Mom told Hannah they had already enrolled her in a school in San Jose.

Hannah was in disbelief. She generally preferred living with Mom, but she had not agreed to move to San Jose. She wanted to stay in Red Bluff and was clearly livid that she had not been given a choice. I knew Mom wanted her to live with them, so I wasn’t entirely surprised. But Hannah then went on to say something that did surprise me.

“Rob, I’ve barely seen Mom this whole week,” she said. “She’s always over at her friend’s house, and Shelly is always at a casino. I go to school, I come home, and I hardly ever see either of them.”

{snip}

“Have you tried calling or texting Mom?” I asked.

“I text her all the time. She gets home pretty late, and we talk for a little bit, and then she goes to bed,” Hannah replied. “I hate it here. I miss our old house—I miss Red Bluff.”

{snip} “I was actually thinking about running away. Just like getting on a bus or something back to Red Bluff.”

Later, we learn that Mom’s “friend” is actually her girlfriend, and she is breaking up with Shelly. Passages like this are why people, especially those from intact families, should read Troubled. When people talk about how children are harmed by divorce, they aren’t talking about abstract, metaphysical harm that comes from a promise before God being violated. It’s more often stupid crap like that. While kids in intact families are sometimes moved against their desires, they’re never in situations where one parent is three hours away and the other parent rarely sees them because they’re putting all their time and energy into a new romantic partner.

Luckily for Hannah, the implosion of Mom’s relationship allows her to return to Red Bluff.

Yale or Jail

Whether by genetics, environment, or some combination, Rob becomes a holy terror. He gets into fights with other children, sometimes in self-defense and other times not. As he grows up, he gets worse and worse. By the time he’s a teenager, he’s doing stuff like this:

During the week Tyler was suspended, he invited me to break into an office building with him. I brought Edgar and his brother Enrique, and we all met up in the middle of the night. Tyler grabbed a brick and broke one of the windows. We climbed into the building and began to destroy it. I saw a fire extinguisher in a glass case fixed to the wall. I broke the glass, grabbed the nozzle, and sprayed everywhere. Edgar took it from me and sprayed some more. We breathed in the chemicals, which tasted like salt. Enrique threw chairs and vases across the room. Tyler took a few swigs of vodka and then shattered the bottle on the floor. I thought about the fire extinguisher cabinet, “In case of emergency, break glass.”

Remarkably, he never gets caught and never gets in serious trouble for doing stuff like this.

Rob and his friends really like being high, to the extent that they try to get high by choking themselves. They seem to be something I’ll call non-addicted addicts. An addict is someone who consumes his substance daily. It becomes the complete focus of his life. A non-addicted addict might only get high once or twice a week, but getting high is still a huge part of his life:

For my friends and me, it seemed like half our waking hours were spent trying to find booze or weed or God knows what else. For the girls we knew, their mission to get drunk or high was seldom as hard to accomplish. There was no shortage of predatory twenty-three-year-old guys on motorcycles who were more than happy to supply drugs and alcohol to a fifteen-year-old girl.

For groups of girls aimlessly walking around, “fun” would find them in the form of a guy who had graduated high school five years earlier and rode a beat-up dirt bike. At the time, that made sense to me. If some twenty-three-year-old woman had pulled up to my friends and me and offered us some booze to come chill with her, we would have leapt at the opportunity. But that doesn’t happen for boys.

This kind of stuff is one reason so many low-class white people believe in “satanic pedophile rings” and QAnon. There’s a parallel to BLM. In 1993, Jesse Jackson said, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” You don’t want to think about the many members of your ingroup behaving badly. You don’t want to think about your fear of these people. You want to focus on the comparably much smaller numbers of bad outgroup members like Derek Chauvin or Jeffrey Epstein. (To be clear, the preceding is my idea, not Henderson’s.)

Rob, it’s clear, is smarter than the other knuckleheads he hangs out with. He spends his time reading in the library, something remarked on by one of his teachers. But he won’t do assignments and graduates high school with a 2.2 GPA. Approaching the end of high school, he and his friends start thinking about what will come next:

Cristian and John said they were going to turn it all around in community college—they both planned to get good grades and then transfer to a four-year college. When they told me this plan, I thought about how we were C-minus students at best, and now that we were nearly adults, we would soon have more freedom. The marginal adult oversight we currently had would soon be nonexistent. Which meant we would go from a little bit of friction to none at all when we felt the urge to ditch class and do something reckless.

This is a common pattern for knuckleheads. The kid who evaded education when it was legally required suddenly announces an intention to voluntarily acquire optional education when the alternative is working a job. John’s plan does not work out:

Shortly after my sister had told me about her recent breakup, John called me. He still lived in Red Bluff and had recently moved into an apartment with Cristian.

“What’s up, man?” I asked.

We caught up for a few minutes, and he told me he’d been enrolled in classes at a nearby community college.

“What’s the plan, when do you transfer?”

“I failed my last class, so I have to retake it. I missed too many lectures and couldn’t catch up on the reading, but that’s okay, I’ll make it up next semester.”

This was a common line. Community college creates a holding pattern, where people can take and retake classes for years with some pie-in-the-sky dream of transferring to a four-year college. Seventy percent of community college students in California never complete their programs.

It’s worth asking if all the subsidies society provides to community college, which make it free for the average student, are worth it. But perhaps that’s missing the point. Education isn’t about education. It’s a “win-win” substitute for redistributing money from rich to poor. If it increases the economic productivity of the students, that’s great. They’ve been helped, and now the workforce is more productive, which helps employers as well. But if it doesn’t, well, at least we did something.

Rob doesn’t consider getting a high-paying, blue-collar job. After all, all those jobs were sent to China during the Clinton years. Or were they? Did Red Bluff ever even have factories? A continuation of protectionism may have meant that the people of Red Bluff, along with many other poor towns across the country, would have had to pay more for manufactured goods with no benefit.

With few options, Rob joins the Air Force. He emphasizes that his case was not typical. Most of his fellow recruits were from intact, middle-class families, many with histories of service. Statistics back him up on this. The U.S. military is not a dumping ground for those with no other options, nor a de-facto welfare program for those who would otherwise be destitute.

Rob does well in the Air Force, becoming an electronic warfare technician. He is promoted six months ahead of schedule and later deployed to Germany. In Germany, he becomes a drunk. He conceptualizes it as a reaction to the traumas he’s lived through.

At one point, he returns to Red Bluff to visit his sister, who’s seventeen and still living in the same house as her Dad. She calls her brother up frantically. Her Dad had been out of town. For how long, it’s not said. She threw a party and someone called the cops. The cops tell Rob that because she was drinking and her parents aren’t around, they would put her into a foster home if he doesn’t agree to stay with her. (Sending her to live with her mother is not an option anyone thinks about.) Rob agrees to stay. And he, the most responsible adult in the situation, had driven drunk to get there.

Later, one of Rob’s friends from the army gets drunk and drives his car into a tree, then walks home and hangs himself in his garage. Reacting to this, Rob gets sickeningly drunk and passes out in the bathtub. The next mourning, his friends take him to the hospital. He agrees to go to a treatment center for military personnel and their families. He completes it and is “clean.”

After recovering from rehab, Rob thinks about what he will do when, a year later, his enlistment ends. He decides to attend college. While researching, he comes across the Yale Veterans Association website. He emails the website and is told to apply for something called the Warrior-Scholar Project, a two-week program designed to help prepare veterans for college. He arrives at Yale for his first-ever visit to the East Coast. He completes the program, takes the SAT, and gets admitted to Yale as an undergraduate!

If Troubled were a work of fiction, the literary agent might have told Henderson that the character’s getting into Yale is an unrealistic deus ex machina, that there should be more to connect the character’s early life with what later occurs at Yale.

Luxury Beliefs

Rob entered Yale in 2015, just when the Great Awokening took off. Those who came of age during the Trump era may wonder why there’s nothing in Troubled about Donald Trump. Isn’t he the reason elites are so Left-wing? In short, no. A survey of 2012 Harvard students found that 69.5% said they “definitely” or “probably” would vote for Barack Obama. Just 13.4% said the same about Mitt Romney. This is a ratio of 5.2:1. In contrast, among Americans aged 18-24, Obama beat Romney by 60-36, a ratio of 1.7:1. Romney ran on a full-throated defense of business, entrepreneurship, and the chief executive. Not surprisingly, he alienated a lot of industrial workers in the Midwest. But his failure to appeal to Harvard students shows why the whole ideology is so absurd.

Before this point in the book, Rob never talked about his political ideology or voting behavior. This is believable; political apathy is common among the lower class. He notes the great gulf in family structure between himself and the typical Yale student:

The professor asked the class to anonymously respond to a question about family background. Out of twenty students, only one other student besides me was not raised by both birth parents. Put differently, 90 percent of my classmates were raised by an intact family. I felt a sense of vertigo upon learning this, because it was so at odds with how I’d grown up. Later, I read a study from another Ivy League school—Cornell—which reported that only 10 percent of their students were raised by divorced parents.2 This is a sharp juxtaposition with a national divorce rate of about 40 percent,3 which itself is quite low compared to the families I’d known in Red Bluff. When I explained to a classmate how disoriented I felt when I discovered these differences, she replied that this was how she felt when she learned that seven out of ten adults in the US don’t have a bachelor’s degree, because that was so out of line with her own experiences.

Soon, he encounters wokeness at Yale:

Two weeks later, I was sitting on a bench in front of Sterling Memorial Library, reading an email on my laptop by Erika Christakis, the instructor who taught the Concept of the Problem Child course.

“I’m confused, honestly,” I said to the student next to me. “I have no idea why people are upset about this.”

He sighed. “I knew that email would be controversial as soon as I read it,” he said.

The university administration had recently circulated a campus-wide email to students asking them to be sensitive about what Halloween costumes they wear. The idea was that costumes that implied that other cultures or interests were unserious or played into stereotypes might cause discomfort or harm to other students. In response, Erika Christakis wrote an email to the students within her residential college. In her email, she questioned whether the administration should interfere with students’ lives—she defended freedom of expression and urged students to handle disagreements about costumes on their own. The social climate immediately changed. Hundreds of students marched throughout campus. They called for apologies from the university and insisted Christakis and her husband, who was also a professor and who defended her, be fired, among other demands.

{snip}

Even the students who didn’t agree that Erika’s email was wrong knew why others thought it was wrong, but I was mystified. I would ask outraged classmates to explain what had been done wrong, hoping to understand.

Not surprisingly, he soon develops a contempt for the woke movement and its born-with-a-silver-spoon devotees. He develops the concept of “luxury beliefs” to describe these ideas:

The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate the believer’s social class and education. When an affluent person expresses support for defunding the police, drug legalization, open borders, looting, or permissive sexual norms, or uses terms like white privilege, they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class.”

He writes:

Occasionally, I raised these critiques to fellow students or graduates of elite colleges. Sometimes they would reply by asking, “Well, aren’t you part of this group now?” implying that my appraisals of the luxury belief class were hollow because I moved within the same institutions. But they wouldn’t have listened to me back when I was a lowly enlisted service member or back when I was washing dishes for minimum wage. If you ridicule the upper class as an outsider, they’ll either ignore you or tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. But if you ridicule them as an insider, they call you a hypocrite. Plainly, the requirements for the upper class to take you seriously (e.g., credentials, wealth, power) are also the grounds to brand you a hypocrite for making any criticism of the upper class.

While I found myself in agreement with much of his criticism of the luxury belief class, I can’t endorse everything, particularly his blithe dismissal of drug legalization. He writes:

Reflecting on my experiences with alcohol, if all drugs had been legal and easily accessible when I was fifteen, you wouldn’t be reading this book. My birth mom was able to get drugs, and it had a detrimental effect on both of our lives. That’s something people don’t think about: drugs don’t just affect the user, they affect helpless children, too. All my foster siblings’ parents were addicts, or had a mental health condition, often triggered by drug use. But the luxury belief class doesn’t think about that because such consequences seldom interrupt their lives. And even if they did, they are in a far better position to withstand such difficulties. A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will, in all likelihood, be fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents will often take that first hit of meth to self-destruction. This is perhaps why a 2019 survey found that less than half of Americans without a college degree want to legalize drugs, but more than 60 percent of Americans with a bachelor’s degree or higher are in favor of drug legalization.

I can understand this perspective. There’s a scene in South Park where Mr. Mackey says, “drugs are bad, M’kay.” This gets repeated by many people across the internet who think they can disprove an idea by putting it in Lame Boomer Voice. For a lot of people, drugs really are bad, very very bad. But Henderson doesn’t consider the many people deprived of pain medication to keep addicts from killing themselves.

Strikingly, there is nothing in Troubled about economic issues. Nothing about the minimum wage, social security, Medicaid, tax rates. He has no praise or criticism of free-market capitalism. Might “we have no choice, America must raise the social security retirement age” be a “luxury belief?” Henderson doesn’t say. You know how I said this is a millennial story? Millennials like Henderson grew up in a time when Left and Right were largely defined by social issues.

People today sometimes look back and wonder at the bizarre fact that southern segregationists and northern blacks used to vote for the same party. But to people living back then, it made sense: both groups favored relatively Left-wing economic policy and economics was the heart of the political divide. Today, social issues are the heart of the divide. An up-and-coming conservative writer with Left-wing economic views has to consider that they will win him few friends on the Left while alienating him from more economics-focused boomer-con publications like the National Review. (I should note here that I’ve never seen Henderson self-identify as conservative, though he’s been identified as such by others.)

If AGI doesn’t arrive, it’s possible that someday events might force economic issues back to the forefront. A crisis might mean that “win-win” will not work, that somebody will have to have their taxes raised or the real value of their benefits cut. It might become much more uncomfortable for those who harshly criticize the rich but do not advocate raising their taxes.

There’s another troubling thing about Troubled. In telling his story of high school and the military, he makes no mention of having, attempting to acquire, or desiring a sexual or romantic relationship. We don’t hear about it until he’s twenty-two and starts dating a German girl while he’s deployed to Germany. That’s kind of a big deal for nearly all young boys who grew up in the 2000s and undermines the book’s credibility as a “fly-on-the-wall” memoir.

Early in the book, Henderson notes that “certain names and dates have been changed.” I understand changing names. But when dates are changed, the memoir becomes almost unfalsifiable. You might look at 2012 and find no evidence an event occurred, but then, hey, maybe it didn’t happen in 2012.

The Tradcon Henderson

I liked Troubled. I agree that the family chaos of the lower class is a bad thing and cannot be attributed to material deprivation. But the ability to diagnose a problem does not imply the ability to solve it. What preceded this point was a review of Rob, the character of Troubled. What follows is a review of the ideas of Henderson, from Substack and Twitter.

Henderson wrote:

The destructive consequences of the 1960s cultural revolution harmed people in order of their marginalization, predilections, and vulnerability.

Poor black families got hit first. Then poor Latinos and poor whites. By the time I was growing up in the 1990s, ordinary working and lower middle class areas in California (mostly white and Hispanic) were being plagued by the erosion of what were formerly common sense conventional social norms and cultural guardrails. Marriage, neighborliness, thriftiness, hard work, punctuality, striving, respectfulness, integrity, decency, and so on.

Working class and poor Asian Americans have been an exception in part because the majority are immigrants (60%) and haven’t yet fully assimilated. They are not immune to the decay; they too will eventually come under the spell of this part of our remade culture.

Ok, so is Henderson arguing for a return to the social values of the 1960s? Not exactly. This is a common pattern among traditionalist conservatives.(tradcons) They speak in favor of the old ways in a general, view-from-10,000 ft. sense. But when you drill down into the specifics, they reject the old ways when they demand harshness toward women. Henderson typifies this pattern, writing:

And most single parent families are not the result of divorce, but rather deadbeat dads. People say we shouldn’t shame single moms, that they are doing the best they can. I generally agree. I was, for a time, raised by a single mother. I am perfectly at ease, though, with saying we can shame absentee fathers.

So, in this one respect, (whether to shame single moms) Henderson regards the mores of 2020 as superior to those of 1960. He’s not advocating going back to the mores of 1960, a society that, for all its flaws, actually existed. He wants a combination of 1960 and 2020, the best of both worlds. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this: out-of-the-box thinking is how progress is made. But when you’re proposing a new set of social norms that have not been tested before, the onus is on you to explain in detail how it will work. Henderson fails in this, reminding me of a Marxist with much criticism of capitalism and little explanation of how his “classless society” will actually work.

Henderson is quite negative toward divorce. He writes contemptuously of articles in legacy media outlets that glorify divorce, giving this, this, and this as examples. (See here and here) He writes, quite accurately:

For every 1 article you see in prestige media explaining the benefits of a stable committed relationship, you’ll see 17 like this urging you to get divorced or avoid romantic entanglements. Any source of pleasure that doesn’t involve producing or consuming must be expunged.

But apart from telling elites to stop doing that, what else is to be done? What can normal people do? How should they treat divorced people?

The Catholics have an attitude toward divorce that is brutally, magnificently simple. The strategy of “be a horrible spouse to goad them into filing for divorce, then claim to have been abandoned” will not work. Your partner is all you will ever have (unless they die), so you might as well make the best of it. It’s “brutal” because it creates real suffering among those who truly were abused or abandoned. But it also has real deterrent power.

Henderson doesn’t endorse this, writing that he endorses divorce in cases of “abuse, mistreatment, truly irreconcilable differences, and so on.” In a society which stigmatizes unjustified divorce, how do you know whether or not a divorce was justified or not? Won’t everyone just claim that theirs was the good kind? Stigmatizing divorce would require people to butt in on other people’s business. This might be done through the government’s existing divorce-court system, through some church’s system of “church discipline,” or, even more exotically, through a secular non-governmental organization. I haven’t read all of Henderson’s writings, but I haven’t seen him address this question. He seems to be proposing nothing more than “ask people nicely.” Moral majority types have been doing that for decades, and it hasn’t worked.

The one group Henderson and other tradcons are willing to stigmatize are deadbeat dads. Like the drunk looking for his keys in one spot because “the light is better here,” the tradcon convinces himself that this one factor is responsible for the change in America’s family structure because it’s the only one he’s willing to take on. Henderson writes that:

Norms were loosened around being an absentee father. So more men took the option.

But nobody wants to admit it because it upsets people.

I do not admit it because I do not believe it happened. Where are the “in defense of absentee fathers” articles? Where are the absentee fathers saying, “we’re here, we’re deadbeats, get used to it!” Where are the political organizations pushing for their interests? Where are the think pieces saying that just as we’re supposed to say “sex worker” instead of “prostitute,” we should use some euphemism instead of “deadbeat?” It seems to me that “deadbeat dads” are the one group everyone is permitted to hate.

We can look at “revealed preference” on a societal rather than individual level. Don’t look at how much society says it loves wounded veterans. Look at how much it actually does for them. Using the revealed preference angle, it seems society is much less tolerant of “deadbeat dads” today than in 1960, with much more law enforcement resources dedicated to punishing them.

Henderson quoted two passages from the book Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas:

“Money is seldom the primary reason mothers give to explain why they and their children’s fathers are no longer together. Although a lazy or spendthrift boyfriend is certainly an aggravation…the mother usually points to far more serious offenses as the prime forces that pull young families apart. It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and subsequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity…”

“Conflicts over money do not usually erupt simply because the man cannot find a job or because he doesn’t earn as much as someone with better skills or more education. Money usually becomes an issue because he seems unwilling to keep at a job for any length of time, usually because of issues related to respect. Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.”

I read the same book, years ago. I don’t doubt the accuracy of those two passages. But I don’t think they’re the whole story either. I remember thinking:

1. Where are all the women these Bad Males are cheating with? It seems remarkably easy for these men to find paramours. Do these women not know they are in relationships and, if so, how are they being fooled? It’s not like such rarely employed knuckleheads can afford to maintain secret love nests.

2. Where are the Good Males from these communities, the ones who can hold a job, who do their homework, are on their way to college? In even the worst neighborhoods, they do exist. If this narrative is true, such men should be swamped with attention from the opposite sex. Are they?

In another article, Henderson wrote:

There used to be romantic incentives to work, but a man with a job is less appealing than he would have been in previous decades.

Doesn’t this claim explode the whole tradcon worldview? If a bunch of men are refusing to work because of drug addiction, issues related to respect, or whatever, shouldn’t the remaining job-possessing men be more in demand? Henderson quotes a paper from the psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs:

“Although this may be considered an unflattering characterization…we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more. (One of us characterized this in a previous work as, ‘If women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks.’) If in order to obtain sex men must become pillars of the community, or lie, or amass riches by fair means or foul, or be romantic or funny, then many men will do precisely that.”

There is this narrative that men have deteriorated because women have become less choosy about who they sleep with. But has this actually happened? If there were a notable number of women who have absolutely no standards, who would sleep with any man who walked up to them, “incel” wouldn’t be the go-to internet insult. Seems to me that women are still plenty choosy; they just choose based on different things. Men’s behavior has adjusted accordingly.

Henderson wrote in Troubled:

For example, a former classmate at Yale told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. I asked her what her background is and if she planned to marry. She said she came from an affluent family, was raised by both of her parents, and that, yes, she personally intended to have a monogamous marriage—but quickly added that marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone. She was raised in a stable two-parent family, just like the vast majority of our classmates. And she planned on getting married herself. But she insisted that traditional families are old-fashioned and that society should “evolve” beyond them.

I see a similar hypocrisy in tradcons. They’ll consider lower-class women to be victims of Bad Young Males, but would never consider marrying one themselves and would strongly discourage their sons from doing so.

Ultimately, I don’t think the culture of 1960 is recoverable. It would require doing things even social conservatives are not willing to do. The only realistic cultural narratives are feminism and leave-us-alone libertarianism. This isn’t to say that nothing can be done.

Are Single-Parent Families Just Incentives?

The 60s cultural revolution was not the only thing happening in the 1960s. It also saw a mass increase in government financial support for single-parent families. Those two things happening at the same time is not coincidental. Both were outgrowths of the same political culture.

But weren’t those bad things repealed in the 1990s? Some, but not all, and new ones, like the EITC, arose. Let’s take California, where Troubled is set.

In California, a single mother with two children who makes 25,000$ a year is well under the eligibility limit for California’s Medicaid program. ($34,307 for a three-person family.[1]) But suppose she married her baby daddy who makes the same income as her. Now, her family makes $50,000, above the limit for a four-person family. ($41,400) Similarly, as a single mom, she’s under California’s eligibility limit for food stamps.[2] ($32,318) Marrying her baby daddy, she’s above it. ($39,000) The same is true for eligibility for Section 8 housing, which requires a household to be considered “low-income,” which is defined according to household size and the area one lives in.[3] In Tehama County, home to Red Bluff, we find again that she would be below it if single($43,150) and above it if married($47,900).[4]

It’s quite true that the seventeen-year-old poor black girl in Oakland is probably not aware that the 2021 expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit meant that two married, childless adults who made a combined income of 2,000 faced a marriage penalty of $1,875 instead of $767. But just as you don’t need to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing, you don’t need to be an economist to look around you and see that the standard of living of single parents isn’t much lower than that of nearby two-parent families.

Given these incentives, is any recourse to culture really necessary as an explanation?

One of the reasons I call myself “Alt-MSNBC” is because I recognize that the Left is simply more competent at achieving its goals. One can recognize and respect that even if he disagrees with their goals. This is an example. Both Left and Right do a lot of complaining about how bad American society is. But the Left-winger will never end his complaint about “systemic racism” or whatever with despondency. He ends by calling for government action to reward behavior he likes and punish behavior he doesn’t like. For the conservative, it’s often pure despondency, he doesn’t even call for eliminating “bad” government action. Why? I think it’s an extreme form of libertarian ideology. While I find much to agree with in libertarianism, I disagree that the government is incapable of accomplishing anything. Just look at the Panama Canal.

When you are told time and time again that the government is incapable of achieving any good things, you may soon reach the logical conclusion that it can’t achieve bad things either. “Social engineering” is not only wrong on a moral level, but it will inevitably fail because it’s the government, duh. So when you’re asked, “why are there so many single-parent families now?” you don’t even think about government. You think about the work ethic, religion, culture, etc. Unfortunately, Troubled does not break away from this mold.

Citations

1. https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/services/medi-cal/Pages/DoYouQualifyForMedi-Cal.aspx Archived: https://archive.ph/ualnd
2. https://www.benefits.gov/benefit/1228
3. https://eligibility.com/section-8/california-ca-section-8-benefits, archived https://web.archive.org/web/20230321174213/https://eligibility.com/section-8/california-ca-section-8-benefits
4. https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/income-limits/state-and-federal-income-limits/docs/inc2k17.pdf