Just Don't Say the M-Word

American-in-London Janet Daley, like us at Road to the Middle Class, is hungrily devouring the new Tory research paper “Breakdown Britain.”

But, she says, we know all this. We know that the social breakdown and feral behavior we see all around us is due to one thing:

That is, [many young people] lack what were once considered to be the basic provisions of family life: two parents, a sense of belonging to a stable household (even if it was poor) and a belief that their lives were tied into some wider network of relationships with adults.

So why do we need a new report, when we know it already?

Now we have another report to say it all again. This time it has been commissioned directly by the Conservative Party, which is a hopeful sign. But I am not blown away by optimism. Not that I am disparaging the project. Iain Duncan Smith's social justice policy unit has done some splendid work: not only in reiterating all that evidence again about how much more likely the children of lone parents are to have poor outcomes in terms of education, mental health, drug abuse and criminal offending, but also in demonstrating how effective local voluntary organisations can be in confronting these problems.

We know all this. Why do we need to chew over it again.

And this very day Rich Lowry is saying the same thing. He is looking at presidential candidate John “Two Americas” Edwards anti-poverty proposals and he is saying: So?

Edwards' anti-poverty proposals aren't compelling because they fail to acknowledge a basic truth: It is impossible "to grow the middle class," as he puts it, without spreading middle-class values.

Tell you what, Lowry writes, there really are Two Americas.

In one America, by and large, women find a suitable mate, marry him and then have a baby. In the other America, by and large, women have the baby first, creating nearly insurmountable difficulties for themselves on the path to the middle class.

What a concept! But John Edwards “refuses to offer as the obvious solution the M-word that rhymes with carriage.”

The root cause of the social breakdown we see all around us is all tied to the liberal taboo around the M-word (rhymes with carriage).

So why do we have to say this again and again, and why is the M-word still taboo (except when we are talking about the gay M-word)? And why has nothing happened, nothing changed?

I will tell you why. It comes out in Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, the story of the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

The Great Society folks were supremely confident that their programs were going to end poverty as we know it. So they set up a whole bunch of assessment projects to measure the progress that was sure to come.

The only problem was that already by the end of the 1960s the results of the assessment progams were in. And the War-on-Poverty liberals knew that their programs weren’t working.

So what did they do? Did they say: OK chaps, sorry about that, a bit of a cock-up on the social science front. We’ll have to terminate all those programs. They simply aren’t working.

They did not. And we know why. The answer is political power. The Democratic Party derives its support from the people who benefit from government programs. They cannot afford to close them down for then they would lose political power.

That is why, ever since the 1960s, the Democrats have perfected the politics of personal destruction against anyone who dares to lay a finger on any of their precious programs.

People Have Needs, they say. You Just Don’t Care About Kids, they say.

So they do. But good people can disagree about how to get there.

Like the postmodernists say: It’s all about power.

And that means that it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Until the day that the welfare-state liberals cry “Uncle” we are going to stay right here, chewing over the same reports and findings and unescapable truths and spitting them out into the public square.

The left has a phrase for what we are doing. It is called: Speaking Truth to Power.