(CORE) The Moral Basis of Red and Blue States?
One’s moral priorities are not a choice, but a justification that has been reduced to an intuition. They must be – reason would be too expensive and too unpredictable for the formation of norms. And those intuitions, which we are in the process of confirming, are both genetically and familially determined. And the structure of the family is determined by the structure of economic production on one hand, and the spectrum of cousin marriage from taboo to expectation, on the other.
->Genetics, Family structure, Production Outbreeding, Norms, Mythology, and Pedagogy.
In fact, the only reason we see migration in moral biases is so that individuals can demonstrate wealth, opportunity, and freedom from mercantile and manorial ethics as a form of conspicuous consumption and therefore as a status and mating signal.
The origins of our universalism are a side effect of the success of the church in prohibiting cousin marriage and granting property rights to women as a means of breaking up the large landholding families so that the church could more easily and cheaply buy land.
America was homogenous in indoctrinating everyone into the Absolute Nuclear Family because immigration displaced extended family networks and the economy in the states prohibited prior loyalties because of available growth. Black americans had an even higher rate of marriage than whites.
But the postmodern and feminist programs have undermined the absolute nuclear family using both academia, public intellectuals, policy, and law; because of the introduction of female voters into the work place, and voting pools gave each group new constituent – customers.
And it has consistently been the voting pattern of women to expand the welfare state, remove the need for marriage before reproduction, and remove the punitive economic and social norms for single motherhood. At this point voting is determined by single women. And we will soon reach the point where 40% or more of children are born to single mothers, who must singularly support a household, and as such will be poorer than married people with two incomes who support a household.
And that is what we see in voting patterns. White married women vote right to keep their family and income. Unmarried and single women and minorities (non-whites, since minority status is rapidly approaching in younger demographics), vote to seek rents and free-riding.
I work on the other side of the spectrum from the status-seeking, conspicuously consumptive, moral justification of redistribution as a replacement for marriage. My objective is the preservation of the high trust society. But the high trust society is a product of the absolute nuclear family as the dominant moral influence in American culture. And what we are seeing, is, in 50 years, it’s rapid decline, and the economic polarization, and moral polarization, of the country along those moral lines.
We cannot keep the high trust society, and the positive benefits that come from it, without the ANF and the moral code that accompanies it. Or, there is no evidence that such a thing is possible.
But, it appears, that at least for a rapidly increasing number of women, this circumstance is superior to the corporation by which we concentrate capital: marriage.
Monogamy and paternalism, as Engels reminded us, were innovations that were the result of the development of property during agrarianism and pastoralism.
But if women can marry the state, rather than a man, they can restore the tribal order, and bear children while placing the burden of their upkeep on the tribe (state).
And that appears to be both normal and preferential.
So I think this is a more likely cause of today’s circumstance than leftover anger at the ‘war of northern aggression’, the purpose of which was to prevent the agrarian, export-oriented south from using slavery in the new territory to form a political block, that could encircle the import-oriented north.
Reproduction and status are an economy.
And moral discourse is verbal warfare over which sector will win which benefits.