The Collapse of the Socialist Family

Economist Philip Pilkington interrogates the idea of the “longhouse,” and demolishes the socialist left’s radically subversive view of the family.

Understood correctly, all roads in today’s social debate lead back to the family. More accurately perhaps, we might say that all roads in today’s social debate lead back to the politicization of the family that started in the nineteenth century and was implemented in the twentieth.

Today on the right it is commonplace to encounter metaphorical talk of ‘longhouses’ that ultimately reduces to frustrated male ambition, often channelled into adolescent Nietzschean rage. Yet if we understand the actual history behind these ideas, we will see that the longhouse is not simply a woolly metaphor concocted by would-be weightlifters, but rather a central theme in the politicization of the family.

At the same time, the socialist and social democratic left has become lost and aimless, tilting at windmills, and fighting wars from nearly a century ago. The socialist left seems perfectly capable of complaining, but their prescriptions seem lacklustre and wanting. Would raising the minimum wage or raising taxes on the wealthy make any difference to any of today’s structural economic problems? Would either policy make a dent in the social problems that we see metastasize and proliferate year after year? Obviously not.

The reality that the socialist left simply refuses to recognise is that no matter how they cut it, most people in advanced Western societies are vastly wealthier than they were half a century ago – and yet, at the same time, social problems seem to have gotten much worse. Wealth generation seems to have been accompanied by a deterioration in actual standards of living, a strange paradox that no one seems to want to examine. And since wealth distribution (the left’s policy “Rosetta Stone”) is just a means of raising wealth for certain groups there is no reason to think the effects would be any different than the manic march to increase GDP that we have seen over the past century.

Yet when we start to dig beneath the surface, we find that both trends (the gender politics of the longhouse and the collapse of the socialist left) go back to the family and the desire, born of the latter group, to meddle with it. In fact, the family is the true Rosetta Stone that allows us to understand all the paradoxes and problems of the 21^st century. From masculinist neuroticism over being hen-pecked in a longhouse on the right, to the inability of the modern socialist left to even articulate compelling political goals — the core problem is all in the family.