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The conservative argument is that those cultural arguments are rooted in poor welfare policies in the 60’s, not personal moral failings.
That is one conservative argument, not the only one. The moral failings argument predates the 1960s, as does, of course, entrenched poverty. That's why I said "tends." And, isn't one of the conservative criticisms of those welfare policies precisely that they undermine the moral traits supposedly needed to emerge from poverty? And then there is the traditional conservative distinction between the "deserving poor" (those who are poor through no fault of their own) and the "undeserving poor" (those who are poor due to character flaws and poor choices)
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And unlike almost every other argument, this one is actually backed in observed, durable, large-scale outcomes, if unfortunately negative ones. Blacks used to have much better outcomes in marriage, much lower rates of fatherlessness, etc, all of which strongly correlate with a multitude of positive social and economic outcomes. The collapse of such statistics was predicted in advance of the implementation of key social policies, among them no-fault divorce, and those predictions did in fact come to pass.
And these predictions are strongly memory-holed, too, I’ll point out. Social conservatives have been right about the harmful effects of policies they oppose a lot, and dismissed so often with ‘have you ever been right? Remember what you predicted about no-fault divorce?’, that it’s nearly Cassandra at this point.
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