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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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familial breakdown following the sexual revolution

According to conservatives on radio it is Great Society welfare policies that destroyed black American marriage rates. There are old articles asserting such. The government subsidized and incentivized single motherhood and certainly got a lot of black single moms.

According to conservatives on radio it is Great Society welfare policies that destroyed black American marriage rates.

Also the Moynihan report, which was not by a conservative.

Old-school Welfare treated a family headed by a single mother as deserving poor (having been introduced at a time when most single mothers were widows, or divorced for sympathetic reasons), but a family headed by a man who couldn't hold down a steady full-time job as undeserving poor. The incentive to make yourself deserving poor is obvious.

It remains the case that a single mother is going to be subsidy-dependent (one person can't earn enough to support both her own family and the woman who is looking after the kids while she is working unless she is pulling in an upper-middle-class income) and these subsidies are means tested such that most of the income of a lower-middle-class man who joins her household is promptly going to be means-tested away (or, in reverse, that most of the income of a lower-middle-class partner she ejects will be replaced by means-tested benefits).

Post sexual revolution culture thinks that people should couple up for love and not money, meaning that not redistributing away the (very practical, with a computable cash value) benefits of couple formation is creating a "perverse" incentive. The red tribe agrees with the general principle, but think the required redistribution should be informal through churches (meaning the benefit can be restricted to women who comply with the red tribe's marry-early-marry-often version of modern sexual morality) rather than coercively through the state.

I wouldn't be surprised if this contributed. But I'm not convinced that this is the main reason for what happened.