Lots of politicians and pundits on the right have been talking about the need to "strengthen the family". The best way to do that is to make people less economically secure and to eliminate the social safety net. Then people will really need their families and will be forced to manifest more familial solidarity. This won't ensure that families take the form that the wingnuts prefer, but it will strengthen whatever families emerge as strategic responses to hard times and insecurity. I'm pretty sure that the right wing has what it takes to trash the economy and to undermine existing social welfare programs as long as it can divorce itself from capitalism and individualism. These result in too much prosperity and too many choices for people and allow them to get along without their families if they so choose.
The right wing in America is not "conservative" despite its appropriation of the label. It is radically anti-modern and authoritarian.
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I agree with the part about losing the "safety net" -- really, it's more like a straight-jacket. I also agree that if this would strengthen the family at all it would do this by redefining what "family" means. If the busybodies would just eliminate the safety net and then leave people alone, folks would form (and sever) bonds as they see fit to mutually serve their interests. Since there's no limit to human inventiveness, the end result may horrify some of those busybodies, so I don't hold out any hope that they would accept the leaving-people-alone part of the proposal.
One common myth is that unfettered capitalism encourages stable and
"traditional" family arrangements. It does not and never has. It has the exact opposite effect. It pulls women out of the home and into the factory, children into mills, and depresses male breadwinner wages. It divorces the home from production, rending the family apart. The only "family value" that capitalism encourages is massive over consumption. One of the reasons why the poor are poor isn't because their lack of "family values" it is because they choose family first over economic concerns and often violate proscribed gender norms--which is a political and economic no-no.
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