Views from Crestmont Drive

• Two pieces about how the idealistic nuclear family beloved by conservatives has been an aberration in human history and is perhaps no longer suited for the modern world;
• Pondering the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and Cain and Abel;
• Items about Trump and the Nazi’s playbook; when the GOP likes big government; and Vivek Ramaswamy’s claims about climate change;
• And Nicholas Kristof summarizes recent trends about the decline of religious faith in America.

It’s been my impression (I don’t have a quick link to cite) that one of the MAGA points is that the traditional nuclear family is threatened by modernity, and ideally society should return to those traditional roles. Father, who goes to work; mother, who stays home; children, who go to school. But in fact my understanding is that the nuclear family is a relatively modern invention, of the past century, perhaps enabled by the rise in America of suburbia and car culture. Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village” remark was reviled by conservatives, whose ideas about an idea past go back only to the 1950s; but they have a very limited perspective of human history.

Big Think, Mauro F. Guillén, 24 Aug 2023: Why we must replace the American nuclear family with a “postgenerational” society, subtitled “Ideal models of family life have been broken by societal, technological, and cultural shifts — and we need to rethink our options.”

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