It's a strange feature of the past 30 years that the power of marriage became a secret kept by the upper classes. Sinister forces don't want the lower classes to know about it, while traditional society was robbed of the confidence needed to extol its virtues.
Yes, traditional society was "robbed" of its confidence. It was not "lost" naturally. A very deliberate campaign was waged against every aspect of traditional society beginning in the 60s, intensifying in the 80s, and going into overdrive in the final push for gay marriage.
A key element to getting gay marriage pushed through was convincing a generation of young people that there was nothing special about marriage. They were taught to regard it as a dusty relic of a bygone age, of no great relevance to modern people in an age of high-tech comfort.
This view was ubiquitous among the young when the big push for gay marriage began. It took the rest of society by surprise. Older Americans were stunned to discover the young saw marriage as quaint, of so little value there could be no good-faith reason to deny it to anyone.
Shock polls emerged that showed young people thought of marriage as something to be postponed until they were older and successful - even until after they had kids of their own. Young people were taught to think of marriage as a hollow custom with yucky religious overtones.
The young were taught to aggressively mock traditional marriage and all of its strengths. If it's so valuable, why is the divorce rate so high? If it's for the children, then why do so many married straights never have kids? Women don't need men! How dare you insult single moms!
But all along, the upper class KNEW how important traditional marriage is, every single bit of it: getting married relatively young, having more than one child, staying married while the kids grow up and go through school. It became the secret key to families staying upper class.
The greatest failure of old-school conservatism was the failure to preserve marriage - not by thwarting the push for gay marriage at the very end of this forced social transformation, but by preserving the virtue and value of marriage at every level of society since the Sixties.
This might be the one failure that really mattered for conservatism, the one that unleashed the tumultuous political realignment we're living through now. It didn't conserve a foundational principle of society. It couldn't find a way to sell a truth that used to sell itself.
The Left had a plan for transforming society, a plan that involved decades of steady effort with occasional fast and furious pushes for important social engineering policy milestones. The Right never really had a matching strategy or the cultural influence to implement it.
So now Americans watch study after study roll out, covered somewhere in the B section of the news, and think: "Wow, men and women getting married and having kids is really important after all. Maybe we should have asked why that fence was there before we tore it down." /end
