ClaireBerlinski.substack.com Profile picture
Sep 30, 2020 21 tweets 6 min read Read on X
This is the most revealing sentence: "Trump treated the debate like he was trying to win an argument between two baby mamas on a trash daytime show."

Part of the problem is that every American understands that sentence. And they shouldn't.
Americans collectively decided, at some point, that it was fine to have "trash daytime shows" featuring "two baby mamas." It primed us for Trump.

Behavior that should have been stigmatized (and situations that were inherently tragic) instead became entertainment.
Well-off people understood perfectly that the screaming women on those shows were objects of derision and mockery.
But the women in question did not.

The normalization of single motherhood and family dysfunction was catastrophic for the poor--and it pushed a good chunk of the middle class into poverty, too.
"Changes in family structure" (as the prim, well-off, educated class calls it) among the uneducated fueled the rise of childhood poverty and dysfunction, which became adult poverty and dysfunction.

This effect has been documented over and over again.
Since the 1970s, everything--culture, the economy, policy--has been militating against stable, working-class family formation.

1) Uneducated men have seen a decline in real wages. They've experienced longer periods of unemployment. Women don't want to marry men without jobs.
2) We made marriage less appealing by offering better welfare benefits to single women than to families.

3) The sexual revolution eroded the norm that marriage was a permanent arrangement and childbirth out of wedlock was unthinkable.
4) The people who thought it would be hugely entertaining to see baby-mamas duking it out on trash TV also drowned the public in romantic love stories, arguably even more destructive--
--the ideal of romantic love raised expectations for marriage to the absurd and the unachievable.

5) We put men in prison at historically unprecedented rates.

Everything worked against the formation of permanent marriages, which are essential to stable societies.
(As you've noticed, ours is no longer stable).

Not only is the institution critical for creating and transmitting wealth, it's absolutely essential for children to have stable attachments to both parents.
Upper-class Americans, despite their rhetoric, behaved as if they understood this.

But lower-income Americans didn't, and the consequences were catastrophic.
Single motherhood and divorce are events that range from "bad, but manageable" to "catastrophic, financially and emotionally," for kids.

brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…
5) The Left reliably mocked anyone on the Right who said, "Traditional, two-parent families are important" as a sex-hating, homophobic hypocrite.

6) The Right has reliably been comprised of sex-hating, homophobic hypocrites.
The Right spent years inveighing against homosexual marriage--as if *that* was the problem.

That wasn't the problem.

The problem was heterosexual marriage.

Specifically: heterosexuals failed to get married and stay married.
Kids who grow up without both biological parents in the home are overwhelmingly less likely to thrive. Stepfathers kill their kids more than 100 times more often than biological fathers do: sciencedirect.com/science/articl….
Preschoolers living with a step-parent are 40 times more likely to be abused: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Children living with a single mother or a step-parent are at much higher risk of physical or sexual assault than children living with two biological parents.

No matter your race, if you're a child of a single mother, you are four times more likely to grow up in poverty.
So the children of "baby mamas" are vastly more likely to be poor, beaten, abused, addicted, and uneducated. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
On the Right and the Left alike, the real divide was class: Upper-class and upper middle-class Americans stayed in school, got married, and stayed married, and enjoyed the economic and emotional stability that obtained.
Everyone else fell deeper and deeper into the mud as their families grew more unstable. And rather than stigmatizing family dysfunction openly, we stigmatized it covertly--by putting it on television, for everyone's entertainment.
Educated Americans were in on the joke and knew these women were not role models.

Uneducated Americans were not in on the joke.

We created a culture in which Trump seems, to uneducated Americans, perfectly normal.

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More from @ClaireBerlinski

Jul 15, 2023
Yes. I have no evidence that this was the deeper source of the tensions, but I sure hope this factors into NATO's thinking and that they're making plans in the full understanding that this could happen. I worry that they may be in some kind of total denial:
Maybe they're not. Maybe this is discussed at every step, but privately. But it's not beyond imagination that some kind of superstition, or fear of causing offense, prevents people from saying to Biden, "Whatever we do has to be Trump-proof."
e.g., "We need to get Ukraine what it needs *now,* because we don't necessarily have "as much time as it takes." And "we need to pass key treaties *now,* because we may not have the chance later."
Read 11 tweets
Mar 23, 2023
You will never convince me that these kids are on the street because they’re sincerely worried that they’ll be forced to toil until the age of 64. When you’re that young, you can’t even truly conceive that one day you’ll be 64.
And the idea that *this* is the worry that keeps them up at night these days is risible. Have they not noticed that Vladimir Putin regularly threatens to nuke them?
That recent advances in artificial intelligence are so revolutionary that we can’t even imagine what work, retirement, or human life will be like by the time they’re old enough to retire?
Read 4 tweets
Mar 14, 2023
On invading Mexico: open.substack.com/pub/claireberl… I wrote this because I find the lack of debate about this spooky. I think the GOP is *seriously* talking about invading Mexico!
I sometimes think I’ve been away from the US for so long that I’ve lost my feeling for US culture, because I just don’t get why some perfectly trivial controversies become absolute firestorms, with no one talking about anything else for days, whereas much more serious things--
--like the GOP seriously proposing to invade Mexico, and trying to pass an AUMF to do it--don’t even warrant an opinion piece in the NYT.
Are we just taking it for granted that these proposals aren't serious?
But why? Once you pass that AUMF, it can be used by *any* president.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 25, 2023
Tucker Carlson's Ukraine war anniversary episode is obscene-an unrelenting firehose of anti-Americanism, Russian propaganda, and grotesque lies about Ukraine. It leaves me slack-jawed that this was aired in America.
Why is the most-viewed host on American cable television serving an unremittingly hostile and genocidal foe of the United States?

This isn't subtle; it's Baghdad Bob level insane.
We know from the Dominion filing that he knows perfectly well these are lies. But we also know he'd cut out his own tongue before saying anything that would displease his viewers. So he must know that this is what they want to hear--but *why* would they want to hear this?
Read 4 tweets
Feb 25, 2023
It's deeply sinister that the West's central platform for sharing news and information is owned by a Putin apologist. Even Father Coughlin (or more aptly, Henry Ford) didn't have this kind of control over the arterials of public debate.
This can't be trivialized. He and Tucker Carlson are overtly on the side of the most dangerous enemy of the West and of humanity since Hitler. Given the influence they have on public debate, this is *deeply* sinister.
Together, they're capable of severely undermining Western unity, morale, and support for Ukraine. Despite the happy rhetoric about supporting Ukraine "as long as it takes," we all know we're only one election away from leaving Ukraine and Europe to Putin's mercy--
Read 4 tweets
Feb 13, 2023
If you missed it in the newsletter, I want to point out a very good place to donate for earthquake victims in Syria. My friend @esi_zey is organizing it and I trust her implicitly: crowdfunding.copalana.org/mycampaign/109…
She writes: "The difference between this and donating to Kızılay or Support to Life for example is that this is a relatively small project and we know exactly where the money is going ... so this might give people a bit more sense of having helped.
"It’s a specific shelter. In Sheikh Bahar. And God knows the Syrians were already miserable, are at the mercy of the Syrian regime and Turkey, therefore largely cut off from the world and receiving aid.
Read 6 tweets

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