Is the traditional family the foundation of democracy? It depends what kind of traditional family you’re talking about. Throughout most of European and American history, the family was organized around a patriarch with power over slaves, servants, poorer neighbors and his sons and daughters. Those families were the foundation of inequality. Our founding fathers didn’t idealize “family values.” They believed married men were better than bachelors because they exercised control over their families, but the “better” sort of man was one who put public passions before private ones. The essence of Republican virtue was to put the public welfare above private commitments. Only in the mid-19th century did people develop the idea that the family itself was the cornerstone. Conservative evangelicals turned their backs on the social reform efforts of their antebellum counterparts and began to say...

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Is the traditional family the foundation of democracy? It’s the foundation of many things—happiness, social order, identity—and it’s essential to the good working of democracy too. The family, with marriage as its foundation, is the first building block of civil society, and democracy is reliant on the idea of people being able to self-govern, to control themselves, to tend to their own needs and not just be servants of the state or, God forbid, wards of the state. There are necessary tasks the family performs that involve love, care, selflessness, which the state is very bad at. Whenever the state is called upon to do these tasks, it fails. Unfortunately, in our society, 40 percent of children are now born to unmarried women, and a majority spend some time in a single-parent home before the age of...

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