June Carbone

Recent Posts by June Carbone

The Conservative War on Single Mothers Like Jessica Schairer
Jul 19, 2012June CarboneNaomi Cahn
Conservatives want to have their cake and eat it too: decry the rise in nonmarital births but make life even harder for women facing single motherhood.
Conservatives want to have their cake and eat it too: decry the rise in nonmarital births but make life even harder for women facing single motherhood.

Ever wonder what the “war on women” is really about? An article in the New York Times, “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’: For Richer Marriage, for Poorer, Single Motherhood,” provides some clues. The article documents the growing class divide in family form. College graduates like Chris and Kevin Faulkner, who were profiled in the article, postpone starting families, produce marriages with lower divorce rates than a generation ago, and reap the rewards in terms of greater time and resources to invest in children. In the meantime, women like Jessica Schairer who do not graduate from college, also profiled in the article, are increasingly raising children on their own. These women often give up on the men in their lives and struggle to balance the demands of low-paying jobs with the attention their children need.

The article presents a compelling portrait of the causes and the effects, but not of the partisan divide over the potential solutions. That divide can be summed up by a struggle over a simple question: are women like the single mother, Jessica Schairer, the victims of our economy or the problem? Those who see them as the problem are setting forth proposals to make their lives (and their children’s lives) worse. Those of us who see Jessica Schairer as a victim of increasing economic inequality recognize that supporting her ability to care for her children is critical to the strength of the country’s next generation. The political war for the future of Jessica Schairer is under way.

The change in family structure is a consequence of growing economic inequality that further increases inequality in the next generation of children. The most startling change is the increase in non-marital births. In 1990, just 10 percent of white women with some college education had a birth outside of marriage; today the figure is 30 percent, compared to 8 percent of whites with a college degree and 40 percent for the country as a whole. Meanwhile, 86 percent of black high school dropouts have children outside of marriage. The likelihood that a child will be raised in a two-parent family has become a marker of class.

The Times article documents the consequences of this change, as it describes the limited ability of single parents to pay for sports participation, attend school events, stay on top of homework, and provide adequate role models. Harvard’s Robert Putnam adds that the growing class gap in childrearing affects everything from the time parents spend playing patty-cake with their pre-schoolers to the likelihood that a high school senior will be the captain of a sports team.

In considering the causes of class divergence, the Times articles documents a negative spiral. It observes that economic woes speed marital decline “as women see fewer marriageable men.” Women do not commit to men without steady employment, and a shortage of “good men” encourages the employed to play the field. A long list of academic studies demonstrates that when marriageable women outnumber the men, everyone’s norms change and marriage rates decline. For single mom Jessica Schairer, as for many other women today, there was no point to marrying the father of her three children. Instead, for her the issue is “why she stayed so long with a man who she said earned so little, berated her often and did no parenting.” On the other hand, marriage also encourages men to shape up. Kevin Faulkner, the married father in the story, explained that he returned to college because he wanted to get married. Other studies show that not only has the premium for college graduates increased over the last generation, but the job stability of less educated men has fallen more than for other parts of the population and male layoffs often break up relationships and discourage marriage.

While the documentation of these differences is now well established, the solutions are not. Yet there are two obvious ones, rarely discussed in explicit terms. The first recreates the links between stable jobs and stable families. This requires greater economic equality, more opportunities for blue-collar men, more family-friendly workplaces, greater support for higher education and job training, and better access to contraception and other supports for delaying family formation. A growing literature suggests that greater equality itself creates virtuous cycles that deter teen births and encourage longer lasting family relationships.

The alternative? Bring back patriarchy. Conservatives like Charles Murray blame changing values, charging that the men have gotten lazy because women no longer depend on them or fail to sleep with them until they shape up. The secret to bringing back female dependence and male virtue? Make the women desperate. Murray has made a career of blaming government programs such as welfare for the destruction of the American family because such programs cushion the impact of single parenthood. For conservatives who see single mothers like Jessica Schairer as the problem and who refuse to see inequality itself as the explanation, the result is a war on women.

Virtually every conservative Republican, from Paul Ryan’s budget to Mitt Romney’s platform, would cut the benefits on which single mothers like Jessica Schairer currently depend. Indeed, shortly after Romney’s NAACP speech, he commented, “Remind them of this: If they want more free stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy.” What could Romney have meant by “free stuff?”

First, start with food stamps. They are an important part of Jessica Schairer’s ability to feed three children on an income of $25,000 a year. Romney’s proposals would either force 13 million people off of food stamps entirely or cut benefits by $2000 per year per family.

Second, Romney’s budget would produce massive cuts in Medicaid programs that serve as the most important source of health care for working mothers without adequate benefits.

Third, Romney’s tax proposals would raise Jessica Schairer’s taxes while providing for massive cuts for those with high incomes.

Whether or not Romney specifically intends to make the lives of single mothers more perilous, his policies would do exactly that.

Social conservatives, in the meantime, have taken aim at the reproductive rights that make it possible for women to avoid inopportune births. The class divide in access to contraception and abortion is wide and growing. The Guttmacher Institute reports that between 1994 and 2006, the unintended pregnancy rate grew by 50 percent for women below the poverty line. During the same period, it fell by 29 percent for higher income women. Yet those who share Charles Murray’s sentiments about single mothers have done their best to make it worse.

For many of us, this is the most perplexing part of the war on Jessica Schairer, and it rests on conservatives’ analysis that the key to reforming the family is to deny men sex rather than prevent births. Indeed, Republican candidate Rick Santorum linked the increase in non-marital births to the “dangers of contraception,” which he categorized as "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

We noted in Red Families v. Blue Families that most conservatives do not oppose contraception per se, but they remain resolutely against the implied approval of non-marital sex that would accompany explicit support and the government subsidies necessary to make access more universal. In the name of religious liberty, they accordingly raised a furor over President Obama’s recent proposal to mandate employer coverage of contraception as preventive health care. With less publicity, they blocked inclusion of proposals to increase contraceptive access in the stimulus bill. And they defeated efforts to include contraception in any form as part of the health care package. Yet poor women’s lack of health care coverage is a major factor in the unplanned pregnancy rate.

If contraceptive access is controversial, abortion is off the table. Ms. Schairer considered one in response to the unplanned pregnancy that derailed her college education, but the father of her children opposed it. The Guttmacher Institute notes that the women most likely to end an unintended pregnancy by abortion are those who, like Ms. Schairer, are in college at the time of the pregnancy. Had Ms. Schairer not given birth when she did, she would have been much more likely to graduate, to avoid a non-marital birth, and to be able to secure a better job. But at the same time conservatives work to make life more difficult for mothers like Jessica Schairer, they argue that having the child is the only acceptable moral option.

For a generation now, Murray, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, and many other conservatives have denied that inequality has anything to do with the changing family. Romney has joined the chorus, dismissing any discussion of inequality as “envy” and “class warfare.” It is time to recognize the truth. The policies they have championed are responsible for the class-based division in family form. The war on Jessica Schairer is claiming an increasing number of victims.

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. She is the author of numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.

Cahn and Carbone are the co-authors of Red Families v. Blue Families.

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The Marrying Kind: How Class Shapes Our Search for a Soul Mate
Feb 14, 2012June CarboneNaomi Cahn
While women on the low end of the economic ladder give up on marriage, the middle class seek partners that have both compatible values and compatible job prospects.
While women on the low end of the economic ladder give up on marriage, the middle class seek partners that have both compatible values and compatible job prospects.

As we celebrate Valentine's Day, we should be aware that underlying the many stories on the changing nature of marriage and relationships is a central irony: the college-educated middle class that embraced the sexual revolution is now leading the way back into marriage. And this group has more stable families because of the combination of two qualities hard for everyone else to find. The first is a flexible approach to family roles. Men who help with the children and women with six-figure incomes are very much in demand. The second is good jobs: over the last 30 years, the number of men with stable employment has stayed even with women only at the top. The result is remaking the definition of domestic success.

Sociologists call the new marriage patterns "soul mate" marriage. They observe that Americans used to marry at younger ages (in 1960, the averages were 22 for men and 20 for women) and the young couples fully entered adulthood only after they married. The secrets to making those marriages work were well-defined gender roles and lots of coercion. The couple was likely to have one child immediately and a second not too long afterwards. With two young children, even a desperately unhappy wife would have difficulty leaving a man who brought home a regular paycheck, and he was likely to be readily employed in a job with benefits, promotions, and raises. The two would be embedded in a network of friends, families, and co-workers that revolved around marriage and stigmatized divorce.

Today, a much higher percentage of the population is single and almost 40 percent of Americans believe that marriage is outdated. Yet the vast majority will marry eventually. Before they do, however, they will spend their twenties unmarried, often on their own, experimenting with different relationships and engaged in what may be a decade-long search for the right partner. This generation will grow up before they get married and in the process they will reach more informed and (hopefully) mature decisions on what kind of partner allows them to realize the family life they wish to create. These patterns are more individualistic than the old institutional model, but while they do vary more than the breadwinner/homemaker model of the fifties, it is a mistake to think that they are based only on dewy-eyed romance.

Instead, today's marital partners select for a mate with shared values -- and they are likely to be drawn to partners who can truly share their lives and their successes. The college educated, for example, marry and bear children later than the less educated, while those with less education have become increasingly likely to bear children first. The non-marital birth rate has stayed at two percent for white college graduates over the last 25 years and risen only slightly for college-educated racial minorities. During the same period, the non-marital birth rate has reached 40 percent for the country as a whole. College graduates enter into any kind of family life significantly later than their less-educated peers and have become even more likely to marry only each other.

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When they do marry, today's romantic partners seek those who share compatible values and complementary employment. The new elite devotes more parental time to their children than their parents did and the ability to do so requires either one high-earning partner or two wage earners with compatible schedules. In commenting on Obama's plans to increase taxes on those with income above $250,000, a University of Chicago law professor complained that it took he and his wife that much income to raise a family in Chicago in accordance with a professional standard of living. What he emphasized less is that it also took a spouse with a six-figure income to afford the nannies, private schools, and college and graduate education that would allow their children to realize opportunities comparable to their own.

Marriage on these terms cannot work, however, for couples who do not trust their partners or who feel that their partners contribute so little that they threaten the resources necessary to provide for children. For the approximately two-thirds of the population that does not have a college degree, an increasing number of men don't have the steady, adequate-paying jobs that allow them to provide the foundation for a successful family life. Nor are working class men who feel like failures in the job market prepared to play roles backing up their wives and children. College-educated artists or faculty spouses may be willing to dote on their children while their wives take on the "breadwinning" role, but less secure men are more likely to chafe at the domestic tasks. Financially independent women who both earn the bulk of the family income and assume the majority of the domestic tasks don't want -- or need -- men who are unable to support their families, emotionally or financially. While divorce rates plummeted in the '90s for college graduates, they continued to rise among the hard-pressed working class.

The secret underlying these patterns has been the growing divergence in male job opportunities and a change in the gendered wage gap. In 1990, all women, irrespective of education, made about the same percentage of the median hourly wage of the men, with college graduate women making a slightly higher percentage of the male wage than those who did not graduate from college. Today, those figures have changed appreciably. College graduate women are now paid a smaller percentage of the median hourly wage the men earn, while all other women are earning a higher percentage of male income. During the same period, male employment stability, which remained largely unchanged for college graduate men, and improved for most women, became notably worse for working class men.

What these figures mean is that for women who graduate college, there are still lots of choices. Even though women are graduating from college in larger numbers than men, there is still a substantial number of men at the top of the income ladder. Moreover, as the wages of college graduates have stagnated over the last decade, they have done so even more for women than for men. Today's college graduates recognize that they need each other to realize the good life and they are very careful in the search for the right partner.

Women at the losing end of the economic spectrum, however, are increasingly giving up on men and marriage. Men with stable jobs are harder to find and recently laid off or semi-employed men help out less around the house than those who work full time. The mismatch between men and women has had a bigger impact on marriage than the change in values that inspired the sex revolution. It is time to recognize that the best Valentine's Day present out there is a more promising future.

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. She is the author of numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.

Cahn and Carbone are the co-authors of Red Families v. Blue Families.

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Blame Marriage Rates on the Family Values of the 1%
Jan 23, 2012June Carbone
While low marriage rates among the working class are being blamed on their flawed morality, the real problem is their lack of jobs and education.
While low marriage rates among the working class are being blamed on their flawed morality, the real problem is their lack of jobs and education.

Charles Murray is at it again. He burst onto the national scene in the '80s, announcing that he knew why the African-American non-marital birth rate had risen so dramatically: the government made them do it. He explained that welfare and a host of other liberal sins had weakened the moral fiber of the poor, producing disaster. It would take free market discipline to instill the right values once again. Now Murray is back with a new book and a long article in the Wall Street Journal attempting to explain income inequality among whites. His claim: working class whites have lost ground because they have abandoned a commitment to marriage, religion, and hard work. In his world, unemployment is high because those on the losing end of today's economy refuse to work, non-marital births occur because of a lack of emphasis on marriage, and the upper class can assist only by expressing its disapproval and "preaching what it practices" -- presumably investments in Ivy League education, parent-subsidized internships, and marriage between two investment bankers at 32.

In this new work, Murray says no five-point plan can change things. What he doesn't tell you is how little his last five-point plan accomplished. Murray's past work helped spark the movement that led to the abolition of welfare "as we know it" in 1996. And the welfare mothers who were able to get and hold jobs -- in no small part due to government subsidized health benefits and day care -- were in fact better off. But Murray claims no credit because throughout the twenty-year attack on welfare (and the steady erosion of benefits that went with it) marriage rates continued to decline.

Murray-like prescriptions -- even when they are right that the behavior of the working class is a problem -- have always failed. The simple fact is that prosperity and equality improve behavior more than privation or preaching. Consider the Irish potato famine. The potato blight wiped out the principal source of food for Catholic Ireland while leaving the cattle and wheat of Protestant Ireland (the 1% of their day) unaffected. The British responded with soup kitchens -- for six months. Then, Murray-like editorial cartoons in London started to depict the English taxpayer with drunken Irishmen on their backs. The editorials complained that soup kitchens encouraged idleness and worse -- too many Irish births. The English brought back market discipline (and upper class disapproval of Catholic behavior) and their solution worked: the Irish population fell by a quarter in the next several years, due in roughly equal parts to death and emigration. But no Englishman heralded the improved moral qualities of Irish Catholics. The improvement in the reputation of the Irish took jobs and equal community membership, factors the Irish never found under British rule.

Murray can't tell you what really caused the class divide in marriage because the class-based changes in families he laments closely track the class warfare of the 1%. Up through the mid-'80s, upper class and working class divorce rates rose and fell together. Starting in 1990, the lines diverged, with the divorce rates of college graduates falling back to the level of the mid-sixties (before no-fault divorce) while the divorce and non-marital birth rates of everyone else continued to rise. What really happened?

First, the income of college graduate men increased handsomely in the '90s and the incomes of the 1% increased even more through the next decade.

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Second, the income of all other men declined in real dollar terms (adjusted for inflation). American industry enjoyed impressive gains in productivity, but working class men received almost none of the benefits. Moreover, while many conservatives argue that the increase in global competition explains the change, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson present a convincing case in Winner Take All Politics that the real cause lies in deregulation and the decimation of union protections.

Third, women's employment increased in the same period and women's wages gained the most vis-à-vis men at the bottom of the income scale. As recently as 1990, women of all educational levels earned about the same percent of the hourly wages of men with the same education. To the extent the gendered "wage gap" varied, college educated women enjoyed slightly more parity with men than working class women. By 2007, the wage gap varied dramatically by class. College-educated women earned a smaller percentage of the hourly income of their male counterparts, while the wage gap between working-class men and women shrunk substantially.

Fourth, working-class male employment in the same period became less stable, while employment stability for college graduate men did not change and employment stability improved for women. Today, working-class women find they have to work and generally can in the expanded service sector (think WalMart) that offers stable jobs with some benefits. Working-class men are far more likely to work in construction or small businesses with frequent layoffs. And as Newsweek reported, "laid-off men tend to do less -- not more -- housework, eating up their extra hours snacking, sleeping and channel surfing (which might be why the Cartoon Network, whose audience has grown by 10 percent during the downturn, is now running more ads for refrigerator repair school)."

The result: a change in family norms. College-educated women postpone childbearing, invest in their careers, and conduct a long search for a compatible and reliable mate. The working class increasingly cannot afford college (defunding public education is very effective class warfare), and working class women have little faith in the available men. A working class mother who comes home from a job she doesn't like to find the father of her children sleeping on the couch or playing video games doesn't stay with him. Christian parents tell me that, like Sarah Palin, they approved of their daughters' decisions not to have an abortion, but they were relieved when their daughters did not marry the unreliable Levi Johnstons who fathered the children.

It is time to recognize the real cause of family change. A corporate strategy that destroys unions, raids pension funds, lays off workers, and values speculative or dishonest ventures (i.e. subprime loans) over long-term institutional development may earn six figure bonuses, but it destroys families and communities. It is the values of Murray's elite, not working class values, that should be the focus of family reform.

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

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Family Values? Conservative Economics Have Shredded Marriage Rates
Aug 9, 2011June CarboneNaomi Cahn
Falling marriage rates aren't a question of morality, but an issue of class.
Falling marriage rates aren't a question of morality, but an issue of class.

A recent article in The Economist on the "sorry state of marriage in the United States" quoted Census data that show that, for the first time, married couples now make up less than half of all households. The article concludes:

Do not expect the Democratic Party, however, to make an issue of the marriage gap in next year's elections. Unmarried women voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. "You don't want to suggest to someone who isn't married and has children that they should be married," says [Isabel] Sawhill. "That is a denigration of their lifestyle."

Ms. Sawhill is right that Democrats will not denigrate those on the losing end of the economic changes remaking America. And Democrats shouldn't suggest that single mothers get married for the sake of having a ring on their fingers. Marriage doesn't solve the underlying problems.

Because the "sorry state of marriage" in the United States isn't the declining number of married couple households. Instead, the sad truth is that just like access to health care, stable employment, and higher education, access to marriage has become a class-based affair. The Economist correctly observes that marriage and the two-parent family has become a marker of income level. According to the National Marriage Project, a half century ago, marriage rates did not vary much by education, and college educated women were less likely to marry than those without college degrees. Today, the likelihood of marrying, staying married, and raising children within marriage correlates strongly with education. Indeed, for white college graduates the non-marital birth rate has stayed at 2%; for African American high school dropouts, it's 96%. In between is a steeply slanted line that links family form to education, income, and race.

The Republican Party has effectively exploited working class fears about family disintegration to peddle the message that these changes reflect elite disdain for traditional values. In their view, the primary way to encourage marriage is to criminalize abortion, discourage contraception, and bring back pregnancy as the punishment for sex (with the scarlet letter soon to follow). In response to the Obama administration's plans to eliminate the co-pay for contraception, Dana Perino of Fox News responded that she didn't see why women spending money on $5 frappuccinos couldn't spend $5 for a contraception co-pay -- with no clue that there might be women who can't afford $5 for coffee. The Republican plan is apparently to distribute Bibles and promote the Christian radio that blankets the airwaves with stories of screwed up men who regain their ability to make a go of family life only after Jesus saves them.

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What the National Marriage Project indicates, however, is that those who show up at church on Sundays are the ones who are doing well economically and maritally. While church attendance has fallen overall since the 70s, it has fallen most dramatically for those at the losing end of the economic spectrum -- and those far less likely to marry. Today, men without college degrees earn less in real dollar terms than they did before Reagan was elected president. Thus marriage becomes an unaffordable luxury for many women because they would have to manage a husband's life as well has their own and that of their children. Even for men who have regular employment, employment stability has taken a hit. A half century ago, well educated and minimally educated men worked about the same number of hours a week with about the same level of job turnover. Today, employment stability and average hours correlate strongly with educational achievement. Working class men (think of construction workers) have much higher rates of unemployment and employment instability and recent studies show that employment instability is a major factor in divorce rates. Unemployed men help out less at home than employed men, and are far more likely to abuse alcohol, play video games in their spare time, or beat their wives. It's hardly surprising that working class women conclude that marriage is a luxury they cannot afford.

A big part of the solution for the problems of the family is jobs -- more and better jobs. We also need to rebuild a safety net that encourages family stability. Studies indicate that the greater the male income inequality in a region, the lower the female marriage rates. We have created a society that writes off a high percentage of men through chronic unemployment and high rates of imprisonment for minor offenses. In The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, authors Wilkinson and Pickett show that the higher the inequality in a society, the higher the rates of mental illness and substance abuse, particularly among males.

The creation of greater inequality, the shredding of the social safety net, and the increasing cost of higher education have much more do with the changing structure of the family than Hollywood mores or internet porn. It is time that the Democrats discovered family values as an issue -- and link those values to a campaign to rebuild community in America. Republicans, the people who successfully blocked taxing people to pay their fair share and spending what it takes to build an effective society, should be forced to look themselves in the mirror when it comes to the destruction of family stability. Marriage rates by themselves have a variety of meanings, but class-based increases in family instability have one overriding consequence: the creation of a less just society with diminished prospects for a large percentage of our children. What we really need to do is increase our investments in children, employment stability, and healthy communities and stop pretending that family structure is simply a matter of morals or will.

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. She is the author of numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.

Cahn and Carbone are the co-authors of Red Families v. Blue Families.

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How to Take Our Country Back from the Money Men Who Fund the Tea Party
Aug 2, 2011June Carbone
If there is a silver lining to the debt limit crisis -- and it's a big if -- it would be that the extremism of Republican agenda has finely become visible to a larger number of Americans. It is time to recognize what it means to face a determined ideological bloc.
If there is a silver lining to the debt limit crisis -- and it's a big if -- it would be that the extremism of Republican agenda has finely become visible to a larger number of Americans. It is time to recognize what it means to face a determined ideological bloc. And what it means to fight back.

While New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently described the Tea Party as an American Hezbollah, Islamic terrorists would not have much clout without their funders in Saudi Arabia and Iran. So, too, the Republican right would be impotent without its behind-the-scenes creators. A small number of incredibly wealthy businessmen -- the principle beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts -- have created an ideological machine determined to destroy government. Taking our country back, restoring pragmatism over ideology, and making government function requires making the deep pocket money men (and they are mostly men) visible and identifying their cause with the looting of the country.

The debt limit gridlock is simply the latest episode in a war on government that has been thirty years in the making. Many of us dismissed the genial, misguided Ronald Reagan as an aberration. We saw the Gingrich revolution as self-destructive and easily contained. We cheered in 2006 and 2008 as we reached that the conclusion that Bush, with his unnecessary wars and the financial crisis that was the predictable consequence of mindless deregulation, had discredited the Republican brand. Some of us voted for Obama over Hillary because we thought that with Bush and political maestro Karl Rove out of the way, Obama could transcend the partisanship of the Clinton years.

We were wrong. What we failed to recognize is the engine of Republican extremism is not Reagan or the second Bush or Gingrich. Nor is it some authentic voice of the Christian right or the disillusioned working class on the American "street." The engine of conservative ascendance is the ideologically driven money men who have built a single-minded political machine in the United States. In Winner Take All Politics, political scientists Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker date the conservative rise to 1978, two years before Reagan. They identify conservative success with the ascendance of the Chamber of Commerce, which became a vehicle for right-wing business interests. They report that since the consolidation and channeling of conservative funding, Republicans have won an astounding 85% of closely fought contests.
Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and New Deal 2.0 pundit Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist at U Mass, Boston, documents the effective sale of Congress to special interests. The Congressmen who raked consumer advocate and should-be populist hero Elizabeth Warren over the coals were the paid shills of the big banks she was willing to confront. Membership on financial services committees is now the product of the right campaign contributions. While public outrage may have led to the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, it did nothing to contain the alliance of lobbyists and business friendly Republicans (along with more than a few Democrats) working overtime to water it down and block its implementation.

In the meantime, the Republicans have launched a campaign to rig the political system. Their campaign against unions is a campaign against the last remaining source of institutional support for Democrats. At the same time, they are engaged in a wholesale initiative to make it harder to vote. Who is most likely to be affected by these measures? The answer is clear: the poor, the young, the less educated, recent immigrants, in short, those mostly likely to be Democrats and most likely to be the victims of tea party budget cuts.

The Supreme Court is no different. The rule of law is all but dead in America. The same group that funded the Tea Party and the congressional financial services committees has stacked the Court and blocked Obama appointments everywhere else. While commentators focus on issues such as abortion or campaign finance, the Supreme Court reaches its ideological height in its consistently pro-business decisions. Three of the Justices (Scalia, Thomas and Alito) are the most extreme justices since the twenties. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy are only slightly behind. Together, the five have produced a series of nakedly partisan 5-4 votes.

So how are we (everyone to the left of Paul Ryan) to respond? In the New York Times this weekend, pollster Stanley Greenberg depressingly observed that the public gets it -- and the public response has been neutralized by the right wing ideological campaign. The public gets that Wall Street runs the country. The public gets that no one represents their interests. The public gets that both Bush and Obama serve corporate interests first. And the public responds -- incredibly to some of us -- by believing that government is the problem. As Tom Frank explained in 'The Wrecking Crew', the point of this ideological campaign is to prove to the public that government can't work and there is no better way than to make sure it doesn't. So how to respond?

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Greenberg argued that Democrats should adopt sensible policies to limit campaign contributions, tax lobbyist expenses, simplify the tax code, add fees to financial transactions and limit CEO compensation and executive bonuses. I wish! To accomplish these objectives, Greenberg needs a party that is not beholden to the same interests. To get there requires taking a few pages from the Republican playbook. Republican success has come from playing on the fears of the American public, making "liberal" a naughty word, and discrediting government especially when it works. According to independent observers, Obama's stimulus package saved jobs and probably prevented a worldwide depression; yet, most Americans think it was a failure. How do we combat propaganda? The answer requires seeing what we are up against and responding in turn.

First, we need to put a face on the enemies of the Republic. The true powers behind the throne are the money men. The Koch Brothers, leading right wing funders, are finally becoming visible. They own the largest privately held energy company in the country, with over $100 billion in revenues. It is one the country's ten top contributors to air pollution and a "kingpin of climate science denial." The Koch Brothers fund a largely invisible network of think tanks, political front groups and advocacy organizations that have opposed Obama Administration initiatives from health care to the stimulus package. Charles Lewis, of the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity, reported that the "sheer dimension" of what the Koch Brothers spend sets them apart. "They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. . . .They are the Standard Oil of our times." Where do all those tax cuts go? We should emphasize just how much the tax cuts increase the Koch Brothers' ability to game the political system to insure their unaccountability.

Right up there with the Koch Brothers is Rupert Murdoch. He has finally registered in public consciousness as a result of the scandals in Britain. His minions illegally tapped the phones of the royal family, the opposition Labor Party, missing children and 9/11 victims, all while he supped with the Conservative Prime Minister. What he has done in the U.S. is comparable. He single-handedly funded the creation of Fox News, the primary source of information for 64% of the tea party and the single entity outside of the Bush Administration itself most responsible for the war in Iraq. He subverted the Wall Street Journal from a reputable, conservative, financial publication to an ideological force. Murdoch undermines reputable journalism everywhere he goes and insulates his media empire from effective oversight (or enforcement of the criminal law). His creations are much more effective than Pravda (the Soviet newspaper and propaganda arm) ever was. We must start by making these men and similar funders the face of conservative extremists. Conservative Republican and former Louisiana Governor Buddy Romer is running for the Republican Presidential nomination by disavowing large contributions. He is close to invisible in the polls. We should make visible the obvious -- every other Republican candidate is a stalking horse for the financial sector.

Second, we need to discredit the extremists as extremists. The Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch society are appropriately viewed as wingnuts. The Tea Party should be seen in the same league. Imagine if Democrats threatened the country's credit rating to pursue an unachievable ideological agenda. They would be called traitors; Vice President Joe Biden finally called them "terrorists" but only behind closed doors. The Tea Party has held the country hostage to a manufactured crisis designed to prove their ideological purity. At best, they are partisans who put their ideological commitments ahead of the country's. More systematically, they serve the interests of those who would destroy government effectiveness. John McCain, now that he has been safely reelected for what is likely to be his last term, has been one of the more effective voices against them. They deserve to be discredited permanently.

Third, the only way to discredit them is to link the money men to the extremist policies. Progressives are proud of their video showing the Republican attack on Medicare as the equivalent of pushing Grandma off the cliff. Their far more effective refrain is the one that links sacrificing Grandma to tax cuts for the wealthy. The refrain could be done through fill in the blanks. The Republicans want to sacrifice Medicare to protect tax cuts for the wealthy. The Republicans want to fire teachers to promote tax cuts for the wealthy. The Republicans want to slash Social Security to promote tax cuts for the wealthy. The Republican held the debt limit increase hostage to their efforts to protect tax cuts for the wealthy. The Republicans, whatever they do, are beholden to the money men the country should love to hate.

Fourth, the Democrats need to claim credit for government's genuine accomplishments. The public believes that Social Security and Medicare are successes. Somehow, it thinks that the extension of Medicare to more people is socialism. Obama failed to put an effective government (and Democratic) label on the programs that in fact produced the most results -- the jobs created by the stimulus for government infrastructure, the federal funds that staved off the need for state layoffs, etc. In Kansas, Republican Governor Brownback and Republican Senator Pat Roberts are claiming credit for a new federally funded Bio-Defense Facility even as they bash federal spending. Either the federal government should be getting credit for the facility or it should be on the chopping block.

Fifth, the Democrats need an overriding agenda. An easy one is the need to rebuild community and equality. Impressive empirical studies suggest that inequality necessarily undermines community health. It results in writing off large numbers as chronically unemployed, mentally ill, likely to abuse drugs or alcohol and effectively unmarriageable. It also makes it easy for those with six figure bonuses to escape accountability. The right wing extremism machine is possible only because the Koch Brothers can amass fortunes worth over $35 billion between them.

I am not optimistic. Naomi Cahn and I wrote a book on the family called 'Red Families v. Blue Families'. We expected it to appeal to family law scholars and women's groups. Instead, we received immediate attention from conservative family institutes. We were eventually invited to speak by same-sex marriage advocacy organizations. We never heard much from the feminist left. At first we were mystified. Then we realized that while there is a well funded network of right wing think tanks, the organized left -- and much of the center -- has starved on the vine for lack of funds. Same-sex marriage passed in New York State because Republican funders, who identify with their gay sons and lesbian daughters, supported the cause. Efforts that require limiting the influence of the billionaires we have empowered and insulated from accountability face an uphill struggle.

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is the co-author, with Naomi Cahn, of Red Families v. Blue Families.

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