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List Price: $25.00
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Product Details:
Type: Hardcover
Item#: c6374
ISBN#: 1932236236
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Why stable families are crucial to our strength and survival as a nation -- and how the federal government seems determined to destroy them
The "American Way"
by Allan Carlson
It was no coincidence that when the American family system came under critical assault, our society began to unravel as well. What's more, a series of government policies have steadily eroded the family's strength, resulting in a rampant hyper-individualism that threatens our nation's very life. Allan Carlson demonstrates this and much more of critical importance to defenders of the family in this incisive new study of the family's importance, The "American Way": Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity.
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Through a series of absorbing looks at key developments in the American view of the family over the last hundred years, Carlson shows that a deep understanding of the centrality of the family, home life, and religion has always had more influence upon the way Americans have looked at the world than have individualism, capitalism, or today's fashionable idol, multiculturalist pluralism. Carlson reveals how the New Deal and other social welfare programs were initially conceived as vehicles for shoring up traditional family life - and traces how they ultimately began undermining family and community life. Carlson also explores Ronald Reagan's heroic attempts to restore a traditionalist understanding of the family and repair the link between the American identity and healthy family life.
Much bolder measures are necessary, says Carlson, if American culture is to be put back on a family- and community-centered footing. In The "American Way" he provides a stirring foundation and blueprint for just such measures. A few of his insights:
- The 1964 Civil Rights Act: one of the chief culprits in the ongoing war against the family. How it fractured family life by effectively making it illegal for employers to offer male breadwinners a living wage
- Nine New Deal programs that were specifically aimed at restoring families and home economies -- but ultimately backfired
- Theodore Roosevelt's remarkably prescient pro-family writings: how he has been proven correct in his predictions about birth rates and demographics -- and why these writings have been so often misunderstood
- How American strength during the mid-20th century rested primarily on the universal acknowledgement that a strong family was the key to a healthy society
- The fatal mistake family advocates once made: putting too much faith in the power of the state (with devastating consequences when leftists turned the state against the family)
- The broad bipartisan consensus in the 1960s that the family was the cornerstone of society -- and why it unraveled
- Motherhood: how as long as 100 years ago it was touted as a force for social unity that would overcome divisions caused by ethnic and cultural differences
- How modern-day, anti-family feminists misrepresent and wrongfully denigrate the positions and accomplishments of earlier pro-family proto-feminists
- Ronald Reagan's Executive Order requiring federal agencies to strengthen the family -- rescinded by Bill Clinton
- How the strong family and solid values of the 1950s influenced policymakers' understanding of American identity, purpose, and strength
- Why efforts by pro-family advocates in the 1980s and 1990s to save the family from encroaching statism didn't go far enough
- The courageous politician who bucked prevailing leftward trends by declaring: "It is the power of the family that holds the nation together, that gives America her conscience, and that serves as the cradle of our country's soul"
- Six ways that America can -- and must -- restore the centrality of the family in our society in the 21st century
- Why calls for diversity and pluralism actually reflect the loss of a shared American identity and the destruction of the family as the linchpin of society
"The most countercultural book of the year. . . . Carlson understands what our culture increasingly refuses to understand, that there is a proper way of living for humans -- and it begins in, and returns to, families." -- James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown University
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